Innovation is a much overused and misused term in business. Fundamentally, the end game of innovation is to provide new products, services,
Assessing your company culture is essential when driving organisational change because you need to understand where you’re starting from. Diagnosing your culture’s key characteristics, finding out what’s causing them, and the impact they are having are all vital steps to undertake in order to successfully shift your current culture to the desired state.
Gaining an accurate view of your culture is also critical when deciding on who to bring into your organisation, so you can assess people on the kind of impact they will have on both the current culture and the future direction it needs to go in.
In this article we will look at why culture assessment is important, what we mean by it, and how to do it effectively. This will include an overview of the three main products we at Walking the Talk use with our clients to help them on their culture change journeys.
Culture is complex. It’s driven by values, beliefs, and mindsets, and manifests in behaviours, systems, and symbols. I often compare it to an octopus with many arms, or to a multi-sided prism with many sides. And a lot of this activity is intangible – for example, you cannot always touch or clearly see the deeply embedded values, beliefs, or mindsets that are behind the visible behaviours.
So, to make smart decisions about culture, including how to steer or transform it, you need to properly understand it. Otherwise, you run the risk of making knee-jerk reactions, which only prolongs the issues as they don’t address the hidden, underlying causes and effects.
For example, we worked with a company which described its culture as very fast-paced, constantly jumping from one project to another without pause. When we asked them about the impacts of that pace, they said it made it very difficult for them to collaborate internally, which had a negative impact on their customers’ experience. It was only when we dug deeper into the hidden reasons why they felt they had to maintain this pace that we discovered the truth. They didn’t want to stop because there was a culture of sharing only good news. Slowing down to pause and reflect meant possibly discussing ‘bad news,’ such as areas in need of improvement, which was not an option – so they felt they had to move on to the next project asap, resulting in their need for speed.
In this example, the real issue was not a genuine need for pace or a high ambition to deliver, but a lack of transparency with each other. But this wasn’t obvious before doing the assessment. That’s why we have our suite of assessment tools to help organisations understand their culture better, take the right decisions, and fix the real issues — even those that aren’t obvious — that will enable sustainable change.
We describe culture assessment as understanding your culture deeply to make properly informed decisions about what you want to change about it, why, and how. It takes a variety of forms:
For example, surveys across an organisation or targeted to particular groups.
For example, focus groups or one-to-one interviews with leaders.
As I wrote earlier, culture is so complex that the most effective way to assess it is to integrate both methods. If you just use quantitative, you won’t go deep enough into the issues to get a clear enough picture. And if you solely do qualitative, you won’t have a sufficiently large sample size to say your results are an accurate representation of all your people.
Walking the Talk has a variety of products on assessment:
CIS is a great place to start when assessing your culture. This is an online survey of company culture that goes to all employees in your organisation. It’s a quantitative tool, and the questions (of which there are more than 60) are based on our six proprietary culture archetypes. We then ask people how often they see evidence of the healthy behaviours associated with each archetype in your culture. The survey only takes 15-20 minutes to complete and gives you a clear sense of how your people are experiencing your culture.
For example, if you have low numbers on a particular archetype, you know that there is an issue with your cultural health in that area.
The survey also includes a set of questions assessing leadership core qualities, and whether their behaviours are healthy or unhealthy regarding them. Through our more than 25 years’ experience in this field, we have identified these qualities as the most important for leaders to have when leading, supporting, and/or role-modelling culture change initiatives.
Overall, the survey results tell you which culture archetypes best characterise your company, and how equipped your leaders are to drive the culture you want.
CIS is a useful tool because it gives you a view across your entire organisation. We can also split the results by demographic, to see if there are consistent patterns regarding healthy or unhealthy behaviours in a specific subset of your company.
So, you have the high-level overview covering the breadth of your organisation. Now you also need the depth.
Discover Culture Diagnostic
To get to why your culture is the way it is, CIS on its own is not enough. You need qualitative data, which is what our Discover Culture Diagnostic (Discover) is all about.
Discover includes our focus group methodology and one-to-one interviews with leaders. This unique product was created by us close to a decade ago, and we have been constantly improving it since. It is a rigorous, systematic approach to conducting and analysing focus groups that gets you to your cultural why.
The rigour, breadth, and depth of Discover is unrivalled in the market. In combination with CIS, it provides a comprehensive overview of your culture, arming you with the data and insights you need to make deep, sustainable changes.
Hiring and developing your leaders based on potential culture contribution is crucial when you are attempting to enhance or evolve your culture. However, in our experience, organisations often struggle with finding the tools and support they need to measure these effectively. This is where The Taylor Assessment comes in.
The Taylor Assessment is our tool that measures the likely contribution that any leader, whether a candidate or existing employee, is currently making or will make to your culture and working environment. This quantitative tool is not about measuring perceived culture ‘fit’, but about assessing the kind of culture the person will naturally help build, develop, and contribute to.
It is borne from the experience, research, and data we have built up over more than 25 years, spanning all types of organisational cultures. During this time, we have encountered and worked with the full range of behaviours, values, and mindsets that you're likely to find in individuals, and mapped these to the six cultural ‘archetypes’ we have created.
As well as recruitment, the tool is also used for leadership development and team building. By assessing leaders, it enables your company to map their scores against your desired future culture. Given the importance of leaders in setting the culture, understanding how they are or are not contributing to it is a critical step on the culture change journey.
Using the tool can help teams to better understand the impact their behaviours are having on the culture, the contribution they are making, and where their blind spots are.
The best solution is to use all three products in a combined way, because they are complementary to each other. We call this an ‘integrated assessment.’ This will give you the clearest and most accurate picture of your culture. As I wrote above, culture is so complex that you need to use all the various assessment products to take the most effective decisions for your company. This is why our products can be deployed simultaneously.
To begin your Culture Transformation Journey, contact us.
