In my advisory work, a common question I get from leaders goes something like, “how do I get my engineering team to care about [customers, shipping faster, quality]?” Their team is chasing the latest AI tool from Hacker News, polishing a low-value refactor, or holding an unstated quality bar that slips a deadline, and everyone is frustrated.

For better and for worse, a team’s culture stems from its leadership. If a team cares deeply about the wrong thing, it usually traces back to its leader. Either that leader set a priority that is no longer relevant to the business, or their personal inclinations toward cool technology, avoiding conflict, etc, have become the team’s inclinations.

The good news is that a leader can shift a team’s culture by modeling the values they want the team to adopt.

A leader has a finite amount of the team’s attention in all-hands, team meetings, Slack, and 1:1s. How they spend their time with the microphone signals what matters. For example, when customers are upset after a string of outages, adding a standing “quality corner” to a team meeting directs attention until reliability improves.

Actions speak louder than words, and it’s not enough to try to speak things into existence, no matter how many times it’s repeated. During the “quality corner” segment, that leader should pull up the dashboard they created with reliability metrics, action item completion percentage, and other relevant quality stats, tied to business metrics like support ticket load and customer churn. The leader needs to show up to incident review meetings, dig into postmortems, and make sure follow-ups are appropriate and actioned. The act of pulling the data and doing the work shows the team that it’s important.

A leader can’t get a team to care deeply about everything. But with honest reflection of their default inclinations and brutal prioritization of what matters most to the business, they can effect real cultural change.