When A Good Leader Meets Bad Culture
Advice for managers navigating a resistant or dysfunctional culture
Last week I got a message from a manager that had attended one of my training sessions a couple months ago.
He wanted to catch up. I was excited to hear from him; he’d been one of the sharpest people in the room. He was fresh out of college and new to the industry, but he picked up concepts quickly, asked good questions, and left class energized and ready to apply what he’d learned. Those are the people you remember. Those are the conversations that remind you why you do this work.
The Zoom call didn’t go the way I expected.
He wasn’t calling to share a win. He was calling because he was struggling, badly, and he didn’t know what to do. He walked me through the past eight weeks. His planning approach, his staffing practices, the relationships he was trying to build. It was all textbook. He understood what standard work looked like. He knew what best practices were. He’d taken what we covered in class and was actually trying to implement it, which is more than I can say for a lot of managers I’ve trained.
But it wasn’t working. And it wasn’t because of anything he was doing wrong.
The Call I Wasn’t Prepared For
By the time he had come to my training session, he knew his site had some challenges. What he didn’t fully understand yet was how deep those challenges ran. This was a facility with a long reputation for some of the worst performance numbers in the network. Not a site in a rough stretch—a site with a deeply ingrained culture of underperformance that had calcified over years.
His peers had been operating a certain way for a long time, and they had no interest in changing. When he pointed to standard work, they dismissed it. “This is how we’ve always done it.” When he flagged that a particular practice contradicted established policy, senior leaders shrugged it off. “That’s more of a suggestion than a requirement.” There was always an excuse, always a reason why the rules that applied everywhere else somehow didn’t apply here.
He had moved across the country for this job. He’d expected to build skills, make an impact, grow. Instead, he felt like he was banging his head against a wall built by people who had decided a long time ago that the wall wasn’t moving.
By the time we talked, he was near tears.
He asked me what he was supposed to do. And I sat there, on the other side of a Zoom screen, struggling to find the right answer.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since. I want to give him (and anyone else in a similar position) the response he deserved.
A Wall Built Over Years
This is what happens at facilities with long-running performance problems. The dysfunction stops feeling like dysfunction and starts feeling normal. People aren’t defending bad practices because they’re lazy or malicious. They’re defending them because those practices are the culture, and the culture is the only operational reality they’ve ever known.
I wrote about this in The Culture You’re Building Without Knowing It. Culture isn’t a set of values on a poster. It’s the accumulation of what leaders have rewarded, tolerated, and modeled—day after day, shift after shift—until those patterns become invisible. When you arrive and say “this isn’t how it’s supposed to work,” you’re not just challenging a process. You’re challenging people’s identity and sense of competence.
That’s why the resistance he’s encountering is so fierce. It isn’t really about the standard work. It’s about what acknowledging the need for change would mean for everyone who’s spent years doing it differently. Competence is threatening when incompetence has become comfortable.
One other factor that makes his situation especially hard is that he’s new. He has no formal authority over his peers. He has no relational equity built with senior leaders. He has knowledge and enthusiasm, but in a dysfunctional culture, those can actually work against you.
You Can’t Push a Culture Sideways
Early in my career, I worked at a site that had pockets of serious dysfunction. Not site-wide the way his site is, but deep enough in certain departments to feel like quicksand. I remember trying to implement a process improvement in one area and encountering the exact same wall: “We’ve tried that before.” “That doesn’t work here.” “You don’t understand how this place operates.”
I had more tenure at the time than this young manager, and I still couldn’t move the needle on my own. What I eventually learned is that you cannot change a culture from the side. Culture changes from the top or it doesn’t change at all.
This is a hard truth, and I wish I’d said it more clearly on that Zoom call.
A new manager, no matter how talented, no matter how right, cannot single-handedly transform a facility culture that has been building for years. That’s not a failure of leadership ability. That’s just reality. As I’ve written before, the boundaries of what any individual manager can control are real, and understanding those boundaries is part of becoming a leader who lasts.
What you can do is decide how you operate within that environment and what you do next.
The Things That Are Still Yours to Control
When the organization above you and around you is working against you, you’re left with a smaller, but still meaningful, set of choices.
Control your own department. You may not be able to change how the site operates, but you can control how your team operates. Set and maintain clear standards within your four walls. Be consistent. Be fair. Be present. Over time, a well-run department becomes visible. It becomes a contrast that other people notice—and that senior leaders eventually have to acknowledge.
Document everything. When a senior leader tells you to do something that contradicts standard work, write it down. Note the date, who told you, and what they said. This isn’t about building a case against anyone. It’s about protecting yourself, understanding patterns, and having a clear record of what you were asked to do and by whom. If something goes wrong, you want to be able to show that you raised concerns.
Build relationships before you fight battles. One of the mistakes new managers make in resistant cultures is leading with confrontation. They’re right about the standards, but they haven’t yet built the relationships that give them credibility. Spend time understanding why people do things the way they do. Ask questions before making arguments. You’re more likely to move people who feel understood than people who feel attacked.
