35 Essential Thought Leaders on Team Culture (2026)

If you have ever sat in a leadership offsite where everyone agreed on a new set of values, then watched those values quietly evaporate within a fortnight of returning to the office, you already know the problem with most conversations about team culture. The talk is plentiful. The behaviour change is rare. The thinkers below are the small group of people who have moved past slogans and built something far more useful: practical, evidence-led models for how teams actually behave when the pressure is on. They explain why your best people leave even when engagement scores look fine. They show why psychological safety is a precondition for performance, not a soft alternative to it. They give you language for the conversations your team has been avoiding for months.

The reason this matters for your team in 2026 is simple. Hybrid work has weakened the casual rituals that used to glue cultures together. AI has accelerated the pace of decisions while shortening the time leaders have to coach the people making them. Talent markets remain tight in most professional sectors, and the people you most want to keep are the ones who can leave most easily. According to recent Gallup research, 51% of employees globally are watching for or actively seeking new opportunities, and disengaged teams cost the global economy an estimated 8.8 trillion US dollars in lost productivity each year. Team culture is no longer a wellbeing topic. It is the most leveraged variable a leader controls.

I am Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out. I have spent the last decade working with school boards, executive teams, and nonprofit leadership groups across Australia, the UK, the USA, Singapore, Canada, India, New Zealand, and beyond on the practical work of building team cultures that actually function. The voices below are the ones I keep coming back to in my own practice and recommend most often to clients. If you want help turning their ideas into the difficult conversations and team decisions your culture needs this quarter, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Team Culture Matters More Than Ever in 2026

The case for taking team culture seriously is no longer theoretical. McKinsey's Organizational Health Index data, drawn from more than 7 million respondents across 2,500 organisations, shows that companies in the top quartile for organisational health deliver three times the total return to shareholders of bottom-quartile peers over a decade. That is not a marginal effect. It is the gap between thriving and slowly dying.

The cost of the inverse is just as stark. Christine Porath's research on workplace incivility, published in the Harvard Business Review and her book Mastering Civility, found that 98% of workers experience rude behaviour at work, and 78% of those who experience incivility say their commitment to the organisation has declined as a result. Add the friction of remote and hybrid coordination, the always-on pressure of generative AI tools, and the rising expectation that work should be a source of meaning rather than only income, and the variable that decides whether a team performs or stalls is the culture inside it.

What makes 2026 different is that none of these pressures are temporary. Hybrid is not a phase. AI is not a fad. The generational shift in expectations is not going back. The thirty-five people on this list are the ones offering the most useful, practical, evidence-led work on how to lead teams in the world we actually have, not the one we used to have.

How This List Was Compiled

This is not a list of the most famous names in leadership. It is a curated set of thirty-five people whose specific contribution to team culture is concrete, credible, and grounded in real evidence or real practice. Selection criteria included formal academic credentials where relevant, published books or peer-reviewed research, sustained body of work over at least five years, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and original frameworks rather than recycled ideas. Around two thirds of those featured are women, reflecting the genuine balance of leading voices in this field. People featured come from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Belgium, and beyond, with academic, consulting, executive, and founder backgrounds represented.

The list deliberately moves past the household names you have already encountered to surface voices whose work may not yet sit in your bookshelf or your bookmarked podcast feed. That is an editorial choice, made because lists that repeat the same ten names every year do not help readers find what they have not already heard.

Psychological Safety and Trust

The starting point for any serious conversation about team culture is whether the people in the room feel safe enough to tell the truth. The five voices below are the most useful thinkers in the world on that question. They explain why psychological safety is not about being nice, why trust is built faster than most leaders assume, and why the absence of either is the single biggest predictor that a team will underperform regardless of how clever its strategy looks on paper.

1. Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and the academic who first defined and operationalised the concept of psychological safety in team settings more than two decades ago. Her work is the empirical bedrock under almost every modern conversation about team culture. Without her research, the language that leaders now use to describe what a healthy team feels like would not exist.

Her book The Fearless Organization, published in 2018, remains the clearest practical guide ever written on how leaders can build environments where people will speak up about errors, ideas, and risks. Her follow-up Right Kind of Wrong, published in 2023, makes the case that intelligent failure is the engine of progress and gives leaders a framework for distinguishing it from sloppy or preventable failure. She continues to publish actively in Harvard Business Review and posts regularly on LinkedIn.

2. Stephen M.R. Covey

Stephen M.R. Covey is the former CEO of the Covey Leadership Center and the global authority on trust as a measurable, learnable competency rather than a vague character trait. His framing of trust as something leaders build through specific behaviours has shaped how a generation of executives think about culture, contracting, and speed of execution.

His book The Speed of Trust, first published in 2006 and updated since, introduced the now-widely-used idea that high-trust organisations move faster and cost less to run. His more recent work Trust and Inspire, published in 2022, argues that the dominant command-and-control management style is increasingly broken in a knowledge-work world and offers a replacement built around trust, autonomy, and meaning. He speaks regularly to executive audiences and posts consistently on LinkedIn about applied trust-building practices.

