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
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:
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.
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.
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.
Phase IV: Sustain the Needed Culture
The final and ongoing step is to sustain your cultural transformation by building capabilities and overcoming obstacles.
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.
A Cultural Alignment Assessment measures how well your organizational culture supports your business strategy, leadership priorities, and performance goals. Our research shows that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations. The assessment identifies where culture accelerates execution — and where misalignment creates friction, slows decision making, weakens accountability, or limits growth.
LSA Global evaluates culture across ten research-backed dimensions tied directly to execution and performance. These include areas such as customer focus, decision-making, operational approach, risk tolerance, accountability, and leadership alignment. The process combines quantitative survey data with qualitative insights to benchmark organizational health, identify culture gaps, and prioritize the critical few shifts that will have the greatest strategic impact.
Common signs of cultural misalignment include inconsistent leadership behaviors, siloed decision-making, low accountability, resistance to change, employee disengagement, slow execution, and difficulty retaining top talent. Organizations often discover that their stated values and ways of working differ from how work actually gets done. A Cultural Alignment Assessment helps uncover these hidden barriers so leaders can address the root causes instead of just the symptoms.
The most effective assessments begin with executive strategy and culture alignment and then expand across leadership teams, managers, and employees throughout the organization. Senior leaders define the desired culture needed to execute the strategy, while broader employee participation provides an honest picture of the current culture and organizational health. This combination creates both strategic clarity and organizational buy-in for sustainable change.
Organizations gain a clear roadmap for aligning culture with strategic priorities. Outcomes often include improved leadership effectiveness, stronger employee engagement, clearer accountability, better collaboration, faster strategy execution, and increased organizational performance. Aligned cultures drive faster revenue growth, higher profitability, stronger customer satisfaction, and significantly greater employee engagement.
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