On the Use and Abuse of Culture Assessments in Organizational Life

Since the late 1970s, the topic of “organizational culture” captured the imagination of both leaders and scholars. Numerous conferences, thousands of articles, and multiple best sellers argue for using culture as a vehicle to understand how organizations function and the extent to which they succeed or fail. Indeed, a 2017 survey showed that 78% of Fortune 1000 CEO’s and CFO’s consider culture as one of the top three factors impacting their firm’s value.

Unsurprisingly, this interest has spawned an industry devoted to measuring and helping organizations improve their cultures as a whole or aspects of culture (for example, safety cultures, cultures of innovation, cultures of engagement, etc.). Deloitte recently estimated that American companies spend over $1 billion annually on employee engagement and a Harvard Business Review analysis found that organizations averaged $2,200 per employee per year on improving culture.

However, in spite of the resources devoted to the study of organizational culture, there are significant issues in the field of which many organizational leaders are unaware and that many practitioners ignore. In this webinar, we will try to shed some light on the importance of some of these questions, including:

• What are we trying to measure, and why? What do organizational culture assessments really mean?
• What assumptions underly most culture assessments? How sound are they?
• What’s the relationship between organizational culture and safety?
• How are culture assessments typically used and misused?
• Where do we go from here? How should we think about assessing culture in our organizations?

About the Presenter: Scott Truelove is a Behavioral Scientist who partners with leaders to fine-tune their organizations. After spending two decades working with Fortune 200 organizations, Scott knows what truly drives values, behaviors, and outcomes—and it’s not mastering the consulting flavor of the week. Rather, it’s digging deep into an organization’s environment and using well-tested behavioral science principles to optimize resources, mitigate risk, shape culture, and help people flourish.

Scott has won teaching awards at the University of Texas and Michigan State University and was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. In addition to his extensive experience inside organizations, Scott is a certified executive coach. He and his family live in Austin, Texas.

Scott holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.