Time, however, always reveals the truth. The best employees don’t tend to stick around for years and years under a boss who treats them poorly or whom they don’t respect. And talented managers can typically turn around poor-performing teams if they are empowered to make changes.

Your team’s culture is like its personality. It exists whether or not you think about it. If you’re not satisfied with how your team works together—maybe the vibe feels hostile instead of helpful, maybe it takes a long time to get things done, or maybe there’s constant drama—it’s worth examining why this might be and what you can do about it.

I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to “buy” a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don’t work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will—all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.

So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results. You have to water the flowers you want to grow.

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?