3. Timothy R. Clark

Timothy R. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a Utah-based leadership development firm that has built one of the most usable practical frameworks for psychological safety in the world. He is the architect of the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model, which gives leaders a progressive map for how teams move from inclusion safety, through learner safety and contributor safety, into the highest stage of challenger safety.

His book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, published in 2020, has become a standard text in leadership programs across Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. What distinguishes his work is the operational specificity. He does not stop at defining safety. He gives leaders concrete behaviours, diagnostic questions, and observable signals for each stage. He posts frequently on LinkedIn and his LeaderFactor podcast continues to extend the work week by week.

4. Tom Geraghty

Tom Geraghty is the founder of Psych Safety, a UK-based community, consultancy, and newsletter that has become one of the most active hubs in the world for practitioners working on psychological safety inside real organisations. His value is precisely that he is not an academic. He is a practitioner translating the research into operational tools that team leaders can use on a Monday morning.

His Psychological Safety newsletter reaches a substantial and growing global audience of culture practitioners, and the Psych Safety community has built one of the most useful catalogues of psychological safety toolkits, training resources, and case studies anywhere online. He posts consistently on LinkedIn about applied team behaviours, leadership traps, and the practical mechanics of building safer teams. For leaders who want to move past the theory and into implementation, his work is among the most useful starting points available.

5. Karolin Helbig

Karolin Helbig is an independent psychological safety coach and former McKinsey consultant based in Germany whose work brings the rigour of management consulting to the lived practice of building safer teams. She co-authored The Psychological Safety Playbook with Minette Norman, a practical field guide that translates the academic research into specific moves a leader can make in everyday team meetings.

She works with senior leadership teams across Europe and posts regularly on LinkedIn about the small behavioural shifts that determine whether a team conversation becomes generative or defensive. Her perspective is particularly valuable for European and globally distributed teams where cultural norms around hierarchy, dissent, and feedback vary substantially from the American defaults that dominate most psychological safety writing. For more on the trust foundations that her work sits on top of, check out my blog post 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Trust and Trustworthiness at https://www.consultclarity.org/news-updates.

Culture Design and Operating Systems

The next five voices think about culture at the level of operating systems rather than only behaviour. They ask the harder structural questions. What if your meetings, your reporting lines, your performance reviews, and your governance structures are quietly producing the culture you keep saying you want to change? These thinkers will not let you off the hook with values posters and offsite retreats. They want you to redesign the machinery.

6. Aaron Dignan

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready, a New York-based organisation design firm, and the host of the Brave New Work podcast. His work sits at the intersection of cultural change and organisational architecture, arguing that most culture problems are downstream of structural choices leaders have stopped questioning.

His book Brave New Work, published in 2019, makes the case that the dominant industrial-era operating system is no longer fit for purpose and offers a playbook for moving toward more adaptive, decentralised, and human-friendly ways of working. He has worked with companies including Microsoft, Charles Schwab, and Johnson and Johnson on real operating-system change rather than surface-level transformation theatre. He posts consistently on LinkedIn about the small experiments that build trust between leaders and teams over time.

7. Pim de Morree

Pim de Morree is the co-founder of Corporate Rebels, a Dutch movement and consultancy that has spent more than a decade visiting and documenting the most progressive workplaces in the world. His perspective is grounded in evidence from real organisations that have abandoned traditional management orthodoxy and found that performance improves rather than collapses.

His book Corporate Rebels, co-authored with Joost Minnaar in 2020, distils the lessons from those visits into eight practical trends including self-managing teams, transparent information sharing, and meaningful purpose. The Corporate Rebels community now reaches a substantial international audience of practitioners building new ways of working inside legacy organisations. He posts frequently on LinkedIn about applied experiments, contrarian management practices, and what it actually takes for an executive team to let go of control without losing performance.

8. Margaret Heffernan

Margaret Heffernan is a British-Irish author, entrepreneur, and professor at the University of Bath School of Management whose work cuts across organisational culture, ethics, and the cognitive failures that allow bad behaviour to flourish inside otherwise capable teams. She built and ran multiple businesses before turning to writing and teaching, which lends her work an operational realism that pure academics often lack.

Her book Wilful Blindness, published in 2011, remains one of the most important books ever written about why teams collectively avoid uncomfortable truths. Beyond Measure, published in 2015, focuses specifically on the small behaviours that produce big shifts in team culture. Uncharted, published in 2020, extends the work into how leaders make decisions under genuine uncertainty. She speaks regularly at international leadership events and is one of the most thoughtful voices anywhere on the ethical dimensions of team behaviour.

9. Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel is a visiting professor at London Business School and one of the most influential management thinkers of the past three decades. His current work argues that the bureaucracy embedded in most large organisations is the single largest tax on human contribution and that team culture cannot meaningfully improve until that bureaucracy is dismantled.

His book Humanocracy, co-authored with Michele Zanini in 2020, draws on research with thousands of leaders to make the case for organisations that treat people as the source of value rather than as costs to be managed. He continues to advise senior executive teams globally and posts regularly on LinkedIn about the structural barriers that make most culture initiatives fail. His work is particularly useful for leaders of large established organisations who suspect, correctly, that their culture problem is really an architecture problem.

10. Vlatka Hlupic

Vlatka Hlupic is a professor at Hult Ashridge Executive Education and the founder of The Management Shift Consulting. Her work focuses on a stage-based model for how organisational mindsets evolve from controlling and bureaucratic through transactional, into engaging, collaborative, and ultimately unbounded cultures.

Her book The Management Shift, published in 2014, won the Management Book of the Year Award and offered one of the most rigorous evidence-led frameworks ever published for diagnosing and improving organisational culture. Her follow-up Humane Capital, published in 2018, deepens the work with case studies from organisations that have made the transition. She advises leadership teams across Europe, North America, and Asia and posts regularly on LinkedIn about the leadership behaviours that hold organisations stuck at lower stages of cultural maturity.

Behavioural Science and Team Dynamics

The voices in this category bring psychology and behavioural science directly into the room where the team meets. They explain why a difficult colleague is rarely as straightforward as they appear, why emotions are a feature of work rather than a bug, and how small behavioural patterns add up to the thing we eventually call culture.

11. Liz Fosslien

Liz Fosslien is an author and illustrator whose work translates organisational psychology into language and visuals that people actually share, save, and apply. She has held senior content roles at companies including Humu and Atlassian and is one of the most-followed voices on LinkedIn writing about emotions, hybrid work, and team dynamics.

She is the co-author, with Mollie West Duffy, of two bestselling books on emotions at work. No Hard Feelings, published in 2018, was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and changed the way many leaders talk about emotion in professional settings. Big Feelings, published in 2022, extends the work into how individuals and teams move through difficulty including uncertainty, burnout, comparison, and anger. Her illustrated frameworks are now used inside teams at companies around the world.

12. Mollie West Duffy

Mollie West Duffy is an organisational designer, executive coach, and the co-author with Liz Fosslien of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings. Her background spans IDEO and frog design, which gives her work a designer's eye for how systems and rituals shape how people feel and behave inside teams.

She has consulted with leadership teams at companies including Casper, Slack, and IDEO on culture, organisational design, and emotional dynamics at work. Her LinkedIn writing focuses on the practical scripts and routines that turn good intentions about team culture into observable behaviour, particularly inside fast-growing startups where culture is being built in real time rather than inherited. For founders and early-stage leadership teams trying to design culture deliberately rather than by default, her perspective is one of the most useful available.

13. David Burkus

David Burkus is an author, keynote speaker, and former business school professor whose work focuses on the practical mechanics of high-performing teams. He is one of the most-followed independent voices on LinkedIn writing about team dynamics and posts useful applied content on an almost daily basis.

His book Best Team Ever, published in 2023, distils the research on team performance into three drivers leaders can actually move. His earlier book Leading from Anywhere, published in 2021, was one of the first credible guides to managing distributed teams written after the pandemic shift. His TED Talk on the loyalty research that drives team performance has been viewed over two million times. For leaders looking for practical, immediately usable content on team culture delivered in small daily doses, his LinkedIn presence is among the best in the field.

14. Tasha Eurich

Tasha Eurich is an organisational psychologist and the founder of The Eurich Group, a Denver-based executive development firm. Her research focuses on self-awareness as the foundation skill that determines whether leaders can build healthy team cultures at all.

Her book Insight, published in 2017, draws on a multi-year research program with thousands of participants and arrived at a finding that has reshaped how leadership coaches think about development. While 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are. Her TEDx talk on the science of self-awareness has been viewed millions of times, and she continues to advise Fortune 100 executive teams. Her LinkedIn writing focuses on the specific behaviours that build the kind of self-knowledge that team culture is built on top of.

15. Cy Wakeman

Cy Wakeman is the founder of Reality-Based Leadership and one of the most distinctive voices on this list. Her work is unusual in that it pushes hard against the dominant therapeutic framing of workplace culture and argues that much of what passes for engagement work actually increases the drama and ego that holds teams back.

Her book Reality-Based Leadership, published in 2010, and her follow-up No Ego, published in 2017, make the case that low engagement and high drama are products of leadership choices, not employee circumstances. She is a sought-after keynote speaker and one of the most followed leadership voices on LinkedIn, where she posts daily reframes of common team-culture complaints. For leaders who suspect that their organisation has confused emotional indulgence with actual care, her work provides an unusually honest counterpoint.

