We have a number of different leadership and culture assessment tools we use in our business and personal sculpting processes. These tools provide us with valuable lead and lag information. These assessments are often a first step in helping leaders to identify talent and the factors constraining progress in their companies. They also help us to monitor our progress and judge how successful our work has been. We agree with Peter Drucker who once said, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.”

We have a number of tools that are able to measure:

• Leadership Capability
  
• Work Behavioural Style
  
• Leadership Effectiveness
  
• Culture-Strategy Fit
  
• Values Alignment and Development.

Assessing Leadership Effectiveness

We use three assessments tools on leaders to identify their both their strengths and the factors preventing them from realizing their potential. After testing the validity and ease-of-use of many different leadership assessment tools, we chose to use the CPA/MCPA/IRIS tools by BIOSS, the DISC Work-Behaviour Style Assessment and the Leadership Circle Profile™. A number of our Sculptors are certified to use these tools.

Leadership Capability:

We are living in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Everyday we see factors such as globalization, technology, legislation and resource constraints increasing the complexity that companies need to grapple with. As we move further up the organization, we have found that staff need particular hard-wired abilities to manage the complexity in their work. Too much complexity and people feel overwhelmed and make short-sighted decisions; too little complexity and people get frustrated and neglect their jobs. Unfortunately, we have found that our industrial-era educational system has failed to prepare our many of our graduates with the abilities needed to thrive in an increasing complex environment.

The Career Path Appreciation (CPA) tool and its siblings (MCPA and IRIS) were developed by Professor Gillian Stamp, Director of BIOSS International (London). This tool allows a highly-trained practitioner to assess an individual’s current and future capability to understand and manage complexity, as well as the level in the company where they would be able to be most effective and make their most valuable contribution. This tool is based on the Levels of Work concept, which is endorsed by over 650 credible and peer-reviewed research articles and 1,500 other research articles. See list of studies.

This information allows us to help companies to develop organization designs that can succeed in a complex world, and ensure that their staff have the ability to understand and manage the complexity inherent in their jobs.

We are members of the Global Organization Design society, which promotes organization design based upon the levels of complexity or Levels of Work within organizations.

DISC Work Behaviour Assessment:

We frequently find the need to assess how people prefer to work and cope with pressure. We need this information to help companies make sure that they have the right people in the right positions. We also need this information to mentor and coach leaders and their staff to develop a style of working that fits with their job, and to monitor whether our coaching/mentoring has helped us to change someone’s work behaviour. After testing a variety tools, we have chosen to use the DISC Work-Behaviour Assessment, originally designed by William Marston.

The DISC Work-Behavior Assessment is a tool that has stood the test of time. It was originally designed by William Marston in the 1930s, and has continued to evolve and become more refined. Where this tool was originally used by the military to identify potential leaders, its validity and ability to provide fast, simple and useful information has helped to make it a popular choice amongst thousands of companies. (Over 4 million work-behaviour assessments have been performed over the last 15 years.)

This assessment enables us to identify people's strengths and limitations, leadership and management potential, ability to handle pressure and uncertainty, preferred team role, attention to detail, tolerance for uncertainty, ability to influence others and read group dynamics and so on. It tells us whether someone's behaviour suits his/her job or a potential job, and how we can help people to develop a more effective style of working.

We have further customized the DISC Work-Behaviour Assessment to include our insights into human behaviour and the culture and design of companies. We have also developed our own reporting format to enable leaders to easily share these insights.

The Leadership Circle Profile™

The Leadership Circle Profile™ is a true breakthrough among web-based 360-degree assessments. It is grounded in a well-researched battery of leadership competencies that have been proven to correlate with business performance. In other words, companies with leaders that score well in these assessments, are more likely to succeed than those companies that lack such leaders. Fortunately, the Leadership Circle Profile™ provides us with the information we need to develop the competencies that leaders may lack.

The Leadership Circle Profile™ measures the two primary leadership domains - Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies - and integrates this information so that the key opportunities for development immediately rise to the surface.

• Creative Competencies are well-researched competencies that measure how you achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, enhance your own development, act with integrity and courage, and improve organizational systems.
• Reactive Tendencies are leadership styles that emphasize caution over creating results, self-protection over productive engagement, and aggression over building alignment. These self-limiting styles overemphasize the focus on gaining the approval of others, protecting yourself, and getting results through high control tactics.

