When Performance Dips, Leaders Often Blame Culture. Here’s What They Should Look at Instead.

According to iHire’s 2026 Toxic Workplace Trends Report, 79% of employees who experienced a toxic workplace pointed to poor leadership and management as the cause, citing leaders who were unethical, unaccountable or unsupportive. Executives rarely see it the same way. When performance dips, the diagnosis that gets reached for first is almost always “culture,” a word

I have spent close to 20 years inside companies watching leaders reach for that same explanation. Culture is safe to blame because it points everywhere at once. Naming your own decisions points back at exactly one person.

Fixing performance starts with a tougher question: “What have I been doing, specifically, that’s producing this?” Here’s where to start looking:

1. Notice the distance before diagnosing culture

Executives rarely think of themselves as the reason performance stalls — they’ve usually stopped being close enough to the work to see their own fingerprints on it. In an interview, Jana Boone, SVP of growth enablement at full-funnel digital marketing agency Intero Digital, told me the behavior executives overlook in themselves is almost always the same one: “Poor performance gets labeled a culture problem when it’s often just distance.”

Boone said the more common issue isn’t culture at all, but a leader who hasn’t spent hands-on time with their people in a while and whose instinct is to solve rather than listen. The job has changed since that leader last did it themselves, she said, and they often don’t know what’s actually standing in someone’s way.

Boone’s point cuts against the instinct that made most of these leaders successful in the first place: solving fast. Before assuming a capability gap, she recommended asking a person directly how they’re feeling about the work, the pace and the environment. “And then be quiet long enough to hear the real answer,” she said.

2. Trace the label back to a decision

Boeing‘s regulator ended up saying the quiet part out loud, even while reaching for the same word everyone else does. After a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max mid-flight in January 2024, an FAA audit found that Boeing’s culture had placed more emphasis on mass production than safety standards, Administrator Michael Whitaker told NBC News.

But the specifics he pointed to weren’t cultural in any vague sense. Boeing’s own protocols, he said, weren’t what you’d expect “if safety is the first priority.” The failures traced back to a specific, correctable set of leadership decisions: what got rewarded, what got skipped and what got signed off without a safety briefing.

The lesson scales down well below aircraft manufacturing. Before a team’s output gets filed under “culture,” name the actual decision behind it, including what got approved, what got ignored and what got rewarded that shouldn’t have been. A culture is hard to fix because it’s everywhere and nowhere. A decision has a name attached to it.

3. Ask the question you don’t want answered

Most leaders who genuinely want to audit their own habits don’t know where to start, and that uncertainty is often reason enough to quit before trying. Boone said the self-examination most leaders skip starts with a simple, uncomfortable request: Ask people above you, your peers and your direct reports what they see as your strengths and your weaknesses.

“You’ll get three different answers, and the gaps between them are the point,” she said. The instruction that follows is the hard part. “Don’t explain, don’t contextualize, don’t defend — just take it, and pay attention to where the three groups disagree as much as where they agree,” she explained.

She recommended writing down a personal read on what’s going well and what needs work, and then holding it against what came back from the three groups. The distance between those two lists, Boone said, is the actual audit. Most leaders skip this step for the reason she named directly: “A culture diagnosis produces a workshop, while an honest look at your own habits produces a list of conversations you now have to have.”

4. Reward the problem before demanding a fix

A University of Iowa study found that management teams respond with more urgency to employees who point out a problem than to those who show up with a proposed fix for it, according to researcher Daniel Newton. Newton said the instinct to demand a solution alongside every problem is backward. When people learn they need a fix in hand before they can speak up, they often stay quiet instead, so problems go unreported and unresolved.

That same filter operates at the top of an organization, not just on the front line. If a leader only takes a concern seriously once someone arrives with a solution attached, the leader is training people to withhold the exact information that would trace a performance problem back to a specific decision instead of a vague mood.

Loosen that filter — ask what’s going wrong before asking what to do about it — and problems get named earlier, closer to the source and easier to trace back to something a leader controls instead of a culture that implicates no one.

You don’t need a workshop, a survey or a new deck to fix this. You need to notice the distance, name the decision, ask the people who actually see you and reward the person who tells you something’s wrong before they know how to fix it.

Pick one of those four things and do it this week. Your team already knows which one you’ve been avoiding.