In today’s dynamic business landscape, organizational culture plays a critical role in driving growth, aligning strategy, and ensuring long-term success. A culture assessment offers a structured approach and objective understanding of your organization’s culture. It can function as a gap analysis, compass to navigate culture throughout the organization, align culture to strategy, and empowering teams to thrive.

Using the Competing Values Framework, a scientifically validated model updated with the latest insights, we provide a comprehensive culture assessment that spans all organizational levels—from C-suite executives to middle management and employees. This approach uncovers areas of alignment or misalignment in core elements such as leadership style, management focus, values, and success criteria, enabling targeted interventions and informed decision-making.

Culture Assessment

A culture assessment offers transformative benefits that enhance organizational performance, streamline strategy execution, and foster long-term success. By uncovering and addressing cultural dynamics, organizations can move forward with clarity and purpose. Here’s how a culture assessment can grow your business:

Benefits of a culture assessment

Make culture measurable

Establish a shared language

Align strategy and culture

Drive organizational success

Create a roadmap for growth

Make culture measurable

Culture often feels intangible and our culture assessment translates its elements into data-driven insights. This process provides measurable metrics to analyse and track, turning an abstract concept into a concrete foundation for decision-making. For example, do the new hires, attracted to shift towards a new culture, really embody the desired culture?

Establish a shared language

One of the biggest challenges in addressing culture is a lack of common understanding. A culture assessment introduces a structured framework and shared language, enabling meaningful discussions about values, behaviours, and practices throughout the organization. This alignment strengthens communication and collaboration on (1) the preferred culture and (2) the direction towards that preferred culture from the current state.

Align strategy and culture

When culture and strategy align, organizations operate in sync. A culture assessment identifies where adjustments are needed to support strategy, ensuring that every department, team and individual is working toward the same objectives using the right systems, mindset and behaviours. This alignment drives faster, more effective execution of initiatives. For example, is you select key market-driven projects to have a faster go-to-market and gain market share, yet your people are used to deliver high quality and don’t mind missing deadlines as long as the quality is high, your strategy will never be executed as intended. Our culture assessment gives you data on whether you have the culture that your strategy deserves and vice versa.

Drive organizational success

Organizations that align culture with strategy experience measurable improvements, such as increased employee engagement, increased cross-silo collaboration, and faster strategy implementation. The cultural alignment ensures smoother transitions, greater adaptability to change, and a stronger sense of purpose across teams.

Create a roadmap for growth

A culture assessment serves as the starting point for long-term development. By identifying gaps and opportunities, the assessment provides a clear roadmap for cultivating a culture that supports your vision. This ongoing journey helps your organization remain agile and competitive in a constantly evolving landscape.

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Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Everyone has heard the popular quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Yet, what does this exactly mean? Our culture assessment answers this quote in an actionable way: culture is the last frontier of modern management, because it has seemingly escaped objective analysis in the past. Until now. A culture assessment delivers actionable insights to navigate challenges and achieve sustainable growth. It can objectify whether you need actions on culture transformation or strategy optimization – or both. Key moments to execute a culture assessment include:

Why conduct a culture assessment?

Change initiatives are stalling

Strategic misalignment

Mergers and acquisitions

C-level succession planning and onboarding

Shifting company direction

Culture Assessment

Change initiatives are stalling: When transformation efforts fail to take hold, underlying cultural factors often act as roadblocks. A culture assessment identifies these barriers, enabling smoother implementation. For example, when you implement a system that presupposes correct entry of data, yet people on the floor are used to manage inventory or stock themselves in a ‘practical’ (yet inaccurate) way their mindset can clash with the implementation of the tool.

Strategic misalignment: Ensuring that culture supports strategy is critical for driving a unified direction and achieving business goals. When you for example design a market-driven strategy, yet your people who execute the strategy are still in the ‘old way of working’, your strategy execution will never reach full actualization.

Mergers and acquisitions: During organizational integrations, cultural compatibility is essential for minimizing disruption and fostering synergy. For example, when two ‘customer-centric’ organizations merge, yet one culture interprets this as ‘following processes’ and the other as ‘customer intimacy through active listening and accommodating all needs’ a culture misalignment will prevent operational excellence, despite shared values. The cultures of the companies each fill in the values in incompatible ways.

C-level succession planning and onboarding: New leaders bring shifts in priorities and cultural dynamics. A culture assessment aids leadership onboarding and ensures alignment across teams. For example, when a new CEO enters the organization with a track-record in innovation and entrepreneurship, yet the majority of the company is a hierarchical culture than key clashes on systems, mindset, behaviors and processes can already be foreseen and proactively anticipated.

Shifting company direction: When strategic priorities change, culture must adapt to successfully embrace the new vision. The culture assessment will objectify whether the culture already enables the shift towards the new strategy or will signify a huge gap which can then highlight key actions to be taken up in the strategy execution roadmap.

How a culture assessment works

Conducting a culture assessment is a structured, in-depth process that leverages proven methodologies to analyse and align organizational culture. Here’s how we approach this transformative tool:

Step 1: Understanding the current culture

We begin by gaining a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s existing and preferred culture. We examine how your culture currently operates and provide you with handover of a user-friendly data set. This includes identifying dominant preferences on ways of working, behaviours, systems, mindsets, as well as any subcultures that may exist. And how the entire organization looks at whet the preferred culture should be on all the aspects above.

Step 2: Analysing the (mis)alignment

Our assessment evaluates how well the current culture aligns with your organization’s strategic direction. This process uncovers discrepancies in key areas such as:

  • Leadership role modelling: Are leadership behaviours fostering the necessary culture?
  • Management focus: Are priorities aligned with organizational objectives?
  • Criteria for success: What is rewarded and celebrated, and does it support the broader vision?
  • Core values: Are stated values reflected in everyday practices?
Step 3: Engaging all levels of the organization

We involve stakeholders across all levels of the organization, from C-suite executives to frontline employees. This ensures a holistic understanding of cultural dynamics and captures diverse perspectives.

Step 4: Providing data-driven insights

The assessment translates qualitative findings into actionable data, offering a clear picture of strengths and areas for improvement. This step makes intangible cultural elements measurable and actionable.

Step 5: Creating a strategic roadmap

The insights gathered serve as the foundation for a tailored cultural roadmap. This plan includes specific actions and recommendations to align your culture with your strategic goals, ensuring long-term success. Whether it’s reshaping leadershipbehaviourss, redefining success metrics, or fostering new values, the roadmap guides your organization toward meaningful change.

By following these steps, a culture assessment transforms cultural understanding into a strategic advantage, enabling your organization to adapt, grow, and thrive.

Customer success stories

Our culture assessments have supported organizations in addressing a wide range of challenges and opportunities. Here are just a few examples:

Customer success stories

Digitalization programs

Recruitment processes

Leadership role clarity

Cross-level alignment

Culture Assessment

Path to aligned growth

A culture assessment is more than a diagnostic tool—it’s a springboard for meaningful, measurable change. By aligning culture with strategy, your organization sets the stage for sustained success, increased engagement, and streamlined operations.

What makes our approach unique?

We combine cutting-edge research with practical expertise to deliver actionable insights. Our assessments are tailored to your organization’s unique needs, ensuring relevance and impact.

Ready to align your culture with your strategy?

Let us assist you in taking the right steps