# Leadership and Culture are Merely Symptoms By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-02-21 A common saying in American business is people don't quit jobs, they quit leaders (or managers). Hence, the most important thing is leadership and management. Intuitively, there is some validity to people quitting their jobs because of management. We all know someone who quit their job because they had a horrible boss. I certainly have. However, a problem with this general statement is that it assumes leadership is the problem. If you browse popular business books, you'll likely find endless advice on being a better leader. We are absolutely obsessed with leadership as a magic cure-all. If we could only be better leaders, our company would finally be successful. But clearly, there must be other factors at play to business success and, likewise, why people quit. Probably the second most popular understanding as to why people quit is culture. Again, this intuitively makes sense. I know many people, myself included, who quit their job because the company had a horrible culture. We want things to be fair, equal, and well-regulated to empower us to work respectfully together. Miserable workplaces infect our lives and spread misery everywhere, and the grass is always greener somewhere else. So, we've identified at least two reasons why people quit their jobs. One is our obsession with individuals overcoming impossible odds of nature and the enemy. The other is our newer obsession with the rules by which we work together and finding ways to eliminate asymmetrical power dynamics. I propose that these explanations are merely symptoms of the disease. Becoming a better leader is taking an allergy pill every day that gets less effective over time as you continue to work in the field of pollen. Building better cultures are exercising every day but still eating junk food. Bad leadership and poor cultures are the product of bad organizational systems. Bad systems promote the wrong people, ideas, power dynamics, and overall outcomes. We can continue trying to duct taping the symptoms, which clearly have not worked in the last 100+ years of formalized, modern business school, or we can try to address the real problem. #### Related Items [[Quiet Quitting]] [[Business]] [[Leadership]] [[Management]] [[Thinking]] [[Problem Solving]]