October 19, 2026Culture vs. Leadership: Which One Is Actually Driving Your Team?

We have all heard the lines: “That’s how things are done around here.” “That’s just the nature of our business.” “It’s our culture.”

Leaders say these things when a project stalls, when good people quit, or when a team stops speaking up in meetings. Culture becomes the box where we put the problems we don’t want to look at too closely. But I have started asking a harder question. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership?

That question stayed with me after I watched a conversation with Chris Dyer, a keynote speaker and 4x bestselling author who spent years as the CEO of a fast-growing company. His teams earned Best Place to Work recognition 15 times. He has delivered more than 300 keynotes in over 20 countries for organizations like NASA, Johnson & Johnson, and Southwest Airlines. When he talks about corporate culture, he does not sound like a theorist. He sounds like someone who has carried the weight of it.

What struck me most was how simple his answer is. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? In his view, many of the things we label culture problems are leadership problems in disguise. And that is good news, because a problem that starts at the top can also be fixed at the top.

📺 Watch and listen to the full interview with leadership expert Chris Dyer

Why We Tend to Blame Our Company’s Culture First

Blaming culture is comfortable. Culture feels like weather. It is everywhere, nobody owns it, and nobody can be blamed for it. When we say “our culture is the issue,” we spread responsibility so thin that no one has to pick it up. A leader can sigh, shrug, and move on to the next meeting. I think the first step in answering the question of whether company culture really is the problem, or is it leadership? is to notice how often we use the word culture to avoid the word leader.

Culture is not a force that arrives from outside. It is the total of what people see leaders do, allow, reward, and ignore. Every team learns by watching. If a company has a habit of rushed, shallow meetings, somebody modeled that habit first. If people stay quiet when they disagree, somebody once taught them that speaking up was costly. Employees are excellent readers of behavior. They don’t study the values poster.

They study what happens when a deadline slips, who gets promoted, and how the boss reacts to bad news. Chris keeps returning to this reality in his work on culture. So when I ask, is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership?, I am not trying to dodge culture. I am trying to find where it comes from.

There is a hidden gift in this way of seeing things. If the problem is a vague thing called culture, the fix sounds like a long, expensive program with a launch date and a slide deck. If the problem starts with leadership choices, the fix can begin on Monday morning. That is a more uncomfortable idea, because it puts responsibility on a person instead of a concept. But it also puts power in a person’s hands. I would rather own a problem I can change than blame something I can’t. That is why the question, is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership?, deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Is Company Culture Really the Problem, or Is It Leadership? Look at the Calendar

When a team’s culture feels off, I now think the first place to look is the leader’s calendar, not the values poster on the wall. A poster says what we hope for. A calendar shows what we actually do. The gap between the two is where most culture trouble lives. Picture a company that says people come first, yet its leader has not had one unhurried conversation with a team member in a month. Every employee in that company knows what the real priorities are, no matter what the poster says. So, is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? The calendar often answers before anyone speaks.

Try a simple exercise. Look back at the last four weeks. How many hours went to customers? How many went to firefighting, reports, and meetings about meetings? How many went to the people who report to you, in conversations that were not about a task? This is not about guilt. Leaders are busy for good reasons, and most of those reasons are real. It is about seeing clearly. Busy leaders teach their teams what matters by where their time goes, whether they mean to or not.

This connects directly to employee engagement. We talk about engagement as if it were a survey score. I see it more as the result of daily experience. People feel engaged when they feel seen, trusted, and clear about why their work matters. Those feelings do not come from a perk or a pizza party. They come from how a leader spends attention. When the calendar shows that people matter, engagement tends to follow. When it doesn’t, no initiative can cover the gap for long. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? Check the schedule first, and the answer often shows up quickly.

The Job of Reminding, Not Teaching

One line from Chris changed how I think about leadership advice. He said,

“I often feel like my job is to go in there and remind them of the things we already know.”

I like how humble that is. A man with 300 keynotes, four books, and a long list of famous clients says his work is mostly not about new ideas. It is about reminders.

