Blog | Walking the Talk Blog

How does the Taylor Assessment work?

Written by Carolyn Taylor | 08-Feb-2024 04:00:00

The Taylor Assessment is based on six culture archetypes: Achievement, One-Team, Innovation, Customer-Centric, People-First, and Greater-Good. There are five anchor behaviors attached to each, all important to build the best culture.

For leaders: As a personal developmental tool, to round out a leader’s contribution to culture. For example, you may be trying to build a One-Team culture, and find that a leader shows preferences for some behaviors associated with One-Team, but not others. Pinpointing this can then form the basis for developmental efforts. Walking the Talk can provide specialist coaching linked to each of the thirty anchor behaviors in our assessment.

For teams: As a team development tool, to review the overall mix of preferences in a team and work on balancing outcomes by supporting each other, as well as helping individuals to strengthen in any area considered important for every member of the team.

For recruitment candidates: To help a hiring manager make a final selection from a slate of candidates, and later to help the final choice to understand the contribution she or he will be able to make to your target culture.

Here’s how the tool works:

  • Respondents complete the online questionnaire, which has 28 questions and takes about 30 minutes.
  • The questions assess behavioural preferences across six cultural archetypes.
  • Respondents rank their preferences between eight attractive statements. This forced ranking ensures that true preferences are revealed in the results
  • The statements are exclusively positive to reduce the risk of candidates answering in what they consider to be a socially acceptable way.
  • This forced ranking reliably reveals how the candidate will likely make trade-offs in real life.
  • Results are compared to a target culture profile customized with you at the start of the process

Taking the guesswork out of assessing contribution to culture change


Understanding contribution to culture in mind no longer needs to be a game of guesswork, intuition, and hope. Using The Taylor Assessment, your organisation can now get specific, detailed, insightful feedback on existing and new leaders that can help you accelerate your culture change, and in doing so fast track the delivery of your strategy.

For insights on culture view our selection of case studiesebooksreports and white papers or contact us to learn how we can transform your culture.