bt cultural assessment

Our Culture Assessment Tool

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Peter Drucker's claim is now a well-known idiom through the world of business. Organizational culture influences performance, promotes or inhibits innovation, adds agility or rigidity, generates engagement or apathy, and is the ultimate driver of competitiveness. Toxic organizational cultures can decrease productivity by as much as 40%, while trusting and engaging ones can increase productivity by up to 50%.*

Organizational culture is pivotal to enabling strategy execution. It should be measured just like any other strategic metric, such as ROI or EBITDA. At Taligens, we have developed an assessment instrument that does just that, focusing on eight key aspects of organizational culture:

Environment

Measures the level to which associates find meaning and satisfaction in their work, as well as their level of engagement with the organization.

Structure

Seeks to gain a perspective on how effective the organizational structure and systems are in translating strategy and decision making into action.

Accountability

Looks for patterns of behavior associated with making and keeping promises, and the existence of practices to hold each other accountable.

Autonomy

Measures the degree to which individuals in the organizational feel free to make decisions and choose the path to accomplish their goals and objectives.

Collaboration

Identifies the level and ease of team and cross-functional work, as well as whether people focus on achieving results together or individually.

Contention

Seeks to identify the organizational ability to deal with differences of opinion and contentious issues, facilitating decision making, alignment and strategy execution.

Listening

Explores the degree to which individuals feel listened to and free to share their opinions with others, when dealing with perspectives different from their own.

Learning

Evaluate people’s ability to welcome new ideas and incorporate them into new learning opportunities for the betterment of the self and the organization.

We have designed our culture assessment to understand our clients’ ways of working and how these patterns drive their customer value proposition. We assess the high-level cultural challenges, how leadership is configured to respond to them, and how well their organizational culture is aligned to those processes and their strategic goals.

The assessment generates a set of clear metrics that help identify areas of organizational strength, as well as those that may need to be realigned to support the effective deployment of new business strategies:

Leadership

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Key Issue: Alignment

Management

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Key Issue: Prioritization

Customers

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Key Issue: Structure & Processes

These metrics also inform our articulation of the organization’s Cultural Anchors™, which are characterizations we use to highlight the dominant cultural styles of the organization that drive behaviors and decision making in daily operations.

With these insights, we help our clients define a portfolio of initiatives for culture alignment and transformation, to move the needle in the successful execution of their business strategies.

Working in close collaboration with our clients, we transform organizational cultures towards cultures of high performance based on trust and customer satisfaction. We do not just leave clients with a product or a set of methodologies. We engage clients in a change experience that enables them to unlock their full potential, thinking differently about their organizations and performing to new standards.

*Priesemuth, Manuela. "Time’s Up for Toxic Workplaces." HBR. June 19, 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/06/times-up-for-toxic-workplaces and Paul J. Zack. and "The Neuroscience of Trust." HBR. Jan-Feb 2017. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust .