Culture is what people do when no one is watching. Or is it?

There is a sentence we’ve all heard hundreds of times in management books, keynotes, and corporate off-sites: “Culture is what people do when no one is watching” attributed to Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO of Southwest Airlines. For a long time, I believed it. I repeated it. After all, in sales we want daily behaviours that drive the right results - whether a manager is present or not.

But the more we work with leadership teams and their organisations, the more we realise this quote, at least in the way it is commonly interpreted, is not only incomplete. It is misleading. And in sales, it often leads us straight into the exact traps we’re trying to avoid.

Because the issue is not what people do when no one is watching. It is why they do it. And how they think. Especially how leaders think. It's also how people act and talk - again, especially leaders - when others are watching, because the rest of the organisation will mirror this behaviour.

Let's unpack this and let's go back to the man behind the quote, Herb Kelleher and what he really meant.

What Herb Kelleher really meant (And why everyone misunderstood it)

Kelleher was famous for cultivating one of the strongest organisational cultures ever built. He was also famously generous with opening his doors: he allowed competitors to observe Southwest’s hiring, onboarding, existing rituals and management practices. Most executives left convinced they had finally uncovered the mythical “Southwest secret sauce.”

And almost every single one misunderstood it.

They wanted to copy what Southwest did. But Kelleher’s genius never resided in the actions. It resided in the thinking that produced these actions. Southwest wasn’t a theatre where people act. What mattered was the mindset. A collective cognitive operating system. “It’s not formulaic,’ he would say about culture, ‘but an ongoing effort and ongoing change’ (and change happens in 2025 much faster than during Kelleher’s time…).

And as Dave Brock wrote brilliantly in his piece, Stop Copying What High Performers Do - Copy How They Think, and what people visiting Southwest Airlines didn't understand, is that you cannot replicate excellence by copying the observable. You only replicate excellence by recreating the invisible architecture of beliefs that sits underneath. A little bit like a tree and its roots. Trying to grow branches without the proper roots is doomed to fail.

Which brings us to sales.

Sales leaders love shortcuts - And that’s why culture collapses

In the world of sales, leaders often want the quick fix. We understand where they are coming from. There is pressure from the board to deliver the numbers. Not next quarter. Not next month. Tomorrow.

So they often resort to the new AI tools. A new sales playbook. A new script. A new two-day training. A new “best practice” copy-pasted from a competitor or a top rep. Or from what worked in a previous role. They do what visitors to Southwest Airlines did.

Looking at the tools or the actions people take without a corresponding shift in belief is cosmetic. It decays quickly. It produces a temporary burst of motivation - or even results - followed by a violent regression to old habits.

In French, we have a saying: “Chasser le naturel, il revient au galop.” Push nature away, it gallops back.

You can’t fix a belief problem with a new sales playbook.

It’s one of the reasons why so many sales transformations fail. Not because the training wasn’t good. Not because the CRM isn’t optimised. But because the thinking patterns - the beliefs, the assumptions, the internal narratives - remain untouched.

It’s also the reason why culture change is not a leadership memo. Not a kickoff meeting. Culture change is repetition. Friction. Reinforcement. Humility not to have the answers. Curiosity to look at the reasons of possible failure. Courage to change. Consistent effort to implement the change (check out Curiosity 5C framework by the way). À la Top Gun Academy (I wrote about this in detail here).

Real culture building is the daily grinding discipline of reshaping cognition: the interaction of beliefs and action. So let me introduce you to the "wheel of beliefs".

The "Wheel of beliefs" - The link between beliefs and actions

When we work with leadership teams, we often explain to them a concept known as the Wheel of beliefs.

This wheel is simple: Our beliefs shape how we think and feel. How we think shapes how we act - or don't act. How we act determines the results we get (or lack of results). And our outcomes reinforce the very beliefs that created them.

It is a closed loop. A self-reinforcing psychological ecosystem. So understanding the existing beliefs is critical. As they will hinder or enable the actions.

If you don’t break the belief loop, the belief loop will break your performance

For example, if someone “doesn’t believe in prospecting”, he will prospect in a timid, apologetic way - generating poor results, which confirm the initial belief.

Or if a manager believes that the lack of results is due to company policies or the economy (and if I had a penny for every CEO I hear saying out loud "the market is tough" rather than "What do we do wrong, we need to fix something", I wouldn't need to write a linkedIn newsletter to make a living, trust me…), what will happen?

1- All attempts to change will be facing resistance. Heck! It's external factors causing our problems. So it's best to wait for the marketplace or the economy to change, no point working on how we do things. And if action is taken, it will be half-heartedly...

2- The sales manager or the leader might voice this belief openly. "The market is tough". The team will hear it and use it as an excuse to justify poor results.

Example of a belief of a sales manager. You can download the list of sales manager limiting beliefs here. The English version available on request.

This is why, when we evaluate a sales organisation at the start of an engagement, amongst the many things we surface are the beliefs of sales leaders, sales managers and the people on the ground by assessing in a robust and scientific manner (you can download some examples here). In other words, we turn the invisible into visible.

