Summary: Many organisations avoided difficult culture conversations in 2025, letting issues fester. Common problems include hybrid working habits that suit individuals rather than teams, underperforming ‘untouchable’ colleagues and executive behaviour that contradicts company values. Good engagement scores often mask deeper cultural problems about how work actually gets done. Left unchecked, these issues drain energy and undermine strategy. Simple interventions can help: team ‘review and refresh’ sessions, stronger coaching skills, collaboration workshops and culture diagnostics. The key is confronting uncomfortable truths rather than practising ‘wilful blindness’ that allows problems to spiral.

Running with a friend to kick off our New Year, we slipped into conversations about work and how we were feeling about coming back in 2026. “I’m not looking forward to it,” my friend said. “I’ve got to have several awkward conversations that I avoided before Christmas, starting with my boss.”

The difficult conversations in question were all about behaviour. A team member’s poor performance had gone unchecked for some time. Her boss’s unhelpful outbursts were undermining team members and creating a culture of fear and micro-management. Leaders were making knee-jerk decisions without understanding the ramifications on the wider organisation and, ultimately, the customer. 

Looking back across 2025, these examples are typical of the challenges many organisations faced in their day-to-day work (and the awkward culture conversations that were avoided). With an overwhelming change agenda, tight resources and uncertain landscapes, tackling pervasive cultural issues seemed too big a hill to climb.  

But left unchecked, sub-optimal culture at best drains energy and at worst undermines strategy delivery and leads to serious reputational damage. 

The awkward culture conversations we avoided in 2025

Reflecting on Pecan’s work with clients last year, here is a round-up of the most common and awkward culture conversations people have been avoiding.

Common team culture issues

• 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 who are 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 that is difficult to work with: For example, a team that is slow and unresponsive or never follows the process it’s meant to.

Common organisational culture issues

• 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 company 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 awkward culture conversations in 2026

These are some simple steps that can be taken to confront each of these cultural challenges.

1. Team culture conversations

Run a ‘review and refresh’ session on ways of working 

• Set up 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 help address any team leader bias).
• Agree on what’s already working well and what to change 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, these issues build up, causing resentment and inefficiency. Running a ‘review and refresh’ session every six 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 overwork 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

Facilitate a session to establish a new vision for working together. This should include ‘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 focus on. 

2. Organisational culture conversations

Start building buy-in for culture change by running simple interventions

Ask for three words to describe the current culture and three 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 executive committee to start with – it’s a great way to get a sense of the shifts needed

This activity can create appetite for a fuller culture diagnostic to understand the 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 three-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’ 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 spiral. Wilful blindness has cropped up in many scandals that have hit the headlines from the BBC to the Met 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.