Diagnosing Culture – What's Really Going on in Your Organisation?

How do you distinguish between the culture your organisation claims to have and the culture your employees actually experience? What tools or signals are you ignoring?

You can't change what you don't understand. Diagnosing your current culture is the first step in any meaningful transformation.

Most leaders are too close to the day-to-day to see the true dynamics. Culture is nuanced; it lives in the gap between what we say we value and what we actually do.

At Colette Strategic Solutions, we go beyond surface-level surveys. We uncover the visible elements, such as systems, symbols and processes, as well as the invisible ones, such as trust, fear or group norms. We look for alignment, or disconnect, between leadership behaviour and cultural aspiration.

Key questions we help clients answer:

• What do people fear or avoid talking about?

• What behaviours are most rewarded and most punished?

• How are decisions really made, and by whom?

Patrick Lencioni warns that a dysfunctional culture often thrives in silence. "If you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction," he writes, "you could dominate any industry."

Warning signs of a culture in distress:

• Low morale or high turnover

• Siloed departments and turf wars

• Innovation fatigue or risk aversion

• Passive resistance to change

Culture is a system of meaning that shapes identity and belonging. Diagnosing culture isn’t an audit, it’s an act of leadership courage.

Request our Culture Pulse Tool to get a quick but insightful snapshot of your organisation’s current culture.