Inclusion, Belonging, and Civility

A team culture that excludes its quieter members, treats incivility as a personality quirk, or tolerates everyday harm against particular groups is not a healthy culture, regardless of how high its engagement scores look on a glossy report. The five voices below are the most useful thinkers in the world on what genuine inclusion costs, what civility actually requires, and how to build belonging that survives the next downturn.

16. Christine Porath

Christine Porath is a tenured professor at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and the leading academic researcher on workplace civility in the world. Her research, conducted over more than two decades and across thousands of organisations, has shown that incivility costs companies billions in lost performance, attention, and turnover.

Her book Mastering Civility, published in 2016, became the canonical text on how rudeness erodes team performance. Her follow-up Mastering Community, published in 2022, extends the work into the broader question of how leaders build belonging in distributed and hybrid teams. Her research has been published in Harvard Business Review and cited extensively in leadership programs globally. She continues to advise senior executive teams and posts regularly on LinkedIn about the small behaviours that either build or erode civility inside teams.

17. Jennifer Brown

Jennifer Brown is the founder and CEO of Jennifer Brown Consulting, a global diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy that has worked with Fortune 500 leadership teams for over two decades. Her perspective is unusually practical because it emerged from a long career building DEI capability inside real organisations rather than only writing about it.

Her book How to Be an Inclusive Leader, originally published in 2019 and updated in a second edition in 2022, has become a widely used field guide for leaders who want to build inclusion as a daily practice rather than a quarterly initiative. Her four-stage development model, from unaware through aware, active, and into advocate, gives leadership teams a shared language and pathway for building genuinely inclusive cultures. She hosts The Will to Change podcast and posts regularly on LinkedIn.

18. Ruchika Tulshyan

Ruchika Tulshyan is the founder of Candour, a global inclusion strategy consultancy, and one of the most rigorous thinkers working on inclusion at work today. Her writing is unusually honest about the difference between performative DEI and the structural changes that actually shift outcomes inside teams.

Her book Inclusion on Purpose, published in 2022 by MIT Press, focuses specifically on the experience of women of colour at work and the team-culture changes leaders need to make to retain them. The book has become a standard reference for leadership teams serious about moving beyond surface diversity into actual structural inclusion. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and posts consistently on LinkedIn about the everyday team-culture moments that either include or exclude the people leaders most need to keep.

19. Minda Harts

Minda Harts is the founder of The Memo LLC and a senior advisor on workplace inclusion to leadership teams across the United States. Her work centres on the experience of women of colour at work, with a particular focus on the team-culture dynamics that determine whether they thrive or quietly leave.

Her trilogy of books offers one of the most coherent bodies of writing on inclusion currently available. The Memo, published in 2019, gave language and strategy to a generation of women of colour navigating professional environments. Right Within, published in 2021, focused on the racial trauma that builds up inside team experiences. Talk to Me Nice, published in 2024, extends the work into the practical mechanics of building trust across difference inside teams. She speaks regularly at major leadership events and posts consistently on LinkedIn.

20. Aiko Bethea

Aiko Bethea is the founder of RARE Coaching and Consulting and one of the most respected DEI strategists working with senior leadership teams in the United States. Her background combines legal training, executive leadership inside Fortune 100 companies, and direct coaching work, which lets her speak to both the structural and interpersonal dimensions of team culture.

She has worked with leadership teams at companies including Adobe, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Brene Brown Education and Research Group on the harder operational work of building inclusive team culture. Her writing on LinkedIn cuts through the surface-level DEI discourse with sharp practical questions about who gets heard in meetings, whose ideas get credited, and what team rituals quietly reinforce exclusion. For senior teams ready to move past performative inclusion into structural change, her perspective is invaluable.

Leadership and Difficult Conversations

A team culture is built or eroded one difficult conversation at a time. The five voices below have done the deepest work in the world on what it takes for leaders to have the conversations they have been avoiding. They share an important conviction. The conversations a leader is avoiding right now are precisely the ones determining what their team culture will look like in six months.

21. Kim Scott

Kim Scott is the co-founder of Radical Candor LLC and a former executive coach and operations leader at Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Twitter. Her contribution to team-culture practice is the now-widely-used framework that maps feedback along two dimensions, caring personally and challenging directly, producing four quadrants that capture how feedback actually lands inside teams.

Her book Radical Candor, first published in 2017 and updated in a fully revised edition in 2019, became one of the defining management books of the last decade. Her follow-up Just Work, published in 2021, extends the framework into how leaders build inclusive cultures by taking on bias, prejudice, and bullying directly. She continues to advise executive teams globally and posts regularly on LinkedIn about the everyday feedback moments that build or erode trust inside teams.

22. David Marquet

David Marquet is a former United States Navy nuclear submarine commander whose leadership work emerged from a single now-famous turnaround. As captain of USS Santa Fe, he inverted the dominant command-and-control culture and produced one of the highest-performing submarine crews in Navy history. The lessons have since reshaped how a generation of leaders think about decision-making inside teams.