The more I think about it, the more true it feels. Most leaders already know that people do better work when they feel valued. They know a clear direction saves time. They know trust is built in small moments. Nobody needs a revolutionary theory to learn these things. The real problem is the distance between knowing and doing. Knowledge fades under pressure. We don’t forget the basics because we are foolish. We forget them because something louder shows up every day. That is a very human pattern, and I have seen it in myself as much as in anyone else.

This changes how we should think about professional development. We often assume growth means learning something new, such as a new framework, a new tool, or a new buzzword. Sometimes growth means going back to what we already know and finally practicing it. And this is where real thought leadership earns its value. The best voices don’t always add more noise. They help us remember what we dropped along the way. In the end, is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? If leaders already know the answers but stop acting on them, then the work is not about finding better answers. It is about building better habits around the answers we have.

How Distractions Crowd Out the Basics

Chris named a few of the things that pull leaders away from the basics: AI, tariffs, and the daily fires. I don’t want to wave those away. They are real. A leader dealing with new technology, shifting trade rules, and a customer emergency before lunch is not being lazy. That leader is dealing with a lot. But I think this list reveals something important about how the basics get lost.

The urgent always beats the important, and people issues rarely feel urgent. A broken system screams. A missed deadline sends an alert. A disengaged team whispers, and sometimes it doesn’t even do that. It just slowly pulls back. Because the quiet problems never demand attention, they grow until they become loud ones, like resignations, missed targets, and a customer who has had enough. By then, the leader is back in firefighting mode, which pushes the people side even further down the list. It is a loop, and it feeds itself. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? In this loop, culture suffers because leadership attention is always somewhere else.

Change makes this worse, because every wave of change adds a new item to the leader’s plate and almost never takes an old one off. Even innovation depends on this foundation. New ideas come from people who feel safe enough to share half-formed thoughts and brave enough to test them. If a leader is too busy chasing the next big thing to protect that safety, the big thing never arrives. So the question of whether company culture really is the problem, or is it leadership? becomes a question about priorities. What does a leader protect when everything is demanding attention? The answer shows up in the culture a few months later.

Putting Employees First Is a Business Decision

The second quote from Chris that stayed with me is about people first. He said,

“If they’re being taken care of, they will take care of your clients; they’ll take care of your vendors and everyone else in that ecosystem that your company needs to thrive in.”

I read that as a statement about how value moves through a company. It does not start with the customer. It starts with the person who serves the customer.

Some leaders hear “employees first” and think it means going soft. I don’t read it that way, and I don’t think Chris means it that way. It is a practical view of how business really works. Customers do not experience your strategy. They experience a person who answers the phone, solves the problem, or ignores it. Vendors do not experience your mission statement.

They experience how your team treats them when a deadline is tight. If those people feel cared for, they pass that care along. If they feel used, they pass that along instead. A company is a chain of human interactions, and the first link is how leaders treat their own people. So, is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? When people are treated poorly, the damage travels far beyond the office.

Chris did not learn this in theory. He grew a fully remote company through two recessions and a pandemic, and he managed teams numbering in the thousands. Putting people first held up under real pressure. That matters for business growth, because growth is hard on people. More customers mean more stress, more change, and more chances to break trust.

Leaders who keep caring for their teams during growth tend to keep the quality that made growth possible. I’d add one more thought for any entrepreneur reading this. It is natural to say the customer comes first. But the customer is served by your people. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? In a growing company, it is usually the second one, because the way leaders treat people sets the ceiling for everything else.

A Vision Is Something You Say Out Loud, Again and Again

The third basic point Chris pointed to is a clear vision. What I liked is how he framed it. Culture is not words on a wall. It is how you communicate what matters. That small difference carries a lot of meaning. A vision statement is a document. Communication is a habit. Many companies have the first and lack the second.

