Cultural Alignment Assessment for Companies

Cultural Alignment Assessment that Works

“LSA’s Cultural Alignment Assessment helped to identify our people and business priorities in a practical and focused manner and has made all the difference in accelerating our performance.”
Brenda Wagner | Founder & President | Proxicom

“Our business is going through a transformation. We knew we had to do a culture assessment and define our values to transform culturally.

This process helped our executive team to focus on the right things at the right times to align our culture with our strategy.”
Cathy Landman | Chief Legal Officer & SVP | YA

Our organizational alignment research shows that workplace culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations.
Gartner research found that aligned cultures can lift employee performance by up to 22%.

Smart leaders know that a one-size-fits-all culture does not create high performance. Smart leaders purposefully assess and align their organizational culture with their business strategy. Culture and strategy alignment starts with assessing organizational health and identifying strategy and culture gaps that impede performance.

Assessing Organizational Health
We define organizational health similarly to how doctors describe personal health. We use seven metrics in the areas of organizational leadership, trust, capability, and climate similar to checking an individual’s cholesterol level, blood pressure, hearing, and vision.

Organizational health is important because it serves as the foundation for higher performance. We measure organizational health on a unhealthy-to-healthy scale. You want your organization to be healthy enough to maximize the employee engagement, discretionary effort, and retention required to get where you want to go.

Assessing Strategy and Culture Gaps
Every business has a unique culture, a system of beliefs, business practices, and values that determine how the organization accomplishes important goals and gets things done. And your strategy must go through that culture to be successfully implemented. We measure organizational culture on an unaligned-to-aligned scale based upon your unique go-to-market strategy.

When an organization has an aligned culture — one that is purposefully aligned with the business strategy — it sets the stage for higher performance. Done right, an aligned organizational culture focuses not only on “WHAT gets done,” but “HOW the critical few actions to get you there” are aligned with what matters most strategically.

We have identified 10 research-backed cultural dimensions that define the unique cultural attributes in terms of strategic alignment. Effective leaders shape their organizational culture in a way that drives the business strategy forward to its full potential across these cultural dimensions:

Market Approach — from adopter to leader
Customers — from transactional to intimate
Loyalty — from individual to company
Focus — from internal to external
Risk Tolerance — from low to high
Operational Approach — from low to high process variation
Decision Making — from centralized to decentralized
Information — from fact-based to intuition-based
Atmosphere — from social to disciplined
Results — from “the how” to “the what”

An aligned culture accelerates strategic results. A misaligned culture inhibits performance and slows growth. Understanding your organizational culture, both what it is today and where it needs to be to support your strategy, is where the real power lies.

The typical steps to align your corporate culture with your strategy include:

Phase I – Align the Executive Team
The first step is to align the executive team. We believe that the same people who are responsible for setting the corporate strategy should also be responsible for defining the workplace culture required to best execute the strategy.

Agree upon the current culture across the 10 dimensions.
Identify the needed culture to best execute your strategy going forward.
Prioritize the critical few cultural shifts required to better align your culture with your strategy.

Phase II – Assess Organizational Health & Cultural Alignment
Once the needed culture has been defined by the executive team, it is time to get a reality check of how the rest of the organization perceives the current workplace culture in terms of health and strategic alignment.

Conduct research-backed survey to benchmark organizational health and cultural alignment.
Perform qualitative and quantitative gap analysis.
Review results, trends, and suggested road-map for transformation.

Phase III – Align Teams
Once the assessment results have been analyzed, the next step is to prepare people leaders with the tools and practices to connect the What (Strategy) and How (Culture) for their teams.

Prepare people leaders to review results and identify actions with their teams.
Cascade results, trends, and suggested next steps.
Agree upon work-group level actions and metrics for success.

Phase IV- Sustain the Needed Culture
The final and ongoing step is to sustain your cultural transformation by building capabilities and overcoming obstacles.

Identify and prepare culture champions.
Sustain cultural transformation through cohort learning, 1-on-1 coaching, and action learning.
Review monthly dashboards and adjust accordingly.

If you want to get aligned and improve strategy execution and performance, please contact us to learn more about our Research-backed Cultural Alignment Assessment.

Related Information

Thanks a million for the great strategy and cultural alignment session for our global leadership team.

Your experience and patience to expertly deal with the inherent and complex challenges between business units uncovered many hidden truths that created a great roadmap for us to move forward as a unified leadership team.

I recommend LSA to any leader looking to shape and align organizational culture.

Juan Plaza
Geospatial Sales Manager, Latin America

We highly value the relationship we have with LSA Global.

I highly recommend LSA to anyone who is looking to strategically, practically, and fundamentally improve individual and organizational effectiveness in a way that makes sense for their unique culture and strategy.

Laura Dominguez
Director of Human Resources

We looked to LSA Global as a consulting partner to help us explore innovative and scholarly approaches to promote employee engagement and sustain the unique high performance culture we’ve built over the last decade. LSA helped us perpetuate coaching as a discipline across the organization by integrating our core values, goal setting, and performance management.

We appreciate LSA’s commitment to cutting-edge practices to help keep us a step ahead during this time of rapid change.

Rosalyn Chan
Vice President, Human Resources

It was a challenge to find a consultant with an approach to performance improvement that fit our unique performance culture and style. We were pleasantly surprised to discover LSA’s depth of expertise in the fields of motivation, developmental coaching, performance management, and measurement.

LSA seamlessly integrated those components without our folks feeling like the intervention was forced. They understood what we were trying to accomplish, helped us clarify our objectives, and created a solid, refreshing approach that quickly got us moving and engaged at all levels across the organization.

Overall, I couldn’t be happier that we found a true strategy and implementation partner in LSA.

Doug Hansen
President and Director

Great job in designing the Mergers and Acquisition strategy session for our global leadership team. The session was excellent.

I gained additional insight on the importance of the role of HR regarding strategy, culture, and people in Mergers and Acquisitions and would recommend LSA to anyone looking to align strategies and cultures.

Gloria Veon
Senior Vice President, Human Resources

The LSA customized Organizational Alignment Survey gave us a comprehensive view of how our employees experience our culture, talent, and strategy.

The systemic approach provided us with a great forum to discuss the strengths and opportunities in our organization, and then to quickly get focused on the key actions critical to executing our business and people strategies.

Mark Forrest
General Manager, FSM Division

I can’t emphasize enough what a huge shift you helped to create for us as an organization. Thanks again for your change management consulting help and guidance.

The clarity, practicality, focus, and accountability are exactly what we needed to make this strategy and major transformation a success from a hearts and minds perspective.

Cris Alvarez
VP Corporate Strategy

You have become our premier change leadership strategic partner. Your expertise in the human side of change is unparalleled and enabled our company to successfully implement our ERP Solution under challenging and ever-changing circumstances.

Thank you for your practical and outcome-oriented approach.

Ted Ramlet
CIO & SVP

LSA Global really shifted our perspective about strategic clarity and organizational culture.

The 3 C’s approach to workplace culture is very practical and really helps executive teams — even skeptical ones — ensure that your culture is healthy, high performing, and aligned.

Amy Cappellanti-Wolf
Chief Human Resources Officer

The experiential New Employee Orientation was an incredible success for 2,500+ new hires over 4 years spread across the globe.

LSA partnered with us to create an innovative solution on very short notice and added a huge amount of value.

We could never have done it without their unmatched combination of expertise, professionalism, and creativity that aligned everything with our unique culture and growth strategy.

Even our executives and experienced hires were blown away!

Brenda Wagner
Founder and President