Let’s stop calling it culture: it’s poor management
We talk about culture constantly. HR teams run annual surveys, launch “culture transformation” programmes, and refresh mission statements. Yet year after year, many organisations struggle with the same problems: disengaged employees, inconsistent performance, and a persistent lack of accountability.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of the time, this isn’t a culture problem. It’s a management problem.
When leaders struggle to manage effectively, “culture” becomes a convenient default diagnosis. It sounds softer, less personal, and far easier to discuss than the difficult, granular work of changing leadership behaviour. But blaming culture doesn’t fix anything; it simply allows the real issues to linger.
Management is the engine of culture
Culture is not something you design in isolation. It’s a by-product. It is the cumulative result of how people are led, how decisions are made, and which behaviours are reinforced (or ignored) every single day.
It is not the slogans on posters or the values listed on the website. Culture is the lived experience of employees.
When managers avoid difficult conversations, shift priorities without clarity, tolerate underperformance, or reward visibility over real impact, the outcome is entirely predictable. Culture doesn’t create these behaviours. Management permits them.
How “Culture Problems” show up in reality
In my advisory work, I repeatedly see the same issues described as “cultural gaps” when they are, in fact, management design failures.
- Low accountability culture
Usually means goals are unclear and consequences are inconsistently applied.
- “Low employee engagement”
Engagement doesn’t disappear on its own. It erodes when managers fail to give feedback, align work to meaningful outcomes, or recognise contribution. Engagement is a response to leadership behaviour.
- Silos and internal politics
When departments compete rather than collaborate, it’s often because incentives and decision rights are poorly defined. That’s not culture but it’s weak organisational design.
- Lack of ownership
Teams won’t take ownership when autonomy and accountability are misaligned. Management creates the environment; culture simply reflects it.
What this means for HR
If organisations genuinely want to improve “culture,” HR needs to stop measuring symptoms and start diagnosing behaviours.
- Look for patterns
Examine how decisions are made, how meetings are run, how performance is discussed, and how often feedback actually happens.
- Prioritise skill-building
Many organisations promote strong individual contributors into management roles without ever teaching them how to manage. Leadership development should focus on fundamentals: role clarity, accountability, delegation, and honest feedback.
- Hold the line on behaviour
When leaders tolerate behaviours they claim to oppose, those behaviours become the culture.
Looking ahead to 2026
Culture is often used as a catch-all because it feels big, abstract, and difficult to fix. But when you unpack the issues holding organisations back, they almost always trace to how people are managed day to day.
In 2026, instead of announcing yet another “culture initiative,” a better starting point is a far more specific question:
Which management behaviours are holding us back and what will we do differently this quarter to change them?
Because until management changes, culture won’t.
About the author
Maria Bartolo Zahra is Managing Partner and HR & Compensation Specialist at SurgeAdvisory. She has over twenty years of human resources and business advisory experience.