Happy summer everyone! I hope you’re finding time to recharge and enjoy the sunshine.
This month something happened during a client engagement that made me realize I need to share this experience with you all. We had spent three months doing everything right — clarifying strategy, mapping decision rights, redesigning processes to empower frontline teams. The structural barriers were gone. The tools were in place. The frameworks were solid.
And yet the problem-solving was still painfully slow.
I went back to the Gemba to find out why. What I found wasn’t a process problem. It was a culture problem.
A frontline engineer told me quietly: “I know what the solution is. I’ve known for weeks. But the last person who flagged a problem like this got pulled into a three-hour review meeting and had their judgment questioned in front of the whole team. So I’m waiting for someone else to raise it.”
That’s when I remembered something Peter Drucker said that has never been more true: culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’d add: it eats your process improvements for lunch.
Theory
Culture isn’t a feeling. It’s a pattern of behaviors — repeated, reinforced, and rewarded (or punished) every single day. Three specific behaviors quietly kill problem-solving long before it reaches the surface:
- Punishment by process — when raising a problem triggers scrutiny of the person, not curiosity about the problem. People learn quickly: raising problems is risky. So they stop.
- Hero culture — when individuals who fix crises dramatically get celebrated, while teams that prevent problems quietly never get recognized. This rewards firefighting over fireproofing.
- Escalation as respect — when “taking it to leadership” is seen as diligence rather than a failure of the system. This normalizes dependency and makes empowered problem-solving feel like insubordination.
None of these behaviors are intentional. Most leaders would be horrified to know their culture works this way. But intention doesn’t change impact.
My thoughts
What struck me about that engineer’s comment was how rational her decision was. She wasn’t being passive or disengaged — she was being smart. She had read her environment accurately and responded accordingly.
That’s the thing about culture: people don’t fight it. They adapt to it.
And when the culture punishes problem-raising, the most capable people — the ones with the most situational awareness — are often the first to go quiet. They have too much to lose.
Here’s what I’ve learned: you can engineer the perfect problem-solving system and culture will override it every time. Structures enable. Culture decides whether people use them.
The good news? Culture is also a pattern of behaviors — and behaviors can be changed. Not through posters on the wall or values statements in the annual report. Through leaders consistently modeling different behaviors, day after day, until the new pattern becomes the norm.
It starts with three things: celebrating problem-raisers, not just problem-solvers. Treating escalation as a system failure, not a sign of diligence. And responding to problems with curiosity, not judgment.
How to
- Listen for the silence — In your next team meeting, raise a problem yourself and watch the response. Does it invite others to share? Or does it trigger defensiveness? The response tells you everything about whether it’s safe to raise problems.
- Track what gets celebrated — For the next month, notice what behaviors get recognized in your team. Is it the person who caught the problem early? Or the person who heroically fixed the crisis at midnight? What you celebrate tells your team what you value.
- Audit your escalations — Look at the last 10 problems that came to you for a decision. How many could have been solved without you if decision rights were clear? Each unnecessary escalation is a cultural signal that says “we don’t trust you to decide.”
- Ask the hard question — Find someone on your frontline team you trust and ask them: “Is there a problem you know about right now that you haven’t raised? What’s stopping you?” Their answer is your culture audit.
Call to action!
This month, audit your culture for the three behaviors that kill problem-solving: punishment by process, hero culture, and escalation as respect. Pick the one that’s most present in your organization. Then pick ONE behavior you as a leader can change — starting this week.
Culture changes one behavior at a time. Start with yours.
Let’s build a culture where problem-solving thrives!
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Eli Sharp.
