If you tolerate this….
I remember sitting in a leadership meeting feeling that quiet knot in my stomach, the one that tells me something isn’t quite lining up. The words in the room were polished, the intentions sounded right, yet the behaviour being described told a very different story. I felt frustrated, not at the people, but at the gap between what was being said and what was being allowed to continue.
As a coach, I see this more often than many leaders would like to admit. Culture is spoken about with care, shaped into values statements, presented in slides, reinforced in town halls. Yet culture does not live in those moments. It shows up in the everyday, in the missed conversations, in the behaviours that slip through because addressing them feels uncomfortable.
It is easy to say we value respect, accountability or openness. It is harder to pause when someone interrupts a colleague, when deadlines are repeatedly missed without consequence, when a high performer quietly undermines others. These moments may seem small, yet they accumulate, and over time they define what is truly acceptable.
There is often a moment of humour when I ask leaders what they tolerate, followed by a pause that lingers just long enough to become uncomfortable. That pause is where the real work begins. Because what we tolerate is rarely intentional, it is usually a by-product of competing priorities, time pressure or a desire to keep the peace. Still, the impact remains.
Culture is not created through declaration, it is shaped through decision. Every time something is left unchallenged, a message is sent. Not loudly, not dramatically, but consistently. People notice, even when leaders hope they do not.
The shift comes when leaders begin to see tolerance as an active choice rather than a passive oversight. When they recognise that addressing behaviour early is not about being critical, it is about being clear. Clarity, done well, builds trust rather than eroding it.
In my experience, the leaders who build strong cultures are not the ones with the most compelling words, they are the ones willing to have the slightly awkward conversation, to hold the line when it matters, to align action with intention even when it would be easier not to.
It is rarely about grand gestures. It is about the small, consistent decisions that signal what really matters here.
If you are noticing a gap between the culture you talk about and the one you experience, start by asking yourself one simple question: what am I currently tolerating that no longer aligns with who we want to be?
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