Measuring Values to understand Culture
When your people thrive, your organization thrives.
Which is why building your optimal culture begins with understanding the values at the root of it. Values – conscious or unconscious – are the motivation for every decision made or action taken.
Employees have their own values when they walk in the door, and they are influenced everyday by the values they experience in your organization. Understanding the values currently at play is essential to put your wanted culture into action.
This is where our approach is uniquely effective. We have pioneered and continue to perfect ways to discover and activate your values to forge a targeted, measurable path towards a thriving culture.
The Barrett Model™
The Barrett Leadership Model is the breakthrough work of Richard Barrett. Inspired by Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and tested over more than two decades of real-world experience with thousands of organizations, the model identifies the seven areas that comprise human motivations. These range from basic survival at one end, to service and concern for future generations at the other.
It provides a proven and extraordinarily useful map for understanding the values of your employees, leaders, and stakeholders. Even better, it offers a means for creating more supportive and productive relationships between them, and a deeper alignment of purpose across your organisation.
Barrett Analytics™
The Barrett Analytics™enable you to identify and map the values of an individual, a team, an organisation to the Seven Levels of Consciousness (Awareness) model.
Barrett Analytics are widely recognized for their ease of use, detailed diagnostics, and meaningful insight. They are based on proven methodology and perfected over more than 25 years of real-world experience, used by thousands of organizations and leaders around the world.
Depending on the overall objectives of your leadership development program and broader organisational roadmap, assessments may include:
Team and Organisational Culture Assessments:
Culture transformation starts with measuring your current culture and the desired culture. This understanding is gained through Barrett Analytics. We use Barrett AnalyticsTM because they offer the proven, customizable assessments used by thousands of organizations worldwide. Understanding culture with shared metrics gives you insight to how to intentionally develop it. When we ask a group of people to pick ten values that represent who they are, how their organisation/community/nation operates (current culture), and how they would like it to operate (desired culture) – we are able to measure the level of values alignment.
The Culture Value Assessment (CVA)™provides you with detailed understanding of the personal motivations of employees, their experience within the organisation, and the direction the organisation should be heading. CVA results generate deep, meaningful conversations about the purpose, priorities and strategy of the organisation and the well-being of all stakeholders. The CVA provides a road map for achieving high performance, full-spectrum resilience and sustainability. The CVA can be used in conjunction with the IVA and is also available as a Small Group Assessment (SGA)™ for up to 20 people to measure personal values and current and desired team/group culture.
Leadership Assessments:
As a leader, you make decisions and manage employees, of course, but you are also a de facto cultural leader. Consciously or not, your manner and behavior convey a wide range of cultural markers and set the stage for a healthy or dysfunctional organization.
It is no wonder then that leadership development is an essential part of cultural transformation.
We use Barrett Analytics™to magnify leadership effectiveness by helping them recognize their true cultural impact and embrace an authentic leadership style. Leadership Development grounded in values-based insights builds the skills leaders need to:
- Work more effectively with their leadership team
- Better utilize the “soft skills” necessary to create a truly fulfilling and productive workplace
- Engage with integrity and authenticity, the basis of trust
- Find greater satisfaction, meaning, and connection in their work
The Leadership Values Assessment (LVA)™ is a powerful coaching tool for promoting self- awareness, personal transformation, and an understanding of the actions a leader needs to take to realise his or her full potential. The LVA compares a leader’s perception of his or her operating style with the perception of their superiors, peers and subordinates. Emphasis is placed on a leader’s strengths, areas for improvement, and opportunities for growth. The LVA reveals the extent to which a leader’s behaviours help or hinder the performance of the organisation, and to what extent fear influences decision-making. The LVA also measures the personal entropy and authenticity of a leader. Demographic categories, such as Boss, Peer, and Team member, may be added to an assessment in order to view responses by the relationship to the leader.
The Leadership Deveopment Report (LDR)™ is a powerful coaching tool for promoting self- awareness, personal transformation, and an understanding of the actions a leader needs to take to realise his or her full potential. Includes self-assessment and assessor feedback on observed and requested values and behaviours. The Leadership Development Report shows leaders how their leadership style is perceived by their assessors and allows them to compare this to their own view of how they lead others. In addition, assessors will identify the 10 values/behaviors which they believe will help the leader to develop. The report also identifies 18 areas against which both leaders and their assessors have clarified to what extent they believe the area to be a strength, an area for development or not relevant in their current role. This data helps leaders and their coaches put together an action plan to support them in their continuing development. Minimum of 10 respondents recommended.
Individual Assessments:
The Individual Values Assessments (IVA) deepens your understanding of what is important to you in your life and what changes are necessary for you to find personal fulfillment in your organisation. The IVA provides insights into how well aligned as a leader you are with the culture of your organisation.
Getting Started with Values:
You can read more about how we use values to generate new awareness and growth to increase engagement and performance in the following blog posts:
Surfacing the invisible to solve the visible – Team Culture Assessment
Or reach out to see how you can get started with leveraging values to ignite individual, team and culural evolution in your organisation.