The Leadership Circle Profile™ reveals a leader’s Leadership Operating System. It shows leaders how they are doing and spotlights the hidden motivators that drive their successful and unsuccessful leadership behaviour. It also enables us to help a leader become more effective and grow his/her personal leadership style.

Please click here to read more about the Leadership Circle Profile™ and how these competencies correlate with business performance.

Assessing Company Culture

Successful companies have company cultures that support their chosen business strategies. Unfortunately, too many companies have cultures that undermine their chosen strategies instead of supporting them. We've realized that a company's culture lays the groundwork for its strategy, and that different types of strategies need different types of company culture to be successful. Sometimes we need to assist companies to develop a company culture that fits with their business strategies, other times we assist companies to develop strategies that fit with their company cultures.

After trying out many tools, we have chosen to use Culture-Strategy Fit™, Spiral Values and The Leadership Culture Survey to accommodate different situational and strategic needs. We are Culture-Strategy Fit’s™ (Canadian Based) alliance partner in Southern Africa.

A number of our Sculptors are certified to use these tools.

These three tools are unique, well designed and supported by credible research on their effectiveness. If cost was no factor, we would recommend that companies struggling to change their organizational cultures use all three tools.

The Leadership Culture Survey (TLCS)™

We have found it valuable to assess the collective leadership of companies and how people perceive their companies' leadership. We have found that companies frequently promote a leadership culture that is different from the one they need or think they are promoting. We need such information to help companies develop a leadership culture that inspires and motivates people throughout their companies.

The Leadership Culture Survey™ reveals how groups and teams view their current leadership culture and how this differs from the leadership culture their companies want and need. This tool uses similar leadership competencies to the Leadership Circle Profile™ - competencies that have been validated and correlated with the financial performance of companies. The findings from a Leadership Culture Survey™ will enable a company to invest in their funds in developing the leadership that will make a real difference to their business.

Both the Leadership Circle Profile™ and the Leadership Culture Survey™ have been extensively tested and validated, with over 15,000 business leaders.

Please click here to read more about the Leadership Culture Survey™.

Culture-Strategy Fit:

Culture-Strategy Fit™ is actually a complete suite of strategy and cultural pattern assessment tools. There are the Culture-Strategy Fit Profile, the Culture Snapshot, the Intergenerational Snapshot, and the Culture Pulse tools. Each of these tools provides a different perspective into how well a company's culture fits with its strategy.

The Culture-Strategy Fit™ Profile assesses the culture patterns in companies and how well these patterns with the type of strategy that the company has chosen. A match between culture and strategy creates a competitive advantage. In contrast, a mismatch of culture with strategy usually means that a company’s culture drags down its strategy. In other words, it does not matter how good a company’s strategy is if company culture does not support it.

Culture Strategy Fit™ provides us with information that we can use to help companies change their organizational cultures, and even their strategies.

We are Culture-Strategy Fit’s™ (Canadian Based) alliance partner in Southern Africa.

Please click here to find out more about Culture-Strategy Fit™.

Culture Transformation Tools:

There is substantial evidence that successful companies are values-driven companies. Books such as Built to Last and Corporate Culture & Performance provide us with substantial evidence that companies with appropriate values outperform other companies in their industries. We have found that values guide organizational culture and leadership effectiveness. They determine how companies change, innovate, perform and make strategic decisions. Values can both constrain and enable companies. To assist companies to develop the values they need to become more successful, we first need to understand the values in their companies and the values they want for their companies.

We have chosen to use the Culture Transformation Tools designed by Richard Barret (author of Liberating the Corporate Soul) and the Values Centre. This Culture Transformation Model has been used to carry out Cultural Values Assessments in over 700 organizations in 41 countries over the last 10 years. The survey instrument is available on-line and in multiple languages.

The Culture Transformation Tools provide us with detailed insight into a company's organizational values and culture, and roadmap for its improvement. These tools are based on the Maslow's model of motivation, the Seven Levels of Consciousness, and Spiral Dynamics. The Culture Transformation Tools enable us to measure the alignment between a company's current values, desired values, and the values upheld by its leaders and employees.

Please click here for more information on the Culture Transformation Tools.