Answer extracted from the Digital Construction Podcast — listen to the full episode below.
How should leaders define and maintain culture across teams experiencing rapid growth?
Culture is fundamentally about people feeling valued, having a voice, and knowing what to expect—built through consistent leadership behavior and direct engagement, not annual surveys. Leaders maintain it by being "in the weeds" through coffee conversations, water cooler chats, and team events, where real behavior emerges under pressure.
The definition of culture often stays abstract in organizations. But culture is tangible: it's the environment where people enjoy coming to work, operate with autonomy, and feel genuinely included. Consistency is the leadership foundation that makes culture stick across scaling teams—when people know what their leader will do or say in a given situation, they build trust and predictability.
Annual surveys and tick-box compliance measures miss the real pulse of a team. As Devon Middleditch explains in the episode, leaders need to abandon the illusion of distance and engage directly with their teams. The quality of how people operate under project pressure—how they handle conflict, support each other, and make decisions when stakes are high—is the true barometer of culture.
Being Present and Consistent Across Growth
Scaling a team doesn't mean automating culture through policies. It means maintaining the same leadership approach across every interaction, from one-on-ones to all-hands meetings. Direct engagement—not delegation of culture work to HR—is where leaders prove their values. This is discussed at length in this podcast.
Water cooler chats and informal coffee conversations are not soft benefits—they are the mechanism by which leaders signal what behavior is rewarded, what questions matter, and what inclusion actually looks like. Informal touchpoints reveal culture more honestly than formal surveys. When a leader shows up, listens, and acts on feedback consistently, the team adapts.
Devon Middleditch — Head of Digital Engineering and Technology at Varys, with extensive leadership experience scaling teams at Tier 1 firms including AECOM and government agencies such as Transport for New South Wales. Middleditch pioneered digital engineering frameworks and transformed organizational culture across complex infrastructure programs in Australia, bringing a pragmatic approach to balancing technical rigor with human-centered leadership.
The pressure test—how teams behave when deadlines tighten and decisions matter—reveals whether culture is real or performed. Leaders who maintain consistency in values, decision-making, and respect for autonomy during crises build resilient teams. Conversely, a leader who abandons stated principles under pressure teaches the team that culture bends when it's inconvenient.
A deeper insight from the conversation explores how Middleditch balanced full-time and contingent workforce ratios to preserve team cohesion, a practical constraint that directly impacts cultural sustainability at scale.
Key takeaways
- Culture is defined by feeling valued, having voice, autonomy, and consistency in leadership behavior—not by policies or surveys.
- Leaders maintain culture at scale through direct engagement: coffee conversations, team events, and informal touchpoints matter more than annual compliance checks.
- How teams operate under project pressure is the truest test of whether culture is real or performed.
- Consistency in leadership approach—how leaders respond to conflict, listen, and act—teaches teams what the culture actually is.
See also
What is the key difference between leadership in government agencies versus private engineering consulting firms?
Government agencies operate with more compliance-driven processes and political movements influencing agendas, whereas engineering consulting firms operate with more commercial flexibility and profit-driven priorities.
What early-career development helped Devon Middleditch succeed in transitioning from technical to leadership roles?
Two transformative half-day training modules were crucial: Understanding Self and Others, and Managing Self and Others. These modules provided the foundational framework for effective people leadership.
How can technical experts successfully transition into leadership roles without losing effectiveness?
You have to get off the tools and leave behind your technical work to move forward. Organizations do not expect you to do two roles—they want you to do one well, focused entirely on leadership.