Is Culture Your Problem? Why Behaviour Follows Conditions
Culture is rarely the root cause of a recurring behaviour problem. Culture is what people learn works in your organization: the pattern they form from what leadership promotes, rewards, tolerates and punishes.
When a behaviour keeps repeating, the more useful question is not “What is wrong with our culture?” but “What conditions make this behaviour sensible enough that intelligent people keep choosing it?” Lasting change starts with those conditions.
What do leaders mean when they say “culture problem”?
Most organizations have a vocabulary for the behaviour that frustrates them. Accountability culture. Silo culture. Risk culture. Execution culture. These phrases are useful shorthand. They name a pattern everyone recognizes: decisions that climb the ladder, teams protecting information, problems that surface late, priorities that quietly stall.
The trouble starts when the shorthand becomes the diagnosis.
“We have an accountability problem” sounds like an explanation. It isn’t. It describes what people are doing without saying why they are doing it. And once a description is accepted as a cause, the investigation stops at exactly the point it should begin. The prescription follows quickly: training, a values refresh, an engagement survey, a new set of expectations.
What is culture, if it isn’t the cause?
Culture is what people learn works. That working definition sits close to Bogale & Debela’s recent description of culture as the assumptions a group has learned because they worked well enough to be passed on.
People learn it by watching. They notice who gets promoted, what gets rewarded, which targets really matter, what happens when someone challenges a senior leader, and whether reporting bad news is genuinely safe. Nobody reads the values statement to find out what is real. They watch what happens next.
They learn quickly, and they learn rationally. That is the point most culture diagnoses miss.
Why do intelligent people keep repeating the behaviour leaders complain about?
Take a common complaint: managers constantly escalate decisions. The diagnosis becomes “poor accountability culture”, and everyone is sent to training.
Now look at the conditions. Decision rights are unclear. Senior executives routinely overturn decisions. Managers are punished when reasonable decisions produce poor outcomes. Governance requires multiple approvals anyway.
Under those conditions, escalation is not a cultural defect. It is the sensible choice. A manager who escalates is protected; a manager who decides is exposed. Changing the behaviour without changing those conditions is what the Japanese call karamawari: the wheel spins, with enormous effort and no equivalent traction.
The same logic applies to other labels. The table below is illustrative, not a research finding: it shows the kind of conditions worth examining before accepting a culture label as the cause.
Why does culture training so often fail to change behaviour?
Training works on the individual. Conditions work on everyone, every day. When a manager returns from a program into the same approval chain, the same performance review and the same response to disagreement, the conditions usually win.
We have seen this pattern in several forms. In one composite example, a management team was sent for training because it could not work together after its general manager left. For years, that leader had brokered every relationship on the team: a hub-and-spoke model with the most senior person at the centre. When the hub was removed, the wheel collapsed. The team was not short on emotional intelligence. The structure had never required them to build direct working relationships with each other.
In another pattern, managers who raised uncomfortable gaps were sent for soft-skills training to change their tone. The organizations involved valued harmony and expected their operating system to be followed without deviation. The managers could attend training indefinitely; if they saw a real gap, they would still raise it. The issue was a system not built to be questioned, not a personality.
None of this means training is wasted. Training builds skill, confidence and new habits, and it works well when the conditions support the new behaviour. The failure is sending people to learn something the organization will not let them practise.
How do you find the conditions behind a behaviour?
Start with one specific, observable behaviour, not a label. “Supervisors escalate overtime approvals they are authorized to make” is workable. “Poor accountability” is not. Then ask six questions:
- Who has been promoted recently, and what did they visibly do to get there?
- What gets rewarded, formally and informally?
- When two targets collide, which one actually wins?
- What happened the last time someone challenged a senior leader?
- What happened the last time someone brought bad news early?
- Who really holds the decision rights, on paper and in practice?
Answer from recent events, not from policy. Ask people at more than one level, because culture is rarely uniform: it can be strong and visible among the executive team and much fainter by the time it reaches directors, supervisors and lead hands. Where what the organization says and what people experience diverge, you have found a condition teaching the behaviour.
Is culture ever the real cause?
Culture matters, but mostly as a lag. Culture is basically a sum of behaviours. Once people have learned a pattern, it outlasts the conditions that created it. When leaders announce new decision rights, people wait. They watch what happens to the first person who uses them, and whether the senior leader who promised not to overturn decisions does so anyway when the stakes are high. That is not resistance. It is due diligence.
So changing the conditions is necessary, but not instant. Culture change needs two things at once: the courage to change the conditions and the patience to keep them changed long enough for people to believe it.
Where should leadership start?
- Name the behaviour, not the label.
- Find the conditions, using the six questions above.
- Change one condition you control: who decides what, what you ask about first in operating reviews, how you respond to the next piece of bad news.
- Tell people what changed, and keep it changed.
- Then train, where skill is genuinely the gap.
Culture may not be causing your problem. It may be the receipt your organization keeps printing for the conditions it refuses to change.
The label Recurring behaviour Conditions that may make it rational (illustrative) “Poor accountability culture” Managers escalate decisions Unclear decision rights, leaders overturning decisions, punishment for reasonable calls, layered approvals “Silo culture” Teams protect information Targets and rewards measured by function only “Weak risk culture” Problems surface late Bringing bad news carries a cost “Poor execution culture” Priorities stall Too many targets, with no signal about which one really matters
Frequently asked questions
What causes a poor accountability culture?
Usually conditions rather than character: unclear decision rights, decisions overturned from above, punishment for reasonable decisions that turn out badly, and approval layers that make ownership pointless.
Can you fix culture with training?
Training helps when the conditions support the new behaviour. On its own, it rarely changes a pattern the organization keeps rewarding.
What is the difference between culture and conditions?
Conditions are what leadership creates: structures, rewards, decision rights and responses. Culture is what people learn from those conditions and carry forward, sometimes long after the conditions change.
Sources:
1. Bogale, A. T., & Debela, K. L. (2024). Organizational culture: A systematic review. Cogent Business & Management, 11(1), Article 2340129. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311975.2024.2340129
