Organizations often say they want culture change. They revise values, hold workshops, refresh policies, and talk about trust, engagement, and performance. But there is a harder question many are less willing to face:
Can culture really change when the leadership driving the toxicity remains unchanged?
It is an uncomfortable question, but an essential one.
Culture is often described as “the way we do things around here.” If that is true, then leadership is not standing outside culture observing it. Leadership is shaping it. Leaders set the emotional temperature. They determine what is tolerated, what is rewarded, what is ignored, and what becomes normal. So while policies may be rewritten, culture rarely resets unless leadership behaviour does too.
That is why so many culture-change efforts fail. They target the symptoms while protecting the source.
A toxic culture does not usually sustain itself through policy alone. It is sustained through patterns. Through silence around certain behaviours. Through defensiveness when truth surfaces. Through the protection of comfort at the top. Through punishing the truth-teller while preserving the conditions that made the truth necessary in the first place.
Sometimes leaders are genuinely insulated from what is happening beneath them. The higher people rise in an organization, the easier it can become to assume that the environment others experience is roughly the same as the one they enjoy. And when leaders have never stood close enough to the rank and file to hear the quiet dread, quiet fatigue, or quiet resignation of employees, they may honestly believe that the organization is healthier than it is.
But sometimes the issue is not ignorance. Sometimes it is avoidance.
Someone once described to me what it was like to move from a position of executive privilege into a place where they could suddenly see the same organization through a different lens. What they discovered shocked them. Believing leadership would want to know, they raised what they had seen. They expected concern. Curiosity. Corrective action. Instead, they were told they knew too much.
That response says more about toxic leadership than any employee survey ever could. Because when dysfunction is brewed at the top, transparency becomes threat. Truth becomes dangerous. And culture-change language becomes performance instead of transformation.
This is why leadership scholars like Edgar Schein remain so relevant. Culture is not changed because leaders announce better values. Culture changes when leaders consistently model better ones. What leaders pay attention to, reward, tolerate, and excuse becomes the real curriculum of the workplace.
And yet many leaders want the appearance of transformation without the cost of introspection.
They want engagement without humility.
Loyalty without accountability.
Trust without truth.
Change without self-examination.
But real culture change demands more than technical fixes. It requires adaptive leadership. It requires leaders to examine their assumptions, behaviours, blind spots, and emotional patterns. It requires the willingness to lose something: certainty, ego, popularity, control, or the comfort of being unchallenged.
This is where resistance often begins. Because the real questions of culture change are not operational first. They are personal.
What behaviours have I normalised?
What truths am I protected from hearing?
Have I mistaken authority for influence?
Have I made it safe for people to tell me the truth?
If my leadership style were replicated across this organization, what kind of culture would exist?
Those are not comfortable questions. But they are necessary ones.
High turnover, fatigue, and disengagement are often described as people problems. Many times, they are trust problems. People do not always leave because the work lacks meaning. They leave because the environment drains it. They leave because the cost of staying exceeds the dignity of the paycheck. Disengagement is not always rebellion. Often, it is resignation.
That is the paradox of leadership. The higher one rises, the easier it becomes to misread what is happening below, unless there is a deliberate effort to listen, observe, and face the mirror honestly.
So perhaps leaders need to stop asking, “How do we fix our people?” and begin asking a more sobering question:
What have we made normal?
Because culture change cannot be delegated. It cannot live only in HR, consultants, values statements, or committees. Those can support the work, but they cannot substitute for leadership transformation. If leadership behaviour does not shift, the culture will eventually return to its old shape.
Real change begins when leaders choose courage over comfort, reflection over defensiveness, and integrity over optics.
And as always, the most honest place to begin is still the mirror.