“You don’t fix company culture with perks, surveys, or offsite retreats. Here’s the thing: Culture isn’t what you write on the wall. Culture is simply the exact behavioral standards your leadership tolerates when revenue targets are under pressure.”
Mike Dixon, President and COO, recently posted this on LinkedIn, and it’s one of those points that sounds obvious the second you read it, but almost nobody actually stops to apply it.
Culture is what you tolerate. Most leaders treat such behavior problems as an HR problem. Someone’s late all the time, someone’s disengaged, someone’s got an attitude, so you coach it, write it up, or eventually let them go. Case closed.
But if you’re hiring for the same role over and over, or the same “attitude problem” keeps showing up on different people, have you considered it’s not actually an individual problem? It might be a company problem wearing a person’s face.
More often than not, it’s what leadership tolerates, or worse, quietly endorses. And that’s exactly why HR can’t fix it alone. You can’t coach or discipline your way out of a problem leadership itself keeps accepting. Practice what you preach, or the cycle just repeats, because the root of it is systemic, not individual.
What Leaders Let Slide (Even When They Know Better)
A few real examples, because most leaders would defend these instead of admit to them.
If you tolerate poor communication from a high-producing manager, that becomes your culture. The numbers look good, so nobody says anything, and everyone underneath that manager learns to just adapt, because that person’s never been pressured to change. We worked with a client years back whose top biller couldn’t keep an account manager. He treated everyone at his level or above like royalty and everyone below him like garbage. Five account managers in under three years, a revolving door, and management always blamed the account manager. It wasn’t the account manager. It was him. Leadership just wasn’t willing to have that conversation, because they were afraid to ruffle his feathers. High turnover became the culture they tolerated instead.
Here’s another one. If you ignore a broken onboarding process, meaning no real support once someone starts, because you’re too busy fighting fires or chasing the next sale, that’s your culture too. New hires walk into a sink-or-swim environment, figure that’s just how it works here, and either fail or leave. That’s not a new-hire problem. That’s a culture problem the company keeps choosing (and keeps leading to costly, preventable turnover).
Here’s another big one Mike talked about recently. A request goes out to a group with no single owner, and three leaders each assume someone else already made the call. Nothing happens, because nobody was actually accountable. That’s the bystander effect in full swing. The fix isn’t complicated: no meeting ends without a named owner, a deadline, and a clear next step, or nothing ever actually gets done.
And one we see constantly: a once-strong performer stops pushing back in meetings. “Here are some ideas I have to make it better” quietly becomes “that’s fine.” They got sidelined enough times that they learned to sit on the bench and stop trying. Leadership reads that as someone settling in. It’s actually someone who stopped believing raising the bar was worth it, because somewhere along the way, you told them, directly or not, that their ideas and effort didn’t matter. People believe the story they’re told about themselves. Once trying stops going anywhere, they stop trying. At the end of the day, it comes down to feeling valued. And if they don’t feel it here, they’ll go find it somewhere else.
These are just a few. The real-world versions of this are endless.
The Cost of Letting It Slide
This is where “it’s just HR’s job to handle it” falls apart. HR can coach the manager with the communication problem (only if allowed to). HR can rebuild the onboarding process (likewise, if allowed to). But if leadership keeps tolerating the underlying behavior every time it’s inconvenient to address, the fix doesn’t hold. You end up right back where you started, just with a different name in the seat. And no, it’s not HR’s problem. It’s like blaming a teacher for bad parenting. It’s the parent’s responsibility, leadership in this case, to keep things in line at home.
And when leadership doesn’t, the pattern doesn’t stay contained to one bad hire or one difficult employee. That’s usually the real reason a role keeps turning over, or the same complaint keeps surfacing from different people. It’s rarely a coincidence that several separate individuals all happen to have the same character flaw. It’s far more often one environment quietly producing the same result over and over, and that turnover carries a real, calculable cost, one most leaders underestimate until they actually run the numbers.
Here’s a quick way to check whether it’s the individual or the company creating the problem: look at the pattern, not the person. Whether it’s turnover, a recurring complaint, or the same kind of pushback showing up from different people on your team, pull the last three examples of it. Look at the actual reasons, not the polite version everyone agreed to say out loud. If the pattern points back to the same manager, the same process, or the same thing leadership has quietly allowed, you’re not looking at three disgruntled people. You’re looking at one unresolved company problem, three times.