Find an ally. In almost every dysfunctional environment, there is at least one person who sees what you see and is quietly frustrated by it. Find that person. Build that relationship. Two voices are harder to dismiss than one, and an ally reminds you that you’re not crazy when everything around you is telling you otherwise.
Holding the Line Without Picking Every Fight
There’s a version of “standing your ground” that destroys your credibility and a version that builds it. The difference is mostly in how you do it.
You don’t have to be combative to be principled. When someone tells you “that’s how we’ve always done it,” you don’t have to argue. You can simply say: “I understand that’s been the approach here. My intention is to follow standard work in my area, and I want to understand if there’s a reason I shouldn’t.” That’s not weakness. That’s someone who knows what they stand for and isn’t apologizing for it, but also isn’t picking a fight they can’t win.
If you’re being pressured to do something that directly violates policy, you have a harder decision. There’s no universal right answer, but the question I’d encourage you to ask is: If this decision were audited, could I defend it? If the answer is no, you probably already know what you need to do.
The goal isn’t to win every argument. The goal is to maintain your integrity and your professional reputation in an environment that may not value either. That reputation is portable. It goes with you when you eventually leave.
The Question of Whether to Stay
This is the part I wish I’d said more directly on that call.
Some environments are not fixable from the inside, especially not by one person, especially not quickly. If you are being actively directed to violate policy, if the dysfunction is affecting your ability to operate ethically, or if the cost to your own development and wellbeing is too high, staying is not automatically the right choice.
Sometimes the best thing a struggling facility can teach you is that you deserve to be somewhere better.
That’s an uncomfortable thing to say, because we tend to treat quitting as failure. But there’s also a trap in the other direction: treating leaving as the obvious answer just because things are hard.
They’re not the same thing. Difficulty is often exactly where real development happens. Some of the most important growth of your career will come from situations that felt, right in the middle of them, completely fruitless. The standards you held when no one was supporting you. The calls you made correctly when the pressure was to make them wrong. Those experiences build something that easier environments simply can’t.
Leaving may be the right call. If you’re being asked to compromise your ethics, if the environment is actively preventing your development with no sign of movement — those are real reasons to go. But it shouldn’t be the automatic answer just because it’s hard, or because you can’t yet see the impact you’re having. Sometimes things push back right up until the moment they change. You won’t know if you leave before that moment arrives.
Ask the question honestly. Just don’t assume you already know the answer.
What I Wish I’d Said
When he asked me what he was supposed to do, I didn’t have a clean answer on that call. I still don’t, entirely. But I’ve had more time to think about it since, and here’s where I’ve landed.
He isn’t failing. The environment is failing him. Those are different things, and I hope he understands the difference. An environment like that has a way of making you feel like the problem is you. It isn’t. Knowing policy and standard work, trying to apply it, and running into a wall of people who’ve decided the rules don’t apply to them is not a reflection of his ability. It’s a reflection of the culture he walked into.
What I’d tell him now: protect your integrity above everything else. Run your department the right way. Document what you’re being told to do when it conflicts with policy. Find the one person on that site who sees what you see. And be honest with yourself about whether this is a place where you’re growing—or just surviving.
Whatever he decides about staying, I’d want to tell him one more thing: don’t let this experience make you cynical. There are operations out there led by people who are genuinely trying to do things right. The fact that he cares this much—that he teared up on a Zoom call because he wanted to do the job well and couldn’t get the space to do it—tells me he’ll be the kind of leader those places are looking for.
From Theory to Action
If you’re a new manager navigating a resistant or dysfunctional culture, these steps won’t fix everything — but they’ll help you hold your ground with your integrity intact.
Separate the culture from your competence. When the environment works against you despite your best efforts, that reflects the environment, not your ability. Don’t let a broken culture write your self-assessment.
Run your area by the book, consistently. You may not be able to change the site, but you can control your department. A well-run area becomes visible over time, and visibility becomes leverage.
Document directives that conflict with policy. Keep a private log: date, person, what was said. You’re not building a case against anyone. You’re building a record that protects you if something goes wrong.
Lead with curiosity, not confrontation. When you hit resistance, try “Help me understand why we do it this way” before “that’s not standard work.” You’ll build more goodwill and learn more about what you’re actually dealing with.
Find one ally. Almost every struggling site has at least one person quietly frustrated by the dysfunction. That relationship reduces isolation and makes your voice harder to dismiss.
Create upward visibility. Find appropriate ways to let leaders above your immediate chain know you’re running things the right way, without throwing anyone under the bus. That reputation travels.
Ask the hard question regularly. Every month or two: Am I developing here, or just enduring this? Growth is the reason you took the job. If the environment is actively preventing it, staying is a choice, not an obligation.
Remember that your reputation is portable. Whatever you do in your current role, make sure it’s something you’d be proud to take somewhere else. An environment that pressures you to compromise your standards is borrowing against your future. Don’t let it.
If this post resonated with you, or if you know a new manager navigating a situation like this, share it with them. Sometimes the most important thing we can offer someone who’s struggling is the reminder that what they’re feeling makes sense.