Turning the invisible into visible is the first necessary step to breaking the belief loop

So. What's to do then? Well, here are four ideas to change the thinking.

Four new ways to think about sales as a leader.

It sounds obvious but the first suggestion is to actually define the right beliefs…

Define your beliefs, i.e. what your sales culture is

Most leaders assume what they think about their culture and what people around them think is one and equal. It couldn't be further from the truth. So whether or not a sales culture is a subset of a more global company culture, if it isn't documented, it simply doesn't exist.

What should you put in your sales culture? Your sales values?

Clearly, it would vary based on the stage of your organisation. A young organisation with an emerging sales motion - what we call emerging sales - will have different values than a large corporate that has established sales teams.

What really matters is specificity:

• Make your beliefs and values explicit.

• Define the behaviours that support these values.

• And just as importantly, define the behaviours that are not acceptable.

If people throughout your sales organisation can’t tell, in concrete terms, what “good” looks like when they are hiring, when they are coaching, when encouraging their teams or when driving accountability, you don’t have a culture. You have vibes.

Stop seeing sales as a necessary evil and stop tolerating mediocrity

This is a big one. If you ask ten random people in the street what they think about salespeople, the semantic field will rarely be flattering. That’s fine - sales has a bad rap. The real problem starts when leaders have similar views and don’t deeply believe in the value of sales.

When they:

• Talk about sales in a negative or condescending way internally.

• See sales as “that messy thing we have to do” rather than the value-creation engine.

• Believe that what matters is the product. And sales is just here to create "a wow effect"

• Accept mediocre results from sales that they would never tolerate from Finance, Product or Ops.

Poor sales performance then becomes an acceptable outcome - something to be endured, explained away by external factors, or buried under the usual external-excuse speeches.

Believe in investing in people. More than in tools

In 2025, AI is everywhere. Everyone wants to integrate it into everything. And yes, it’s a seismic shift. But it’s also putting steroids on an old obsession: tooling.

Look at any sales tech landscape slide from 2024 (one below, link here): it’s already overcrowded.

With AI, don't expect that graph to get smaller. And yet, despite already paying tens or hundreds of thousands in licences, many leadership teams still resist when the conversation shifts to investing in people.

Let me share an example we've seen. We recently evaluated a large sales team. Two key findings:

• Messaging used at the top of the funnel by the various sales rep was wildly inconsistent and often ineffective.

• The team had a strong resistance to prospecting.

Leadership chose not to invest in a sales transformation. Instead, they spent $100,000 on a new prospecting tool.

Horse. Cart. Wrong order.

Tools amplify behaviour. They don’t fix belief systems, skill gaps, or poor management practices. If your people don’t believe in prospecting, don’t know how to have a real sales conversation, or don’t get coached… AI will just help them go faster in the wrong direction.

Make continuous improvement non-negotiable

If culture is an “ongoing effort and ongoing change” as Kelleher said, then sales excellence is a continuous improvement game, not a one-off project. Too many leadership teams still operate in “campaign mode”:

• A big kickoff.

• A shiny two-day training. No long term reinforcement.

• A new playbook (and more often than not outside rather than inside a CRM ).

• And then… back to business as usual.

If you want to reshape beliefs and behaviour, you need rhythms, not gesticulation:

• Weekly coaching conversations, not quarterly feedback.

• Regular deal and loss reviews that ask “What did we learn?” or "What are we going to do differently" not just “Did we hit target?” (article on the topic here)

• Small experiments on messaging, territory coverage, or discovery questions - tested, measured, then either scaled or killed.

• A visible expectation that everyone (including leadership) is learning, iterating, and getting better at the craft of selling.

Couple that reset of beliefs with continuous improvement and you supercharge the wheel mentioned above.

Better beliefs → better actions → if results not as good → fix actions through continuous improvement → Better results → reinforce better beliefs.

Without it, just fixing beliefs on their own, you get quickly stuck:

Better beliefs → better actions → results not as good → keep repeating action → same results → people are stuck and start doubting beliefs…

Your role as a leader and sales leader is to design a system where learning is built in, not optional. Where improvement is the default, not the exception.

The Real Lesson From Herb Kelleher

When Kelleher talked about culture, he wasn’t talking about compliance. He was talking about identity. About a collective operating system strong enough that even without supervision, the default behaviour remains constant and supporting the vision of the leadership.

The real problem is that most organisations never deliberately shape the belief system and the systems that support it (hiring, coaching, on-boarding, development of sales talents and sales leadership development, acquisition/account management processes, compensation, etc...).

And that belief system always starts at the top.

So if you’re serious about transforming your sales culture, here is the real starting point:

Don’t try to change how your team acts. Start by changing your beliefs and how you think about sales and build the sales systems that enables you and your organisation to act on this new way of thinking.

If you've read all the way here, congratulations! Especially as we live in an era of content snacking. Don't hesitate to share the article (sharing is caring).

And if you feel your organisation isn't getting the results it deserves, you feel that the thinking needs a reset and you are curious to know more about how to build a new operating system for your organisation, get in touch.