Be Intentional With Your Culture

Euda Leadership Principle No. 2

By Keegan Evans

It’s rarely a sign of things going right when the Operations Duty Officer (ODO) is visibly relieved to see a squadron’s Aviation Safety Officer (ASO) walk into the ready room. The young pilot that day in 2008 was holding the radio in one hand and a phone in the other. He was one of our new copilots, and I knew before he spoke that something had happened to one of our training flights. We didn’t know much, just a few broken radio calls from the section lead, but it sounded like they were coming back and asking for help. I solved the ODO’s immediate question by telling him to break out the pre-mishap plan binder and start working the steps.

Throughout the day the full picture emerged: an aircraft from our squadron had gone down while practicing mountain landings. While the bird was totaled, the crew got out shaken but without serious injury. The investigation that spanned the next month became my full time job, and we developed a clear picture of the issues that lined up to lead to a crash that day. The aircraft commander (HAC) was one of our strongest new HACs, and his logbook showed that he had recently completed the mountain area operations training codes during a firefighting detachment a few months earlier. On paper, the flight schedule was legal, reviewed and signed by five officers including me.

But legal is just the start, and what none of us had stopped to examine was whether the experience behind that paperwork was real. The aircraft commander had exactly one exposure to mountain area operations, on that firefighting detachment. Our generation had different foundational experience from the senior officers. For instance, instead of learning to set the parking brake to land on a ship, our thousands of combined hours of combat flight time experience were all over airfields in the deserts of Iraq. Skills that were instinctive for our senior officers simply weren't there for us, and everyone who reviewed that schedule, myself included, assumed that the flight hours combined with the code in the logbook was good enough.

Getting a lot of training done in a short amount of time was critical, and we wanted more pilots qualified for these landings. A deployment was coming, my third in as many years. Aviation, especially military aviation, is always about balancing the tensions between mitigating risk and accomplishing the mission. So much of a squadron culture is about riding that ever moving line. I had completed ASO school less than a month prior, and the Commanding Officer (CO) had taken command while I was gone. There are a lot of factors that could have been attributed to previous and departed leaders, but we re-learned a powerful lesson from this mishap: culture belongs to whoever is in charge. Leaders don't just influence culture, they own it.

Years later at Intuit, I joined an engineering organization where product quality, performance, and reliability were all on fire at the same time. Once the immediate crisis had been stabilized, the deeper issues started to surface: a culture of reactivity, fear, and quiet resignation. Senior leadership was changing team priorities every other week, and people had stopped pushing back because they'd settled into a belief that this was just how things worked here. The culture had gotten away from them, and nobody could see what to do differently.

What made this turnaround hard was that the leadership group had to fundamentally change how they operated. They had been reacting to every new input by redirecting scrum team priorities every two weeks. They were holding decisions close to the top instead of letting people own the solution. For leaders who had spent months in constant firefighting mode, stepping back while a team worked through a problem on its own timeline felt like negligence, and learning to sit with that discomfort was some of the hardest work they did. Then we got to work on the systems.

We reorganized to give every piece of code clear ownership and ran a thirty-day bug jam that gave the new teams a shared identity. But the most significant cultural shift came from establishing a new weekly rhythm called the Product and Design Review. We were excruciatingly clear about what it was for: this meeting exists to unblock what your teams need to run fast. Share wins, share blockers, ask for help. This stood in contrast to executive status review meetings that took hours of preparation and could have been an email. That single framing decision told the entire organization what leadership was actually for, and people started to believe it when the leaders’ behavior matched week after week.

One of the patterns I see most often in my coaching work is founders and leaders who built strong cultures when their teams were small enough to absorb it through proximity. At fifteen or twenty people, culture is easy to see and easily reflects the founders’ personality. How you react to bad news, what you celebrate, what you let slide. The team picks all of that up because everyone is in the room.

Past fifty or sixty people, that proximity breaks down. Information flows differently. Decisions get made without everyone in the room. The norms that everyone just knew because they sat three desks away now have to be explicitly communicated, reinforced, and built into the systems of the organization. If they aren't, people fill the gaps with their own assumptions. Culture is organic like a garden; if it’s not tended it will grow on its own.

The leaders I coach who get this right treat culture as a design problem. Not a values exercise or an offsite deck, but a commitment to deliberate choices about what gets prioritized, what meetings exist and why, who gets promoted and for what, and how they behave. Values are what's written on the wall. Culture is the sum of every action and decision, with extra weight on the people holding the most authority. 

All leaders, whether they’re commanding a helicopter squadron, scaling a startup, or leading a scrum team, own the culture from the moment they take command. The only question is whether you're building it on purpose.