13 Ways For Leaders To Promote a Healthy Team Culture

A healthy team culture doesn’t happen by chance. It’s something leaders shape every day, through the choices they make, the behaviors they model, and the environments they create.

You can feel the difference when team culture is healthy – people feel safe, valued, and empowered to do their best work. It becomes the foundation for high performance, creativity, and resilience. But when culture is left unchecked, even the most skilled teams can struggle with misalignment, low morale, or burnout.

The good news? Leaders can intentionally build a team culture through simple actions—such as modeling openness, using real-time feedback, or introducing team-building exercises.

In this article, we’ll explore thirteen practical ways to promote a healthy team culture that you can start applying today.

13 Ways For Leaders To Promote a Healthy Team Culture

1. Model Curiosity and Invite Dissenting Views

One of the best ways leaders can foster a healthy team culture is by modeling genuine curiosity and inviting balanced input from all team members, not just the person who speaks first. Being genuinely curious means that you are not just willing to hear pushback on an idea, but you’re willing to be inquisitive and explore different ideas. If you’re not hearing contrary points of view, actively seek them out. Questions like “What are we missing?” or “What’s at risk if we proceed?” will invite different points of view.

Some of us speak to think, and others think to speak. Creating opportunities for both ways of contributing is essential. Ask people to write something down first, before they speak. Use short pair conversations first before asking people to contribute to the whole group conversation. These techniques offer varied opportunities for everyone to participate in speaking.

Most importantly, when tensions arise, resist the urge to bypass or smooth over them. Instead, help the team stay in productive dialogue long enough to understand the different viewpoints and find shared meaning together. This ability to stay with tension is what transforms cultures in teams from ideas being imposed on people to aligned change that teams co-create together.

Marsha Acker, Team Catapult

2. Invite Real-Time Feedback

Leaders can cultivate a healthy team culture by creating a development-oriented environment that encourages open, real-time feedback to flow freely at all levels. By setting an example of sincerity and receptiveness to feedback, they set the tone for psychological safety and collective development.

When feedback is welcome anytime, anywhere, it becomes a natural part of day-to-day collaboration rather than a formal event. This transparency builds trust, strengthens relationships, and empowers individuals to take ownership of their own development, which in turn fosters the collective growth of the team and the organization.

Christophe Schnoebelen, Luxury Industry

3. Coach Through Listening and Curiosity

Leaders can foster a positive team environment by leveraging coaching techniques, specifically active listening and curiosity. By setting aside the urge to react immediately and instead genuinely listening, leaders create a safe space where team members feel heard and appreciated for their ideas.

Ultimately, these coaching techniques encourage creativity, build trust, and cultivate a culture of inclusion and engagement.

Fadly Rasyad, Bank of Singapore

4. Promote Purpose, Empowerment, and Collaboration

Leaders must focus on providing the essential motivators that enable their teams to deliver value. First, they need to establish a shared, meaningful purpose that aligns team members and clarifies what success really means. This sense of direction helps unify efforts and fosters commitment.

Second, promoting a healthy team culture also requires more than simply telling people they have autonomy — it demands intentional leadership that actively invests in developing the team’s knowledge, skills, and capabilities.

Third, leaders should cultivate co-intelligence by encouraging collaboration over cooperation. While cooperation might involve working side by side on individual tasks, collaboration invites diverse perspectives, shared responsibility, and collective achievement. This builds a team dynamic where individuals support each other, innovate freely, and grow together. What’s healthier than that?

Tricia Broderick, Ignite Insight & Innovation

5. Reward Well-Intentioned Failures

Celebrate and reward well-intentioned failures. Leaders who openly recognize and reward failures when teams take thoughtful risks foster a culture where innovation thrives.

By valuing learning over blame, they create a safe space for experimentation, encourage creative problem-solving, and inspire continuous improvement. This mindset transforms setbacks into stepping stones, strengthening trust and resilience within the team.

Prashant Shinde, Agile Visa

6. Create Psychologically Safe Spaces

Leaders promote a healthy team culture by fostering safe spaces grounded in trust and respect, allowing a shared purpose to naturally take shape. These environments are a place where open dialogue is encouraged, diverse perspectives are respected, and mistakes become opportunities to learn.

