Recently I challenged a post by Sally, whose work I admire. She wrote: “Leadership will make or break your culture. On this there is no middle ground.”
I asked a simple question: If culture fails, must we blame the leaders? More importantly, does assigning blame actually fix anything?
The familiar response from most management consultants to a failing culture is more leadership and team training, better role modelling, clearer expectations and stronger managerial accountability. These may help. But they keep returning us to the same assumption: better leaders are the answer.
What if that assumption is the problem?
Australia’s psychosocial hazard framework already points beyond personalities. Employers must identify and manage and control psychosocial risks, not merely encourage managers to behave well.
In physical safety, we don’t depend on the foreman setting a good example. We design controls, test them and check that they work.
Why not apply the same thinking to everyday workplace misbehaviour?
That’s the proposition behind SpatzAI: a procedural risk control, self-managed by workplace team members, through which they can address minor objectionable behaviour, regardless of rank.
It has four proposed layers:
- Spatz Verbal Caution — address the behaviour immediately.
If acknowledged, move on OR if challenged or ignored, escalate: - Spatz Chat Three-step chat app — Formal Caution, Formal Objection, Stop, with structured escalation.
- Spatz Team + AI Review — examine any unresolved incidents transparently on their Slack platform.
If still unresolved escalate to the normal HR reported incident and if required and finally an overall system appraisal using the: - Spatz Review of the Reviewers and AI System — scrutinise decisions, AI and the overall procedures themselves.
The fourth layer matters. No one or thing is above the review — including the Spatz and AI system, HR and even management.
But such a detailed design system may not be proof enough. SpatzAI has yet to establish its effectiveness in workplace pilots. Coming as soon as we can find in interested university to partner with us.
My ambition is much higher than convincing managers to buy another culture app: it’s to develop independently tested, validated and eventually certified behavioural risk control self-management system.
Think aviation: approval comes from evidence, not enthusiasm.
Leaders would remain responsible for team safety, but they wouldn’t have to be the behavioural operating system. Their job would include implementing the control system that is demonstrated to work.
Sally and I needn’t disagree about responsibility. We might converge on a better solution.
Perhaps the real paradigm shift is from blaming leaders for a failing culture, to demanding evidence that the behavioural risk controls they implement actually work.
Now that would be a game changer.
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