Look at the “Why” Before You Label It
One important check before you act on any of this: make sure what you’re looking at is actually a standards problem, not a circumstance being mistaken for one.
Mike gave an illustrative example on The Business Blueprint podcast with James May that makes this point well. Picture a leader ready to write someone up, maybe let them go, for consistently showing up late. Weeks of it. The kind of pattern that looks like it settles the question on its own.
But look into the why, and here’s what was actually going on. A few weeks earlier, the employee had told his manager he needed that time, four days a week, to take his son to cancer treatments. The company changed his shift anyway, without factoring that in. He didn’t quit, and he didn’t stop showing up. He just kept coming in late, because getting his son to treatment came first.
That’s not a discipline problem. And while this specific example is hypothetical, we see cases just like it all the time: employees who needed something for legitimate reasons, and the company didn’t honor it. A problem the company created, then turned around and punished the employee for.
This doesn’t cancel out everything above. The point is to always look closer and understand the reason before you act. In this case, the standard was showing up on time. That didn’t stop mattering. What changed was how leadership needed to handle it, adjusting the schedule instead of writing him up or letting him go. Real accountability means both: don’t excuse what your leadership team is genuinely tolerating, and don’t punish someone for a circumstance your own company created.
Practical Tips to Fix It, Not Just Tolerate It
Naming the problem is a key step, but not the only one. Then you need to do something different about it. Here are some tips we suggest to help get you started:
- Actually find out what’s being tolerated. Run engagement surveys, but actually do something with the data. If you’re going to ask, actually read the answers, follow up on the patterns, and let people see something change because of what they said. Our blog on turning employee surveys into real action walks through how to do this well. A survey nobody acts on trains people to stop being honest on the next one.
- Give every issue one owner. When a problem gets discussed by a group and nobody’s specifically responsible for fixing it, it doesn’t get fixed, it gets discussed again next month. We run our own leadership meetings on EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System), and one of its core rules is that shared accountability usually just means no accountability. Every issue gets a name attached to it, plus a real deadline, before the meeting ends.
- Use a real filter before you react, not just good intentions. Did something change recently that this person didn’t have a say in? Would a reasonable person in their exact situation likely do the same thing? Is this new, or has it been quietly happening for a while and nobody asked why? Three questions, five minutes, and you’ll know a lot faster whether you’re looking at a person problem or a company problem.
- When it genuinely is non-excusable, act, and say why. If you’ve actually confirmed the behavior isn’t circumstantial, isn’t something the company caused, and isn’t a one-off, then it’s time to act, not investigate further. Letting a genuinely toxic pattern sit unaddressed has a real cost, one that spreads well past the one person involved. Address it directly, follow through, and be transparent with the team about why, without turning it into a public takedown. Silence here is its own kind of tolerating.
- Build visibility instead of relying on willpower. Even our own leadership has had to solve this in ourselves. When a leader’s instinct is to stay hands-on in every decision, the fix usually isn’t asking them to stop caring, it’s building a system, a regular reporting rhythm, a dashboard, a structured update, that gives them the visibility they actually need without requiring them to be in every room. Our blog on leadership drag gets into this in more detail if it sounds familiar.
- Be honest when leadership itself is the gap. None of this works if accountability only flows downward. If a standard slipped because leadership let it, the fix starts by admitting that out loud, not quietly tightening enforcement on everyone else while the actual source stays untouched.
We’re not saying we’ve got this perfected. Nobody does. But these are the actual mechanisms, not just good intentions, that turn “we value culture” into something a team can feel day to day.
The Bar You Set Is the Bar You’ll Get
Culture really is what you tolerate. Not the poster, not the perks, the standards you actually enforce when it’s inconvenient to enforce them.
If something’s been sliding because a person is too valuable to confront, or a process is too annoying to fix, that’s on leadership, not HR. And if you’re not sure whether what you’re looking at is a real standards problem or a circumstance being punished unfairly, closing that gap is worth doing before it costs you someone good.
That’s exactly what our Talent Review Workshop is built for, an honest, outside look at where accountability is really breaking down. And when the answer points to a specific leader or manager who needs to operate differently, our coaching and development plans build that skill directly, with a customized plan and measurable follow-through.
Naming the problem was step one. Building the muscle to catch it the next time, before it becomes a key person’s resignation, is the part most companies never get to. That’s where we come in.
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