Culture Screen™ provides organizations with a quick and objective view of culture, what it is and isn’t, enabling leaders to prescriptively drive and accelerate change.
In virtually every conversation, leaders reference culture as either an impediment or an enabler to growth. Yet it’s always subjective and anecdotal.” – Jeff DeFazio, Managing Partner.
Culture is always top of mind for leaders, and with good reason. A healthy organizational culture can motivate employees and enhance performance. It is also a tool that organizations can rely on to drive productive change and improvement. Yet leaders don’t typically have a clear and objective grasp of their culture, relying heavily on anecdotal impressions that may be outdated or incomplete.
The Carpe Diem Culture Screen™ is designed to give leaders a timely and objective view of their culture, with an eye towards accelerated and targeted change that can generate meaningful business outcomes. “As important as culture is, organizations don’t always want to assess their culture, because the process itself is too disruptive and lengthy,” said Craig Kamins, the head of the firm’s Culture and Change Management practice.
It’s also easy for this work to fall into ‘check-the-box’ territory, where there are no clear outcomes, or where the payoff is 3-5 years down the road. We created a more user friendly, less invasive process, with more defined, segmented, and immediate focus areas for our clients.”
There are three factors that make the Culture Screen™ unique – ease of process, the structure of the assessment outputs, and a direct link back to existing change or business objectives, to better isolate where leaders need to drive change.
Ease of Process – In its Retained Search business, Carpe Diem identifies the winning candidate in 38 days on average which can have a material impact on a monthly basis with an open or underperforming leadership role. In that same vein, Carpe Diem wants to help leaders make faster impact through the quick, objective, and frictionless Culture Screen™ tool. The tool and analysis typically complete in a few weeks, not months, so leaders can focus on the important conversations around culture that follow. Mr. Kamins elaborated: “We know there is assessment fatigue in organizations. No one wants another lengthy and involved process.”
Structure – The Culture Screen™ assessment is built around four aspects of the organization’s ‘personality’ – its Organizational Priorities, Decision-Making Style, Leadership Style, and Social Structure. Rather than relying on the traditional Likert scale, Carpe Diem tests these different aspects of the culture by having participants compare contrasting statements, to see which is more accurate; proactive or reactive, support employee well-being or adopt more of a 24/7 mentality; recognize success, or focus on mistakes. This allows the Culture Screen™ to provide a more nuanced view of the culture, capturing traits that are often missed by traditional cultural assessments.
Link to Objectives – The value of any assessment tool comes from what leaders are willing and able to do with the results. Practice leader Craig Kamins has decades of experience helping leaders prioritize and execute on the low hanging opportunities that are identified from the Culture Screen™ tool. Kamins does this by linking the Culture Screen™ results back to a key change or business objective. “We are not looking at culture in the abstract. Our focus is on how culture helps or hinders the objectives of the business. The recommendations we offer will enhance the culture, but our primary goal is to drive the business objectives,” said Kamins.
A recent analysis looked at how culture was impacting a CPG company’s ability to successfully launch new innovations into the marketplace. Carpe Diem’s Culture Screen™ tool has been used by new leaders to accelerate their success in their role, existing leaders interested in unlocking more impact from the power of culture, and organizations considering new leadership talent and how that leadership might impact an organization.
For further information, please contact Craig Kamins at ckamins@carpediempartners.com or Jeff DeFazio at jdefazio@carpediempartners.com.