You Are the Culture – How Your Nervous System Shapes Team Performance
- Apr 9
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Jara Dekker is a cognitive and emotional performance coach helping people rewire their nervous system for the success they’re seeking. She’s the founder of A Curious Catalyst and co-founder of both Logos, a personality assessment tool, and Unbound, a neuroscience-based well-being platform.
The beginning of any goal is full of inspiration, drive, and motivation. The excitement is palpable, the energy is abundant, and the possibilities are endless! People rally around the energy and momentum, while decisive action creates quick progress. However, this is not to be sustained. Conditions begin to shift, systems multiply, processes start to become complex, responsibility spreads across multiple people, and the actual execution begins to depend less on the force of the effort and more on the willingness of people to carry the mission forward. Things start to shift from depending on momentum to depending on the team's dedication and consistency. Which begs the question, what influences those factors? Well, it might come as no surprise that, as the leader of the team, you do.
It's pretty common knowledge that dedication emerges when people feel seen, respected, challenged, valued and a sense of responsibility. This can all have an impact because of the competence of a leader, yes, but what really anchors it into a company or a team is the emotional atmosphere of the environment a leader creates. So, while your company values and mission statement are important, that's not actually what company culture is built on.
The data behind leadership, culture, and performance
Before we dive into what creates company culture, let's take a look at some of the company-level stats on company culture, leadership and performance:
44.6% would consider accepting a lower salary for an improved work environment or company culture.[1]
Divisions outperform their targets by 15% when leaders develop EQ competencies.[2]
Manager upskilling was associated with 21% to 28% lower turnover relative to peers.[3]
58% of job performance is driven directly by EQ skills.[4]
When originally looking at what impacts retention and makes for good leaders, I was surprised to see so much about emotional intelligence, only to quickly realise I was only scratching the surface. When we zoom in on what makes good leaders, the data on a personal level is even more intriguing:[5]
About one-third of leadership perception is associated with emotional capacity.
About one-quarter is associated with relational capacity.
Emotional and relational depth. When we put these two domains together, they represent one of the strongest drivers of leadership effectiveness. If we zoom in further, within these two domains, there are several individual traits which really stand out:
Attunement (the ability to read people and emotions) explains about one-fifth of leadership perception.
Genuine presence (being authentic and requiring depth from others) explains about one-sixth of leadership perception.
Sociability (social skills and energy in a group setting) explains another one-sixth of leadership perception.
Authority grows from competence, trust and devotion grow from connection. (Interesting to note is that compassion actually shows a slightly negative correlation in this dataset. Indicating that unlimited emotional accommodation has an adverse effect on being experienced as a strong leader.) The picture starting to emerge from the data is that people follow leaders whose emotional presence creates safety and direction simultaneously. This indicates that the emotional tone of a business forms through the emotional tone of its leaders.
How your nervous system sets the tone
Because no one's nervous system is a closed circuit, and we co-regulate with the people around us, we are constantly influencing one another. Emotional states spread through environments in subtle ways, tone of voice, facial expression, body posture, and responsiveness. These shape the atmosphere in a room long before strategy discussions begin. When you're the leader, well, teams will calibrate themselves to your nervous system. Teams read their leader before they hear their leader:
A regulated leader creates an environment where exploration is possible.
A tense leader creates an environment where caution becomes the norm.
What leadership looks like in practice: Evidence from the field
Davidovitz, Mikulincer, Izsak, Popper and Shaver gave us a prime example of what this looks like "in the real world." In 2007, they did a study with military officers and their soldiers during months of intensive combat training. Looking at several factors, they measured the success of the different units. The factors they measured were: Tactical skill, command experience, and relational style using the attachment theory (secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment).
The outcome?
Relational style predicted the cohesion of the unit, the performance of the soldiers, and the psychological well-being of the team over time. For each leader type, it looked as follows:
Teams with Avoidant Leaders operating under self-reliance and emotional distance while pursuing achievement. In these teams, self-reliance becomes a central strength. The team experienced competence from the leader while lacking emotional accessibility.
The consequences?
These units reported lower cohesion, weaker mutual support, and poorer long-term mental health compared to their counterparts led by Secure Leaders.
Teams with Anxious Leaders who displayed elements of uncertainty about their own abilities. In these teams, the uncertainty tended to ripple outward, causing lower task effectiveness in their units.
The result?
Followers’ confidence in their own performance declined, which created a reinforcing cycle of doubt, lower productivity, and weaker task execution. Davidovitz et al. (2007) describe this dynamic as an amplifying cycle where the leader’s internal uncertainty gradually erodes the team’s performance and confidence.
Teams with Secure Leaders who showed confidence in their own abilities while remaining emotionally available to their teams. Meaning they provided both direction and relational stability.
The outcome?
Soldiers led by securely attached officers reported stronger unit cohesion, greater trust in leadership, higher task effectiveness, and better psychological well-being over time.
This isn't the only study of its kind, yet time and again we see relational style outperforms rank and tactical expertise as a predictor of cohesion, effectiveness and mental health. Another brief example is Google’s Project Aristotle, which examined over 180 internal teams to determine what distinguished effective teams from average ones. They were expecting technical skill or intelligence to dominate the findings. Instead, what they found was that the strongest predictor of team effectiveness was psychological safety.
Psychological safety and the leader’s influence
Within groups, leaders often become psychological reference points. Team members unconsciously evaluate two questions about their leader:
If something goes wrong, can I bring this forward?
If I take initiative or risk failure, will my leader stand behind me?
Safety and exploration. These are referred to as the safe haven and secure base functions.
When leaders create an environment for both, teams become more resilient, innovative, and collaborative. When either function weakens, behaviours change, and people begin managing risk rather than pursuing opportunity, showing psychological safety functions as performance infrastructure, creating an environment where individuals speak honestly about errors, ideas, and risks without anticipating humiliation or retaliation and therefore generating more ideas, solving problems faster and adapting quickly.
You are the culture
To bring it back full circle, it’s not the company values and mission statement, not the perks of the job or the office vibe that creates the company culture and influences the collective state of the team.
It's you. You are the culture.
I will close with this: Your emotional fluency and nervous system regulation have a direct impact on those around you, but it can only be a positive impact when you actually understand your own. If you don’t know, understand, or trust your own inner landscape (your emotional fluency, if you will), how do you expect to be able to attune to your team and understand what’s happening with them?
If any part of this resonated, there is likely more clarity available than you’re currently seeing. The Logos Personality Assessment offers a structured way to understand the patterns shaping how you think, relate, and lead. Bringing awareness to what operates quietly beneath the surface. For leaders who value precision, self-awareness, and clean decision-making, it becomes less about insight for its own sake and more about seeing yourself accurately enough to be able to choose differently when necessary.
Read more from Jara Dekker
Jara Dekker, Cognitive and Emotional Performance Coach
Jara Dekker is a leader in emotional resilience, cognitive performance, and human transformation. After years of studying how personalities are shaped, Jara co-developed and co-founded the Logos assessment, which helps people understand themselves deeply and apply that awareness to how they live, lead, and connect. As founder of A Curious Catalyst, she works directly with individuals through a practical, proven approach to help them rewire the patterns that inhibit their goals, strengthening their inner foundation for lasting peace, strength, and prosperity. She is also the co-founder of Unbound, a neuroscience-based platform helping organisations strengthen employee wellbeing to improve performance, engagement, and culture.
References:
[1] SHRM 2024
[2] TalentSmart
[3] Gallup
[4] TalentSmart