When leaders show empathy, teams feel empowered to bring their authentic selves to work. This builds trust and collaboration, which form the foundation of high-performing teams.

Mohd Puzi Mohamed, NTUC LearningHub Pte Ltd

7. Protect Work-Life Balance

You can't have a healthy team culture if your team is burned out and dreads their workdays. So, stop trying to maximize team output and focus on the expected outcomes when planning work.

Be mindful of each person's workload and make it clear that it's okay to push back if overburdening becomes "business as usual." Encourage people to take vacations and do so yourself to set an example that it's okay to be away from time to time.

Your team should work to live, not live to work, so give them a nudge. You'll see a lot more happy faces, unity, and loyalty soon enough.

Alex Novkov, AgileSherpas

8. Cultivate an Environment for Authenticity and Growth

To promote a healthy team culture, I focus on creating a container where people can be themselves and grow—together. That means modeling boundaries, honoring different thinking styles, and fostering conversations that go deeper than surface-level check-ins.

Growth doesn’t happen in isolation; it happens when people feel safe enough to take risks, speak honestly, and build something meaningful as a team.

Jolene Jangles, Balanced Agility

10. Talk About Feelings

In an AI-fueled world, creating a healthy team culture means doubling down on the human stuff because that’s what makes us real, connected, and able to do our best work. In my team, we don’t shy away from the F word... yep, we talk about feelings.

Using the Emotional Culture Deck, a simple set of emotion cards, we shaped our emotional culture: how we want to feel at work. We call out the emotions we want more of and the ones we’d rather leave at the door. It sparks honest, often fun conversations that set the tone for how we work together.

And there’s always a right to pass. Not everyone wants to share every time, and that’s part of making it safe; people can choose when and how they join in.

Gwyn Thomas, Skills Development Group

11. Equip Teams With Leadership Skills

Promoting a healthy team culture starts with a foundation of trust and psychological safety, where every team member feels safe to speak up, take risks, and be themselves.

The key is to provide the practical skills needed to actively cultivate this environment—like active listening, giving constructive feedback, and modeling vulnerability. You can build these skills through comprehensive learning programs and open conversations.

Jeff Pierce, Coveros

12. Be a Role Model for Vulnerability

Real teams have one another's backs, and they challenge one another to stretch and grow. They trust one another to show grace when, inevitably, mistakes happen. They admit when they don't know without fear of ridicule or being sidelined.

None of this happens automatically. The single biggest determinant of whether a team can lean into the discomfort of uncertain outcomes is how their leader responds both to the team's failures and, more subtly, to their own.

Leaders, this is hard. Modelling vulnerability means admitting your mistakes openly, saying "I don't know" when you genuinely don't, and showing your team that falling short doesn't diminish your worth or theirs. When you demonstrate that failure is part of growth, you give your team permission to do the same.

That's where real trust and real performance begin.

Antoinette Coetzee, LumenEssens

13. Support Job Crafting

Building a healthy team culture starts with encouraging happiness. One of the most underutilized approaches for doing so is through job crafting. The process empowers employees to explore opportunities to integrate their personal passions into their work. Research shows it improves engagement, performance, and satisfaction whilst also reducing stress and burnout.

For example, someone who loves sketching might bring that passion into retrospectives by creating unique visual templates. Leaders can support this by taking time to better understand what energizes their team members and giving them the space to experiment in their daily work.

Paddy Dhanda, QA Ltd

Conclusion

Promoting a healthy team culture isn’t a one-and-done initiative—it’s a daily leadership practice. From modeling vulnerability to protecting your team’s well-being, small, consistent actions go a long way in building a team culture that thrives.

Your behavior shapes how your team feels and works. When you show up with empathy, openness, and curiosity, you create an environment where people feel safe to collaborate and grow together.

Building the right environment for your team starts with you. Are you ready to take on the challenge? The Leadership Essentials micro-credential collection will help you develop the skills that foster trust, empathy, and collaboration. With courses like Impactful Feedback and Coaching Conversations, you’ll learn practical ways to lift your team to success.

Explore the Leadership Essentials certifications and choose your first course today!

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13 Ways For Leaders To Promote a Healthy Team Culture

13 Ways For Leaders To Promote a Healthy Team Culture