His book Turn the Ship Around, published in 2012, remains one of the clearest practical case studies ever written on how cultural change actually happens through deliberate language and structural shifts. His follow-up Leadership Is Language, published in 2020, focuses specifically on the small word-level changes that determine whether a team conversation produces real thinking or compliant agreement. He posts consistently on LinkedIn about the daily linguistic habits that either invite or shut down genuine team contribution.

23. Liane Davey

Liane Davey is the co-founder of 3COze, a Canadian leadership consultancy, and the author of multiple books on the politics, conflict, and dynamics that play out inside executive teams. Her work fills a gap that most team-culture writing leaves open. What you do when the people on your team genuinely disagree about important things.

Her book The Good Fight, published in 2019, is one of the few practical guides to productive conflict inside leadership teams ever written. Her earlier book You First, published in 2013, focuses on what a team member does when their team is dysfunctional but they are not the leader. She writes a regular column for Harvard Business Review and posts consistently on LinkedIn about the conflict patterns that quietly poison otherwise capable teams. For more on the difficult conversations her work centres on, my book Step Up or Step Out covers the same territory from a practical facilitator's perspective.

24. Sheila Heen

Sheila Heen is a partner at Triad Consulting Group and a lecturer at Harvard Law School where she teaches negotiation. She is one of the world's leading practitioners and thinkers on conversations that go badly wrong, which makes her work essential reading for anyone serious about team culture.

She is the co-author, with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton, of Difficult Conversations, published in 1999 and now a foundational text that has sold over two million copies globally. Her follow-up Thanks for the Feedback, co-authored with Douglas Stone in 2014, addresses the receiving side of feedback, which is the dimension most leadership programs neglect. She advises senior executive teams across multiple sectors and continues to publish actively in Harvard Business Review on the conversational mechanics that make or break team culture.

25. Ron Carucci

Ron Carucci is the co-founder and managing partner of Navalent, a leadership and organisational change consultancy that has worked with more than 200 senior executive teams. His work focuses on the gap between what leaders say their culture stands for and what their team experience actually reflects, which is the place most culture problems quietly live.

His book To Be Honest, published in 2021 and drawing on a 15-year research program with more than 3,200 leaders, identifies the four structural conditions that determine whether an organisation operates with integrity at scale. His earlier book Rising to Power, published in 2014, focuses on the leadership transition into senior roles where culture-shaping responsibilities increase dramatically. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review and Forbes and posts consistently on LinkedIn about the executive behaviours that determine team trust.

Future of Work and Human Workplaces

The five voices in this category think hardest about what team culture looks like under the specific pressures of 2026. Hybrid coordination, AI-augmented decision-making, intergenerational complexity, and the slow erosion of the casual rituals that used to bind teams together. They share a practical optimism. The shifts are real, but the response is learnable.

26. Jacob Morgan

Jacob Morgan is the founder of Future of Work University and one of the most-followed voices in the world on how work is changing. His writing combines original research with leadership interviews from hundreds of CEOs and senior executives, which gives him an unusually grounded perspective on what is actually happening inside large organisations.

His most recent book Leading with Vulnerability, published in 2023 and drawing on interviews with more than 100 CEOs, makes the case that the leadership skill most determining team culture in the next decade is the willingness to be a real person at work without losing competence. His earlier book The Future Leader, published in 2020, identifies the nine skills and four mindsets executives will need going forward. He hosts the Future Ready Leadership podcast and posts daily on LinkedIn.

27. Erica Keswin

Erica Keswin is the founder of The Spaghetti Project, a research and advisory firm focused on the role of relationships and rituals in modern workplaces. Her work fills a specific and useful niche. The small recurring behaviours and routines that, repeated over time, become what we eventually call team culture.

Her trilogy of books offers a coherent and practical body of work. Bring Your Human to Work, published in 2018, made the early case that the rise of digital and remote work makes human moments more rather than less important. Rituals Roadmap, published in 2021, focuses on the specific team rituals that build culture deliberately. The Retention Revolution, published in 2023, extends the work into how leaders keep people through the relational mechanics of culture rather than through pay alone. She advises executive teams across multiple sectors.

28. Tracy Brower

Tracy Brower is a sociologist and the principal of applied research at Steelcase, where she leads research into how the design of work, place, and culture intersect. Her unusual background, combining academic sociology and corporate research at a major workplace strategy firm, lets her see team culture from angles most leadership writers miss.

Her book The Secrets to Happiness at Work, published in 2021, draws on global research to identify the practical conditions under which work becomes a meaningful part of a good life rather than an extraction from it. Her earlier book Bring Work to Life, published in 2014, was an early and prescient guide to integrating work and life through deliberate cultural choices. She writes a regular column for Forbes and posts consistently on LinkedIn about the practical intersections of workplace design and team culture.

