10 Excuses Leaders Use to Avoid Culture Work (and How to Break the Cycle)

Culture change is slow, messy, and deeply personal. It requires leaders not just to fix processes but to face themselves. That’s why it so often gets delayed. Leaders may not say it outright, but here are ten common excuses that keep culture on the back burner according to research:

1. “We’re too busy with operations.” Yet when leadership development is underinvested, performance drops across strategy, cost optimization, and adaptability (McLean & Company, HR Trends 2025).

2. “Our people already know what to do.” McKinsey reports productivity gaps between high and low performers can reach 800% in complex jobs (2025). That gap reflects culture, not just skill.

3. “We can’t afford it.” The cost of avoidance is higher: one hour of unproductive work weekly can cost employers up to $5,900 per employee per year (McKinsey, 2025).

4. “HR should handle this, not me.” HR can support, but culture is most powerfully shaped by daily leadership behaviour.

5. “We’ll focus on it after the crisis.” By then, dysfunction has usually become a direct threat to business continuity.

6. “Our team isn’t asking for it.” Retention, not recruitment, has risen as a top priority, because employees leave when culture erodes (McLean & Company, 2025).

7. “We’ve already done training.” Leadership isn’t a one-and-done workshop. Only one-third of critical roles have succession plans in place, leaving leadership capacity dangerously thin (McKinsey, HR Monitor 2025).

8. “I don’t need to change, they do.” In fact, 73% of leaders admit their skill sets will need to change completely or almost completely by 2030 (McLean & Company, 2025).

9. “We’ll lose productivity if we slow down for training.” One aerospace supplier actually increased throughput 15% by slowing down production to train staff (McKinsey, 2025).

10. “It’s too hard to measure ROI.” Yet organizations that embed ROI-driven approaches to talent consistently outperform competitors (McKinsey, 2025).

A practical step: Choose one excuse you’ve caught yourself saying. Flip it into a commitment. Instead of “We’re too busy with operations,” reframe it as “Because we’re busy, I’ll prioritize culture so our resilience grows when times are tough.”

Culture change isn’t urgent, until it is. Starting before you have to is the most strategic move you can make.  Over the next few weeks we are going to look at these excuses in more depth and discover our power to make changes and see real results.

At Straza solutions, our Culture Change Blueprint™ takes the guess work out of this process and provides you with the outcomes and the metrics you need to demonstrate your ROI.