Higher education scholarship is focused largely on professors who guide students in their learning and students who participate in the educational process. The contributions of professional staff (i.e., those supporting the work of faculty and students) have not been as well understood, particularly those who reside in academic departments. We explore the work and impact of three staff-led problem-solving teams within an academic unit at one U.S. public university. Professional staff led these three grassroots teams on co-operative education, mentorship, and intercultural competency; in each, staff represented the majority of team members. We report on our research on these teams between 2017-2019 which culminated in interviews with 20 team members. We applied cultural models' theory to orient our data collection, analysis, and validation. In this theory, interviews help uncover the existence and extent of a sense of "sharedness" with the potential to reveal a consensus view of the culture, hence the name "cultural models." Interview statements are validated against other data--two sets of drawings interviewees created during the interviews. Through interviewee discourse and drawings, we describe the internal dynamics and connections accessed by members of these three teams. By specifying "how" staff were able to work together and what the cultural models illustrated about organizational-culture change, we help fill the gap in the higher education literature about this university subculture.