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Decision-Making

Decisions Shape Culture; Culture Shapes Decisions

How the culture you build shapes your ability to decide under pressure.

Key points

  • Culture drives decision-making: Your team should build a culture that improves decision making under pressure.
  • Decision-making shapes culture: The way you make decisions builds or breaks trust and changes your culture.
  • What your team measures signals its values: People watch both how you make decisions and what you decide.
  • Strong cultures mean better decisions; better decisions mean strong culture.
A team charting their course through the wilderness.
A team charting their course through the wilderness.
Source: Daniil Silantev/Unsplash

The culture of your team and your organization has downstream effects on your ability to make critical decisions, but how you go about making these decisions also has upstream effects that change your team's culture. Understanding this dynamic is essential for teams operating in high-stakes, rapidly changing environments where the ability to make sound, timely decisions under pressure can mean the difference between success and failure.

In this article, we’ll explore how culture dictates the types of decisions teams face and how they make them, and how decision-making practices reinforce, erode, or change team culture. At the end, we'll look at specific questions you can use to examine and shape this interplay for your team to improve performance under pressure.

Culture Dictates the Quality of Decision-Making

Let's start with culture and its downstream effects on decision-making. The culture of a team substantially impacts both what types of decisions the team makes and how it goes about making them.

It’s a bit counterintuitive to some organizations, but working on challenging problems is a privilege. Teams known for excellence and innovation are entrusted with high-value, complex problems. Conversely, teams perceived as resistant to change or prone to “satisficing” (accepting minimally acceptable solutions) are relegated to low-impact decisions. The more your team culture is oriented toward seeking excellence and delivering no matter what, the higher quality decisions you'll likely get to make.

This relationship applies to internally sourced decisions too—if your culture is open to learning and values growth and exploration, team members are more likely to surface decisions early when there are more options available to work with. Conversely, if team members don’t feel safe bringing emerging issues to leadership, problems fester and decisions don't get presented to the team until they are full-blown crises.

Once your team does have a decision to make, your culture dictates the types of alternatives you're able to consider, and how you frame the choice you eventually make. Teams that foster psychological safety create environments where members feel comfortable sharing unconventional, counter-narrative, or experimental ideas. This broadens the range of potential solutions and strengthens problem-solving abilities. Similarly, effectively leveraging cognitive diversity—incorporating different training backgrounds, skill sets, and perspectives—requires a culture that welcomes debate and actively integrates diverse viewpoints into decision-making processes.

Decision-Making Reinforces or Erodes Culture

Just as culture affects decision-making, the way decisions are made has significant upstream effects on a team’s culture over time.

Returning to the idea of psychological safety, every decision a team makes carries a clear signal of whether dissenting opinions are valued. Importantly, the signal of “how we actually act” is much louder than the signal of “what we say we do.” No matter what they say that they value, leaders who steamroll alternative perspectives, dismiss junior voices, or mock new ideas create a culture of guarded compliance rather than open innovation. Conversely, leaders who actively solicit and incorporate diverse viewpoints reinforce a culture of collective problem-solving.

As options are being considered, teams that make decisions by consensus tend to develop cultures that value deliberation and group alignment—this type of culture can be effective for careful and considered decision-making but can be inefficient for addressing rapidly changing needs.

Teams that rely on autocratic decision-making can reinforce cultures where individuals are used to obeying orders rapidly—this can be effective for some types of decisions, but risks leaving team members less able to explore or think for themselves, fostering a culture where individuals hesitate to take initiative without direct orders. The highest-performing teams clarify when to use each approach—changing fluidly between consensus-driven and directive decision-making based on situational needs—and build cultures that are flexible, adaptive, and results-oriented as a result.

Finally, it’s important for teams to know that what they measure or consider signals what they value. Are decisions optimized for short-term efficiency, or is long-term growth prioritized? Does the team reward risk-taking and learning, or does it punish failure and encourage safe bets? High-performing teams make their priorities explicit, reinforcing their desired culture through clear, value-driven decision processes.

Creating a Virtuous Cycle of Culture and Decision-Making

This interplay between culture and decision-making either builds a virtuous cycle or a vicious one. High-performing teams get this right by actively cultivating a decision-making environment that enhances culture, which in turn strengthens their ability to make critical decisions under pressure. This approach attracts top talent, earns access to the most challenging and meaningful problems, and drives sustained excellence.

To shape this dynamic intentionally in your team, try asking:

  • What kind of culture does our decision-making process reinforce?
  • Do we actively encourage cognitive diversity and psychological safety?
  • How does our team frame problems—reactively or proactively?
  • Are we measuring and rewarding decisions that align with our long-term goals?

By answering these questions and making intentional adjustments, teams operating under pressure can continuously refine their culture-decision loop, ensuring they remain at the top of their game.

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