Excuse #4: HR Should Handle This, Not Me

It’s common to hear leaders say: “Culture is HR’s responsibility, not mine.”

It’s a convenient belief. HR designs policies, runs training, and manages engagement surveys, surely they “own” culture. The sad truth is culture lives or dies in daily leadership decisions. Delegating it to HR alone is a dangerous abdication.

The Real Challenge

This excuse reflects a separation of “people work” from “real work.” Yet employees experience culture most directly through their leaders’ behaviours: how they communicate, how they handle conflict, and how they model values. HR can provide frameworks, but leaders carry the lived expression of culture. 

In fact we could go one step further and say that managers are on the front-lines of your culture's gains or losses.

The Consequence

McLean & Company’s HR Trends 2025 identifies leadership development as the top organizational priority (McLean & Company, 2025). Yet many HR leaders admit they cannot meet this need without managers and executives actively modeling the behaviours they want to scale. When leaders assume culture is HR’s job, organizations end up with beautiful policies but inconsistent lived experience.

The result? Teams fracture. McKinsey’s research on team performance shows that three in four cross-functional teams underperform on key metrics due to lack of trust, communication, and alignment (McKinsey, Go Teams: When Teams Get Healthier, the Whole Organization Benefits, 2024). Those gaps are not caused by HR, they’re caused by leadership behaviour.

The Reframe

Instead of saying, “HR should handle this,” leaders can reframe to: “As a leader, I’ll model the culture daily.”

Culture is built when leaders embody values in meetings, decision-making, and recognition practices. HR provides scaffolding; leaders provide substance, team members provide multiplication.

A Practical Step

Choose one cultural value that matters most to your organization (e.g., trust, respect, innovation). Identify 3 behaviours that support that value. For example, if respect is a value then a behaviour that supports that value would be “I will learn what others need to feel respected and endeavor to engage them in this way.” (This is an important one in multi-generational workforces by the way.) As a team, commit to practicing this with each other using the 3 behaviours as guardrails for what is ok, and what is not ok. 

Culture isn’t HR’s to own. It’s every leader’s responsibility to live out on the daily.