A performance problem you’re calling “culture” is usually a decision you haven’t named yet.

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:

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.

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