Would your leadership team score your culture the same way you do?

Ask most executives how their culture is going and you’ll get a confident answer. The team is good, people are engaged, we look after each other here.

Ask them how they know, and the room gets a lot less certain.

Culture problems rarely show up early. We see the same pattern again and again. Turnover starts to climb, usually among the people you most wanted to keep. Conflict appears in teams that used to work well, and nobody can say where it came from. High performers spend their time managing friction instead of doing their best work. Eventually it shows up in the results. In one organisation we worked with, a single misaligned hire set off that chain. Within six months the sales team was demoralised, working relationships had broken down, and revenue fell just when the business expected it to grow.

All of those signs tell you something went wrong months ago. Leaders need an earlier signal: a way to compare the culture they think they have with the culture their people are experiencing.

Why leaders are often the last to know

The more senior you are, the more filtered your information becomes. People tell leaders what they think leaders want to hear. Meetings run smoothly when you’re in the room and less smoothly after you leave. Your view of the culture is real, but it’s a view from one seat, and usually the seat with the best furniture.

That’s why gut feel is a poor way to measure culture. It tells you about your own experience of the organisation, and yours is the least typical experience in the building.

The organisations that catch problems early ask a range of people the same questions and compare the answers. Where the answers agree, you can trust the picture. Where they differ, you know where to look.

How the Culture Health Check works

The check takes about five minutes. It asks sixteen questions across four areas.

• Purpose: do people understand why the organisation exists, do leaders refer to it when they explain decisions, and does it motivate anyone?
• Vision: do people understand where the organisation is heading, can they see how their work contributes, and is the goal ambitious enough to stretch them?
• Values: can people recall the values without looking them up, do the values shape hiring and performance decisions, and are people challenged when they fall short?
• Culture: are expected behaviours clear, does the environment help people do their best work, and does it help solve problems or get in the way?

You get a score for each area straight away, with a short explanation of what that score usually means in practice.

One person’s score is one view. The check is most useful when several members of a leadership team, or a cross-section of staff, complete it separately and you compare the results. If the CEO rates values highly and the sales team rates them low, that difference is what you need to understand.

The executive team in the organisation above had never looked at their culture this way. If they had, the values questions alone would have shown that their values weren’t yet strong enough to outweigh a big revenue promise. Knowing that beforehand changes how you approach the hire. We tell the full story in The gun hire.

Take the check

If any of the signs in this piece sound familiar, or you can’t answer the question "how do you know?", the Culture Health Check is a quick way to find out where you stand.

Take the Culture Health Check

It takes five minutes and you see your results straight away. If you’d like to talk through what they mean, we offer a free 30-minute conversation about what to focus on first.