You Might Be the Problem with Your Culture

Healthy Leaders | Issue 67

Jun 12, 2026

Welcome to Issue 67 of Healthy Leaders. In this issue, culture change begins where you least expect it — with you.

Hello friends,

Every leader has a culture problem. The question is whether they know it.

Walk into almost any struggling organization — a church that has grown stagnant, a ministry where people have quietly stopped trusting one another, a team where initiative has dried up — and you will find a leader who is deeply concerned about the culture and has tried many things to fix it. They have drafted vision/mission/values statements, gathered their team to cast their vision, rallied the troops as best they can… And the culture has not changed.

Culture is not a program you can install. It is a living thing that grows out of the people in the organization, and above all out of its leaders. Every decision you make, every priority you set, every conversation you allow or avoid, every behavior you tolerate or confront — all of it is constantly shaping and reinforcing the culture around you. You have been doing this for years. So has every leader beneath you. The culture you have today is the sum of all of that.

Which means the only real lever you have on culture is yourself.

Here’s Malcolm with more:

This is uncomfortable for most leaders to hear, not because it is complicated, but because it is so close to home.

We tend to think of organizational problems as being “out there” somewhere. The culture is the problem. The people are the problem. The systems are the problem. And so we reach for external solutions: a better strategy, a clearer vision statement, stronger policies and processes. These things are not useless, but they cannot do what we are hoping they will do. A vision statement describes the kind of culture you want, but it won’t produce it.

Culture is always a reflection of who the leaders are, not just what they wish everyone else would be.

Jesus drove this point home when He rebuked the Pharisees:

… first clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. (Matthew 23:26)

The Pharisees were meticulous about external appearances. They knew exactly what the culture of a godly community was supposed to look like, and they worked tirelessly to produce it through rules, rituals and enforcement. And it was hollow. Jesus told them why: the problem was never the outside of the cup. The outside will take care of itself when the inside is clean.

The same principle holds in every organization you lead.

We see this pattern again and again in our work around the world. A pastor in Egypt who came to one of our long-term trainings had been dedicating all of his efforts to evangelism and saving souls. During the conference — especially when he heard about the centrality of Christ — he realized that he had focusing solely on outreach to the point that he viewed his followers as tools for achieving his mission. This created a culture of frustration and discouragement in his team.

Through the training he was able to realize that this unhealthy culture was not the fault of his followers, but of himself. It was if he was seeing himself in a mirror for the first time. He came to understand that he had not truly been serving his people but using them. They didn’t have a lack of love for God, or a lack of commitment. They needed a leader who cared for them personally, before they could effectively serve others.

Faced with this revelation, the pastor asked us to help him on his journey of transformation, and we began regular follow-ups to support him as we continued with the training. He immediately put his plan into action before we even finished the training.

Most of his team were farmers, so he began to go to them personally, spending time with them where they lived and worked, demonstrating care for them and serving them as a true shepherd.

On the final day of the training, there was a special time of worship and prayer after the sermon. The pastor knelt before the Lord, weeping bitterly and praying with true repentance for the Lord to help him change. He asked for prayer, that the Holy Spirit would lead, guide, strengthen and support him on the new path he had chosen, to correct the mistakes of the past.

This moment became a turning point. The pastor began to lead in a different way, one that reflected the heart of Christ more closely. His work to change himself was reflected in his leadership, and brought about a profound change in the lives of his followers and in the culture of his ministry.

By saying that you as the leader are the primary cultivator of culture in your organization, we don’t mean that the structural work of leadership is unimportant. Structures, expectations, how you communicate, how you handle conflict, how you make decisions — all of this matters, and all of it can be done well or poorly. But the reason those things produce life or drain it always comes back to the person behind them.

A leader who is fearful will build a fearful culture, no matter how courageous his vision statement.

A leader who is defensive about being questioned will build a culture where people stop thinking out loud, regardless of how many times the term “open communication” is proclaimed to be a core value.

A leader who quietly tolerates sin in his own life will find that sin spreading through the organization, usually in forms he doesn’t recognize as related to his own.

What you are is what your organization will become, over time and in one form or another.

So our first question as we get into organizational culture is not “how do we change the culture?” The question must be “what needs to change in me?”

This is a much harder question to answer. It requires taking a hard look at your beliefs and values, your habits and attitudes, and the assumptions that you carry into every meeting and every relationship. It requires asking God to show you what is actually shaping the people around you, and being willing to hear the answer.

The good news — and it is genuinely good news — is that this kind of change is possible, by God’s grace. The leader who is willing to be changed by God is the leader whose organization can be transformed.

As Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord Who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)

The transformation flows from beholding Him. When it is received by the leader, it begins to move through the culture he shapes.

The desire for change is universal, but the willingness to be changed personally, at the level of belief and character and ingrained habit, is rare. The leaders who get to the other side of a genuine culture transformation are almost always the ones who were willing to go first, to let God work in them before they tried to manage what was happening around them.

This is what healthy leadership looks like from the inside: honesty about what needs to change in our own hearts, and willingness to keep bringing those things to God.

What about you?

Take a moment to consider the culture of your organization — your church, your ministry, your team. What are one or two cultural problems you have been trying to address through external means?
What might those problems reveal about something in you that God wants to change?

You don’t have to answer these questions publicly. But we’d encourage you to sit with them honestly before God, and to share what He shows you with a trusted friend, a mentor, or in the comments below.

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