29. Bree Groff

Bree Groff is an author, speaker, and former CEO of SYPartners whose work centres on the surprisingly underexplored question of whether work feels good. She has spent her career inside organisational change projects at companies including Google, Calvin Klein, and Microsoft, which gives her writing the operational realism that distinguishes useful culture work from generic encouragement.

Her book Today Was Fun, published in 2025, is one of the most original recent additions to the team-culture literature. It argues that the modern workplace has systematically squeezed delight, play, and creative energy out of the working day and offers practical small moves leaders can make to put it back. She writes a regular newsletter, speaks internationally, and posts consistently on LinkedIn about the small daily decisions that determine whether a team experience is energising or depleting.

30. Erin Meyer

Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD and one of the world's leading researchers on cross-cultural team dynamics. Her work is essential for any leader managing a team that spans more than one country, time zone, or cultural background, which in 2026 is most leaders.

Her book The Culture Map, published in 2014, became the standard reference for understanding how cultural differences shape communication, feedback, decision-making, and disagreement inside teams. Her follow-up No Rules Rules, co-authored with Reed Hastings in 2020, is an inside look at the culture that built Netflix and the deliberate choices that made it possible. She advises senior executive teams at global organisations across multiple sectors and continues to publish actively. For globally distributed leadership teams, her frameworks remain the most useful starting point available.

Performance and High-Performing Teams

The final five voices on this list focus relentlessly on the question of what actually makes teams perform at the highest levels. Their work is the answer to the leader who suspects that team-culture conversations have drifted too far into the soft and the symbolic and wants the practical mechanics of what makes the difference between good teams and great ones.

31. Daniel Coyle

Daniel Coyle is a journalist and author whose research-led books on culture and skill development have become standard reading inside professional sports teams, special forces units, and high-performance corporate environments. His method is unusual. He spends extended time inside the highest-performing teams in the world and reports back on what they actually do differently.

His book The Culture Code, published in 2018, identifies three core skills that high-performing teams share. Build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose. His follow-up The Culture Playbook, published in 2022, distils 60 specific practical actions leaders can take from the research. The books have been adopted by NBA teams, Navy SEAL units, and Fortune 500 leadership groups. He continues to write and speak regularly on the applied mechanics of team culture.

32. Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors, a leadership development firm focused on the dynamics of talent inside high-performing teams. Her work brings the language of disruption theory directly into the team-management conversation, which produces an unusually clear way of thinking about why talented people get bored, stuck, or leave.

Her book Build an A-Team, published in 2018, was named one of the top business books of the year by Inc. magazine and offers a framework for managing the S-curve of growth on which every team member sits. Her follow-up Smart Growth, published in 2022, extends the work into how leaders sequence growth across an entire team to avoid both burnout and stagnation. She hosts the Disrupt Yourself podcast and was named to the Thinkers50 list of leading global management thinkers.

33. Lindsay McGregor

Lindsay McGregor is the co-founder and CEO of Vega Factor, a Boston-based culture analytics firm, and one of the most rigorous evidence-led thinkers on workplace motivation in the world. Her work brings hard quantitative measurement to questions that have historically been treated as too soft to measure.

Her book Primed to Perform, co-authored with Neel Doshi and published in 2015, draws on a multi-year research program across more than 20,000 employees and introduces the concept of total motivation, or ToMo, as a measurable predictor of team performance. The framework distinguishes between high-quality motives like play, purpose, and potential and corrosive motives like emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia. She continues to advise senior leadership teams and publish research on the operational drivers of high-performance culture.

34. Ashley Goodall

Ashley Goodall is an author and former senior executive at Cisco and Deloitte whose recent work cuts unusually hard against the dominant narratives in change management and culture transformation. His perspective is unusually credible because he led people functions at scale inside two of the largest professional services and technology organisations in the world before turning to writing.

His most recent book The Problem with Change, published in 2024, makes the contrarian argument that the relentless organisational change inside modern companies is itself the largest source of disengagement and culture erosion. His earlier book Nine Lies About Work, co-authored with Marcus Buckingham in 2019, dismantled several of the most cherished assumptions inside corporate culture work and replaced them with evidence-led alternatives. He writes regularly in Harvard Business Review and speaks internationally.

35. Daniel Stillman

Daniel Stillman is the founder of The Conversation Factory, a New York-based consultancy that treats organisational conversations as designed artefacts rather than incidental events. His work fills a specific and useful gap. The everyday team meetings, retrospectives, and decision conversations that quietly produce or erode team culture.

