Written for HR Zone by Pecan’s Director Ella Overshott
Running with a friend to kick off our New Year, we slipped into conversations about work and how we were feeling about coming back to 2026.
My friend started, “I’m not looking forward to it, I’ve got to have a number of difficult conversations that I avoided before Christmas, starting with my boss”.
The difficult conversations in question were all about behaviour – poor performance of a team member that had gone un-checked for some time; unhelpful outbursts from her boss that are undermining team members and creating a culture of fear and micro-management; knee-jerk decision-making from leaders without understanding the ramifications on the wider organisation and, ultimately, the customer.
Looking back across 2025, these examples are typical of the cultural challenges clients faced in their day-to-day working. With an overwhelming change agenda, tight resources and often uncertain landscapes, tackling pervasive cultural issues in a team or more widely across an organisation seemed too big a hill to climb.
But we all know that left unchecked, sub-optimal culture at best drains energy, making it more difficult to deliver efficiently and at worst totally undermines strategy delivery or even leads to serious reputational damage.
The awkward culture conversations we avoided in 2025
Reflecting on Pecan’s work with clients over the year, here is a round-up of the most common culture conversations people had been avoiding.
Team culture
- Hybrid or flexible-working habits that suit the individual not the team. For example, a boss insisting that the team come back to the office 5 days a week because that’s how they prefer to work; or a colleague who now leaves early every day to pick their children up from school
- Underperforming team members perceived to be too valuable to tackle their behaviour. For example, an IT specialist who has deep subject matter expertise but who doesn’t communicate proactively with other team members; or a sales manager who hits their targets but has a disrespectful communication style
- That team who are difficult to work with. For example, another team that is slow and unresponsive; or a team that never follows the process it’s meant to
Organisational culture
- Good engagement scores mean people think the culture is fit for the future. When engagement scores paint a rosy picture of the organisation’s health it can be difficult to persuade leaders that ways of working may need to evolve to deliver the strategy. Engagement scores tell you whether people want to get out onto the pitch to play, not how they’ll play when they’re there.
- The Executive Team’s behaviour does not reflect the stated values of the organisation. For example, Collaboration is a value but Executives work in siloes with competing priorities.
- Culture is not getting the attention or investment needed to change. For example, culture change is limited to communication campaigns
How to confront them in 2026
These are some simple steps that can be taken to confront each of the cultural challenges.
1. Team culture conversations
Run a ways of working ‘review and refresh’
- A short anonymous survey to understand what is working and what is not
- Use the output as the basis for a team conversation (it can be useful to use a facilitator for this, to create a safe space to open up and to help address any team leader bias).
- Agree what’s already working well to continue and what to change or improve for the team to be more effective.
It’s often small things that get in the way of a team working at its best, left unresolved they build up and cause resentment and inefficiency. Running a ‘review and refresh’ session every 6 months keeps the cogs running smoothly and helps new team members hit the ground running.
Sharpen up performance coaching skills across all people managers.
- Remote working is often blamed for a lack of productivity when all the evidence suggests this is not the case. In fact, many team members over-work and struggle to set boundaries when working at home.
- Instead, invest in developing coaching skills in anyone leading people. Make sure the training focuses on mindset as well as technique and ensure the approach is fully embedded into day-to-day practices.
- Bring teams together for a ‘proactive collaboration’ workshop. For example, facilitate a session to establish a new vision for working together, ‘what good looks like’ and the benefits for each team of working in this way. Help them share their honest reflections on how they work at their best/ worst and the priorities to improve
2. Organisational culture conversations
Start building buy-in to the need for culture change by running some simple interventions.
- Ask for 3 words to describe current culture and 3 words to describe the culture needed to deliver the strategy. This can be done via your people survey, with focus groups or just with the ExCo to start with – it’s a great way to get a sense of the shifts needed
- This can create appetite for a fuller culture diagnostic to understand current cultural strengths to preserve and blockers to transform. It doesn’t need to be costly or time-consuming – a few weeks will give you the insight you need.
The 3 words exercise usually makes it apparent that your engagement survey doesn’t tell you much about whether ways of working are fit for strategy delivery. It tells you a lot about how people feel about the organisation, their level of commitment and how to improve it. What you need in addition is insight into how people work around here.
Once you start to shape a simple description of the culture you need, you can assess the degree to which the Executive Team display these behaviours in the way they work.
- Add values-based questions to your people survey
- Introduce a 360 tool tailored to your values and behaviours
- Facilitate Executive self-reflection using interviews and team discussion
Don’t let wilful blindness hold you back from awkward culture conversations
Author Margaret Heffernan, popularised the term ‘wilful blindness’ used to describe a psychological phenomenon where individuals, groups, or organisations ignore obvious risks or truths, due to discomfort, incentives, or cognitive biases.
Whilst these awkward culture conversations are not at crisis stage, continually avoiding uncomfortable truths and candid conversations hampers performance and leaves space for problems to quickly spiral. Wilful blindless has cropped up in many scandals that have hit the headlines from the BBC to the Metropolitan Police – don’t let this become the norm in your organisation.
Key takeaways
Which awkward conversation have you been avoiding? Here’s how to move from awareness to action:
- Schedule regular team ‘review and refresh’ sessions. Create space every six months for honest dialogue about what’s working and what’s not. Small frustrations compound quickly – address them before they erode trust and performance.
- Distinguish engagement from culture fitness. Your engagement scores tell you if people want to play, not how they’ll play once they’re on the pitch. Add culture-specific questions to understand whether your ways of working truly support strategy delivery.
- Invest in coaching capability across all managers. Remote working isn’t the productivity problem – poor performance conversations are. Develop the mindset and skills that help managers address behaviour issues confidently and constructively.
- Check executive behaviour against stated values. If collaboration is a value but leaders work in silos, you’ve got a credibility gap. Use 360 tools and facilitated reflection to hold leadership accountable.
- Act before issues reach crisis point. Wilful blindness allows problems to spiral. Start with simple interventions that build buy-in and create momentum for deeper culture change.
Need support?
For further inspiration on how to evolve your culture download Pecan’s Culture Fit for the Future Report.
If you need some guidance get in touch for a no obligation conversation. One of our values at Pecan is ‘light-touch, lasting impact’ and our Culture Coach service gives you a trusted partner to work with at a fraction of the cost of typical consulting services.
