Executives blame culture for weak performance while employees point at leadership
Most employees who lived through a toxic workplace blame leadership, not culture: seventy-nine percent in iHire's 2026 Toxic Workplace Trends Report cited poor leadership and management. Jana Boone, senior vice president of growth enablement at Intero Digital, told an Entrepreneur contributor that what executives call a culture problem is often distance, meaning a leader who has stopped spending hands-on time with the team.
The culture diagnosis usually comes from the chair furthest from the work. A culture verdict implicates no one and produces a workshop. Naming a decision implicates one person and produces a list of conversations. The article cites Boeing: after the January 2024 Alaska Airlines door panel incident, the failures the Federal Aviation Administration described traced back to specific choices about what was rewarded, skipped and signed off.
Source: Entrepreneur · October 9, 2026