I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat across from a senior team and heard the phrase “we’ve got a culture problem.” Said with a sigh, like culture is weather. Something that just happens to an organisation, rather than something a small number of people are actively creating every single day.
It’s rarely true. What’s actually being described, nine times out of ten, is a leadership problem. And “culture” has become the polite way of not naming it.
Why “culture” is the safer word
Nobody gets defensive about culture. It’s abstract enough to be everyone’s fault and no one’s fault at once. You can commission a survey about it, put it on a strategy slide, form a working group. All useful-looking activity that costs nothing to the people whose behaviour actually needs to change.
Leadership, on the other hand, has names attached. Naming a leadership problem means naming a person, or several people, and having a conversation that isn’t comfortable. So teams reach for the softer word instead. “The culture needs work” travels a lot easier through a leadership meeting than “the way you three run your teams is inconsistent, and staff have stopped trusting that anything will change.”
I’m not saying culture doesn’t exist as its own thing, it does, and it’s bigger than any one leader. But in my experience, when an organisation says its culture is the problem, what’s usually broken is much closer to the surface: how leaders communicate, how they make decisions, whether they follow through, and whether their behaviour matches what they say in the town hall.
The tell is always in the pattern
I’ve seen this play out the same way across very different organisations. Staff surveys come back low on trust or morale. Leadership responds with a wellbeing initiative, a values refresh, maybe a new set of posters in the staff room. Eighteen months later, the same survey comes back the same way, because nothing about how the leaders in that building actually operate has changed.
The pattern is the giveaway. If an engagement problem sits under one manager and nowhere else, that’s not culture — that’s a management issue, and it needs treating like one. If it’s genuinely everywhere, look up, not sideways. That kind of consistency across an organisation almost always traces back to what leadership tolerates, rewards, and models, whether they intend it to or not. Staff read leadership behaviour far more closely than they read the values statement.
What this means for the 8 Levers
This is exactly why Leadership Behaviours sits as its own lever in Culture by Design, separate from Vision & Values Alignment. They get lumped together constantly, but they fail differently and they get fixed differently. You can have beautifully written values and still have a culture problem, because values are what an organisation says. Leadership behaviour is what it does. When those two levers are out of sync, staff believe the behaviour every time — not the poster.
It also means diagnosis matters more than most organisations give it credit for. Before you touch communication, recognition, or systems, you need an honest answer to one question: is this a “the whole ship is off course” problem, or an “one or two people at the wheel need support, coaching, or in some cases moving on” problem. Treating the second as the first wastes a year and changes nothing. Treating the first as the second means someone gets unfairly blamed for a system failure that was never theirs to fix alone.
The practical bit
If you’re heading into a culture conversation this term, don’t start with “what’s our culture like?” that question is too big and too vague to act on. Start with “is this pattern coming from one or two leaders, or from everyone?”
A proper diagnostic earns its keep here, not by asking staff to rate “culture” in the abstract, but by pinpointing whether the problem sits with a specific manager’s behaviour or runs consistently across the whole senior team. That distinction changes everything about what you do next. One is a coaching conversation. The other is a leadership-wide reset.
Skip that step and you’ll either unfairly blame one manager for a system-wide failure, or spend a year on generic “culture work” while the actual behaviour driving it goes untouched.
Written by Amy Fowles — education leader with 15+ years’ experience building and developing teams in challenging circumstances.