Think about how vision actually reaches people. It does not reach them through a launch email or a framed poster in the lobby. It reaches them through repetition, and through moments when a leader connects a daily decision to the bigger goal. Why are we saying no to this client? Why are we spending money on this training? Why did we change this process? Each answer is a chance to say what matters. When leaders skip those chances, people fill in the blanks themselves, and they often fill them in wrong. Good communication is not about saying more. It is about saying the same important thing in many ways until it becomes how people think.

I find this one of the clearest tests of the question: is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? If employees cannot explain in their own words what the company is trying to do and why, that is rarely a culture flaw. It is a communication gap, and communication belongs to leaders. Nobody else can say what matters with the same weight.

I’ve seen teams working hard in five directions at once, and the cause was never laziness. It was that nobody had said, clearly and often, where they were all going. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? When direction is unclear, the answer points back to the person who should be giving it.

What Moments Reveal About Leaders

Chris built his book and his keynote work around what he calls moments that matter. The idea is to recognize, design, and scale the defining moments that shape outcomes in organizations, relationships, and careers. I think this idea fits neatly into the question we are exploring. Culture is not built by big speeches alone. It is built in small, specific moments that people remember for years.

Consider a few of them. The first day a new hire walks in. The way a leader reacts when someone admits a mistake. The conversation after a project fails. The moment someone is recognized, or overlooked. These moments last far longer than any policy. Employees rarely remember what the handbook said, but they remember how they were treated when it counted. And each of those moments has a leader in it, either by showing up or by being absent. So when I ask myself, is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership?, I find it helpful to look at the moments instead of the mood. Mood is vague. Moments are concrete, and concrete things can be changed.

This is also where teamwork is built or broken. A team does not become a team through an offsite or a trust fall. It becomes one through repeated moments of being supported, heard, and held to a fair standard. Leaders who learn to see those moments can shape them on purpose.

They can design a better first week, a better way to give feedback, and a better way to say thank you. And once a moment works, it can be repeated and scaled across the company. That is how a few good habits turn into a culture. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? The best leaders I know treat culture as something they build one moment at a time, not something that happens to them.

Turning the Question Into Daily Habits

An idea like this is only useful if it changes what a leader does on Tuesday. So here is how I would turn the question into practice, using the ideas Chris brings up. These are my reflections, and none of them are complicated. That is the point.

Start with the calendar. Block out time each week for your people, and protect it the way you protect a client call. Not a status update, but a real conversation about how they are doing and what is getting in their way. Next, say your vision out loud, often, and tie it to real decisions. When you decide something, name the reason.

Then ask your team what they think the company is trying to do. Their answers will tell you more about your culture than any survey. Finally, pick one or two moments that matter, like onboarding or how mistakes are handled, and improve them on purpose. Small changes in the right moments can shift how people feel about the whole company.

Some people worry that a people-first approach will slow things down. I see it the other way around. Friction at work is mostly human: unclear goals, mixed signals, people afraid to speak. When leaders remove that friction, productivity tends to rise. And in the future of work, where teams are spread out and tools keep changing, the basics matter even more. Technology can change how we work. It cannot replace the sense of being valued and clear about direction. So is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? The more the world changes, the more that question points to the same fundamentals.

The Answer Was Always on the Calendar

Chris Dyer’s message is not complicated, and I think that is its strength. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? Most of the time, culture is where the problem shows up, and leadership is where it starts. The good news is that leaders already know what to do. Take care of your people. Make the vision clear. Spend time on what matters. The hard part is remembering these things when AI, tariffs, and daily fires are all asking for attention at once.

What I take from this conversation is a simple habit of honesty. Before launching another culture initiative, look at your own calendar. Before writing a new values statement, ask whether your team can already say the old one. Before blaming “how things are done around here,” ask who taught people to do things that way. If you are open to the answer, you may find that the fix is closer than you thought. You do not need a new theory. You need to bring back the basics you already know and give them real hours in the week.

So I’ll leave you with the question one more time. Is company culture really the problem, or is it leadership? If you are brave enough to look at the second half of that question, you also gain the power to change it, starting with the next thing you put on your schedule.

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