His book Good Talk, published in 2020, offers a practical methodology for designing conversations that actually achieve what they are supposed to achieve, which is harder and rarer than most leaders assume. He hosts The Conversation Factory podcast, which has featured many of the other voices on this list, and posts consistently on LinkedIn about the small structural choices that determine whether a meeting builds culture or quietly damages it. For leaders ready to take the design of their team conversations seriously, his work is the most useful resource currently available.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, Patrick Lencioni, Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, and Susan Cain would appear on most lists like this. Their work has shaped the field for over a decade and their contributions are foundational. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices the reader may not yet have encountered.

Beyond those seven, several others were genuinely considered. James Kerr, whose book Legacy on the All Blacks rugby team remains one of the most useful single-team culture case studies ever written, was a close call. Stanley McChrystal, whose Team of Teams reshaped how a generation of leaders think about adaptive networks, was another. Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations, has produced a foundational text whose impact continues to grow, particularly inside purpose-led organisations. Edgar Schein, whose work on organisational culture provides much of the intellectual scaffolding the whole field rests on, would have been included if not for his passing in 2023. Margaret Wheatley, whose work on leadership and complexity shaped how a generation of thinkers approach team dynamics, was a strong contender. Tracy Edmondson and Bob Sutton both produce work that easily warranted inclusion in a longer list. The decision in every case was the same. Surface voices currently building active practical bodies of work that readers may not have encountered, rather than repeating the same set of names that dominates every other list on this topic.

Common Mistakes Leaders Make with Team Culture

The most common mistake in team-culture work is treating it as an output rather than an outcome. Leaders run engagement surveys, react to the scores, and call the response a culture initiative. The score is a symptom. The culture is built one team conversation at a time, one decision at a time, one small visible behaviour at a time. The leaders whose teams have the strongest cultures rarely talk about culture as a thing. They are obsessed with the small daily choices that, repeated, become it.

The second common mistake is confusing harmony with health. A team that never argues is not a healthy team. It is a team that has learned to suppress disagreement, which is a far more expensive long-term state than productive conflict. Liane Davey's work on conflict debt and Sheila Heen's work on difficult conversations both point to the same uncomfortable truth. Healthy teams have hard conversations early and often. Unhealthy teams have them eventually and badly.

The third common mistake is delegating culture work to a function. HR, People and Culture, Talent, however the team is labelled, none of them can build a culture on behalf of a leader who has not committed personally. The behaviour at the top is the loudest signal in the room. When a senior leader interrupts, dismisses, or rewards poor behaviour, no slide deck, value statement, or workshop will counteract it. Culture is built and broken from the top down whether leaders intend it to be or not.

The fourth common mistake is over-investing in big symbolic moments and under-investing in everyday rituals. The annual offsite is necessary but insufficient. The weekly team meeting, the one-on-one, the way people are spoken about in their absence, the small recurring decisions about whose voice is heard and whose is interrupted, these are the actual culture-building moments. Erica Keswin's work on rituals and Aaron Dignan's work on operating systems both point in the same direction. Pay attention to what you repeat, because that is what you are actually building.

The fifth common mistake is assuming culture is binary. Teams imagine they have either a good culture or a bad one. The reality is that team culture is multidimensional. Psychological safety, trust, accountability, inclusion, performance focus, and conflict skills all sit on independent dimensions. A team can have high trust and low accountability, or strong inclusion and weak conflict skills. The first step in any serious culture work is diagnosing which specific dimensions need attention rather than treating culture as one undifferentiated thing.

Implementation Guide

Taking action on team culture begins with a willingness to diagnose honestly. Most teams overestimate their cultural health because they conflate liking each other with trusting each other, and conflate the absence of open conflict with the presence of psychological safety. Step one is to use one of the diagnostic frameworks introduced by the thinkers above and apply it specifically to your team. Amy Edmondson's psychological safety scale, Timothy R. Clark's 4 Stages, and Vlatka Hlupic's Management Shift levels all offer credible starting points.

Step two is to identify the smallest possible behavioural change you can commit to as the leader. Not a values rollout. Not a culture campaign. One specific behaviour. A new opening question in your weekly team meeting. A new closing ritual where each team member names one thing they are stuck on. A new norm around how disagreement is invited in decision-making conversations. The research is consistent on this. Culture changes through small repeated behaviours sustained over months, not through grand symbolic gestures sustained for a fortnight.

Step three is to make the change observable and accountable. The behaviour you commit to has to be visible to the team and you have to invite them to point out when it slips. Most culture work fails at this step because leaders do not give their teams permission to hold them to their stated changes. Permission is not implicit. It has to be granted explicitly and renewed regularly.

