Can a Toxic Culture change when Toxic Leadership remains?

I SOMETIMESWONDER what would happen if organisations introduced an undercover boss, not to applaud success, but to listen for truth. How many employees who dared to speak honestly about what they see, know, and feel would still have a job afterwards?

Not everyone can live with the truth. And some leaders avoid it at all costs, which raises the question many organisations are unwilling to confront: Can an organisation truly change its culture when the toxicity is fuelled by leadership itself?

Culture is often described as “the way we do things around here.” If that is true, then leadership is the hand that sets the temperature. You can refresh policies, rewrite values, and invest in training, but if leadership behaviour remains unchanged, the environment adapts rather than heals.

Where leaders sit in an organisation often determines what they see.

The higher you climb the corporate ladder, the more comfortable the view becomes. And if you enter an organisation at the top, never standing close enough to the rank and file to hear their quiet dread, you may genuinely believe that life inside the organisation is as good for everyone as it is for you.

Someone shared an experience with me where they served as an executive, enjoying the privileges and clout that came with the role. From where they stood, the organisation appeared ideal.Then an opportunity arose for them to see the same organisation through a very different lens. What they discovered horrified them.

Believing leadership would want to know, they shared what they had learned.

They expected urgency, curiosity, and corrective action. Instead, they were told that they knew too much.They said that was their first real lesson in how toxic leadership sustains itself, not merely through ignorance, but through silencing truth-tellers and protecting comfort.When dysfunction is brewed at the top, transparency becomes a threat rather than a gift.

This is why culture-change initiatives so often fail.

Leadership research supports this reality. Edgar Schein, a leading authority on organisational culture, reminds us that culture is shaped by what leaders consistently pay attention to, reward, tolerate, and model. Culture does not change because leaders announce new values; it changes when leaders become them. Yet many leaders want transformation without introspection. Engagement without humility.

Loyalty without accountability. They focus on symptoms while leaving the source untouched.

The uncomfortable truth is this: Toxic leadership will always reproduce toxic culture. Does that mean change is impossible? No.

But it does mean change must begin where many leaders are least willing to look.

Ronald Heifetz’s concept of adaptive leadership teaches us that some challenges cannot be solved with technical fixes. They require leaders to examine their own assumptions, behaviours, and blind spots. Adaptive change demands loss, loss of ego, certainty, control, and sometimes popularity. This is where resistance sets in, because culture change asks leaders questions they may have long avoided:What behaviours have I normalised? Have I mistaken authority for influence? Do people feel safe telling me the truth, or have I trained them to stay silent?

High turnover rarely signals a lack of talent. More often, it signals an erosion of trust. People leave not because the work lacks meaning, but because the environment drains it.

Disengagement is not rebellion; it is resignation.

And here lies the paradox of leadership: The higher you rise, the harder it becomes to see the damage below, unless you intentionally look. So, perhaps leaders must stop asking, “How do we fix our people?” and start asking, “What have we made normal?”

Because culture change cannot be delegated. It cannot live solely in HR, consultants, or committees.

If leadership behaviour does not shift, culture will not follow.

A Mirror for Leaders: What behaviours do I excuse in myself but correct in others? What truths am I protected from hearing? If my leadership were replicated across the organisation, what culture would exist?

A Mirror for Employees and Followers: Am I speaking truth with wisdom, or retreating into silence? Have I normalised dysfunction because it feels safer than resistance? What responsibility do I carry in shaping the culture I experience?

Culture change is possible, but real change begins when leadership chooses courage over comfort and reflection over defence. And as always, the most honest place to begin… is still the mirror.