Step four is to bring in outside help when the difficult conversations your team most needs are the ones you are least equipped to facilitate yourself. The leaders who get the best results from team-culture work almost never do all of it alone. They bring in a facilitator, a coach, or an external lens at the specific points where the conversation needs someone in the room who is not subject to the internal political weight every internal voice carries. This is precisely the work I do with executive teams, school boards, and nonprofit leadership groups globally. To discuss bringing me in to facilitate a leadership offsite, run a difficult-conversations workshop, or deliver a keynote on team culture, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Step five is to commit to a longer time horizon than feels reasonable. The leaders who change their team culture meaningfully are the ones who treat it as a multi-year arc rather than a quarterly project. Six months is not enough. Three years usually is. The compounding effect of small consistent behaviours over a long period is the only mechanism that has ever produced a genuinely transformed team culture, and there is no shortcut around it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my team culture actually needs work? The most reliable signal is the gap between what people say in meetings and what they say in the corridor immediately afterwards. If those two conversations sound different, you have a culture problem regardless of what your engagement scores say. Other reliable signals include difficulty retaining your strongest performers, slow decision-making, and disagreements that surface late, often during implementation rather than during the original decision-making conversation.

What is the single most important driver of team culture? The single most important driver is the behaviour of the most senior person in the room. Every other variable, including structure, rituals, language, and process, sits downstream of leader behaviour. Amy Edmondson's research, Christine Porath's research, and decades of organisational psychology all converge on the same finding. People take their behavioural cues from the most senior person they regularly interact with, and team culture is the aggregate of those cues.

How was this list compiled? The thirty-five people featured were selected against a deliberately strict set of criteria. Formal credentials or substantial practical track record in team culture, published books or peer-reviewed research, a sustained body of work over at least five years, geographic and disciplinary diversity, original frameworks rather than recycled ideas, and current active practice rather than legacy reputation. The list deliberately moves past the household names that appear on most similar lists in order to surface voices whose work the reader may not have encountered.

What books should I start with if I am new to team culture as a leader? The most useful starting points are The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson, The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and No Hard Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy. Together they cover the foundational dimensions of psychological safety, the practical mechanics of high-performing teams, the everyday discipline of useful feedback, and the emotional dimension of work that most management books still ignore.

What is the difference between team culture and organisational culture? Organisational culture is the aggregate of all the team cultures inside an organisation plus the formal structures and rituals that span them. Team culture is the specific local culture inside one team, which is determined primarily by the behaviour of the team leader and the norms the team has built together over time. In practice, team culture is the unit at which culture is actually built and changed. Organisational culture is the downstream output.

Can I hire someone to facilitate team culture workshops or sessions for my team? Yes. I am Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, and I work with executive teams, school boards, and nonprofit leadership groups globally on the practical work of building team cultures that actually function. I run leadership offsites, facilitate difficult-conversations workshops, deliver keynotes on team culture, and act as an external lens for senior teams working through specific cultural challenges. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. To discuss your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How long does it take to genuinely change a team culture? Honestly, longer than most leaders want to hear. Visible behavioural shifts can emerge within a quarter. Cultural change that survives a downturn, a leadership transition, or a significant strategy shift usually takes two to three years of consistent practice. The leaders who treat culture as a short project are the ones whose culture work fails. The leaders who treat it as a multi-year arc are the ones whose teams still look healthy when the conditions change.

Final Thoughts

The single most useful thing you can take from a list like this is permission to stop looking for the one silver bullet that will transform your team culture. There is no such bullet. There is, instead, a long-running conversation across academia, consulting, executive practice, and lived team experience that has converged on a small number of practical truths. Psychological safety matters. Trust is measurable. Difficult conversations are unavoidable. Small repeated behaviours compound. Leaders set the cues. Inclusion is structural. Culture is built one team meeting at a time.

The thirty-five voices on this list are the ones who have done the deepest work in the world on what those truths look like in practice. If you let them, they will save you years of trial and error. They will give you language for the conversations your team has been avoiding, frameworks for the decisions your leadership team has been postponing, and the practical scripts for the small daily moves that build cultures worth working inside.

The hardest part is not the reading. It is the doing. The leaders whose team cultures actually change are the ones who pair their reading with the practical work of running the difficult conversations, facilitating the offsites, and committing to a longer time horizon than feels reasonable. That practical work is precisely what I do with leadership teams globally. My book Step Up or Step Out, available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD, focuses specifically on the difficult conversations that most team-culture work depends on. To discuss bringing me in to facilitate your next leadership offsite, run a difficult-conversations workshop, or deliver a keynote on team culture for your organisation, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect, and many organisations find that flying me in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 50 Best Thought Leaders in People and Culture (2026)

If you are responsible for building team culture inside your organisation, you almost certainly also carry responsibility for the broader people and culture function that surrounds it. The two are deeply connected, and the most useful voices on people and culture overlap meaningfully with those on team culture while extending into talent strategy, HR transformation, and the structural choices that shape how people experience work.

The list of 50 Best Thought Leaders in People and Culture covers the broader landscape with the same rigour as this team-culture list, surfacing thinkers whose work spans the full operating system of how organisations attract, develop, and keep their best people. It is the natural follow-on read for any leader serious about turning the principles in this team-culture list into the structural choices that hold them in place over time.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-people-and-culture-2026