The Cultural Performance Audit™
Culture is not a value statement. It is the output of an incentive system. The Cultural Performance Audit™ scores what your organization is actually rewarding across culture, strategy, and performance — then maps every gap back to the incentive producing it.
We have run this instrument across health systems, state agencies, a governor's office, global CPG teams, national institutions, and founder networks — for hundreds of leadership teams and more than ten thousand leaders.
- 4,000+
- Leaders in the room
- 10,000+
- Leaders coached
- 98%
- Rebooking rate
- Top 1%
- IAF-credentialed facilitator
Engagement surveys measure how people feel. This measures what the system pays them to do.
Most cultural work stops at sentiment. You learn that morale is down, you run an offsite, and twelve months later the same scores come back — because nothing about what gets rewarded, promoted, or protected has changed.
The Cultural Performance Audit™ ends at the incentive layer. Every low score is traced to a comp rule, a promotion criterion, a meeting design, a decision right, or an informal status game — the specific mechanism producing the behavior. That is what you can actually change.
Three scored sections. Five to ten minutes per person.
Respondents answer on how things are today — not how they wish things were. There are no trick questions. The richness of the open-ended responses determines the richness of the feedback.
Culture
Ten statements that surface the gap between the culture leadership describes and the culture people live in. Clarity of vision, congruence of leadership behavior, role clarity, communication, crisis mode, whether challenging the status quo is rewarded, fad-chasing, bureaucracy, recognition, and collegiality.
- The vision, values, and mission are clear for the organization.
- Leadership's actions are congruent with the organization's strategy.
- I understand my role and responsibilities.
- Communication is a high value in this organization.
- We operate in crisis mode (everything is an emergency).
- I am rewarded for challenging the status quo.
- A new fad guides the direction of this organization.
- Our organization is a bureaucracy.
- Leadership supports my growth with proper rewards and recognition.
- People are very considerate and helpful within our organization.
Strategy
Ten statements that test whether the stated strategy is actually installed — customer loyalty, people as an asset, structure, decision rights, performance review fairness, information flow, competitive position, and whether daily work ladders to the goal.
- Customer loyalty is a value of this organization.
- People are considered the most important asset of this organization.
- Leadership drives the efforts of employees.
- The organizational structure is conducive for productive work.
- Employees are empowered to make decisions and often make them.
- Our current performance review is a fair practice.
- Information is shared with employees frequently.
- My role is the most important role in this organization.
- Our organization is competitive and a leader in our industry.
- Every task or project I work on is related to our underlying goal or strategy.
Performance
Ten hard numbers that convert culture into economics: customer retention, happiness at work, email load, five-year intent, tenure, training hours, reliability, meeting load, customer-facing time, and total hours worked. This is where cultural sentiment becomes a cost line.
- Average years the organization retains a customer.
- Happiness at work (1–10).
- Emails answered per day.
- Likelihood of still being here in five years (1–10).
- Tenure with the organization.
- Training hours per year.
- How often you can rely on others to get their jobs done (1–10).
- Total hours in meetings per week.
- Percent of time spent with internal or external customers.
- Total hours worked per week.
Respondents select every word that reflects their lived experience. The signature that emerges — and what is missing from it — is often the most diagnostic page of the report.
- Trust
- Autonomy
- Bureaucracy
- Collaboration
- Consistency
- Creativity
- Diversity valued
- Excellence
- Fair
- Healthy
- Innovative
- Ethical
- Shared Leadership
- Shared Decisions
- Fear Based
- Team Driven
- Authentic
- 1.What are three things that excite you about what is currently going on in your organization?
- 2.What are three things that concern you in your organization?
- 3.What are three ways to improve your job today?
- 4.If you were CEO for the day, what is the one thing you would change — and how?
- 5.What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you see for the organization?
Six phases from scope to re-audit.
- 01
Scope & sponsor alignment
We agree on the decision the audit has to inform — an acquisition, a re-org, a comp redesign, a new CEO's first 100 days — and define the population, confidentiality terms, and reporting cadence.
- 02
Instrument deployment
The Cultural Performance Audit™ goes to the population. Five to ten minutes per respondent, three scored sections, a word bank, and five open-ended prompts. Answers are on how things are, not how people wish they were.
- 03
Leadership interviews
Structured interviews with the executive team and a cross-section of frontline operators. We're listening for the delta between what leadership believes is rewarded and what is actually rewarded.
- 04
Incentive mapping
We map every scored gap to the incentive producing it — comp, promotion criteria, meeting design, decision rights, recognition, and informal status. Culture is an output; incentives are the input.
- 05
Findings & perverse loops
You get the scored profile, the word-bank signature, the verbatim themes, and the named perverse incentive loops — the places where the system pays people to do the thing you say you don't want.
- 06
Redesign & re-audit
We hand back a prioritized redesign of the incentives driving the worst scores, then re-run the audit on a fixed cadence so the change is measured, not asserted.
Cultural due diligence, executive transitions, and turnarounds.
Cultural due diligence (M&A)
Run the audit on both sides of a deal before close. Integration failures are almost never strategic — they're two incentive systems that reward opposite behavior colliding on day one.
Pre-integration and post-close
A baseline at close and a re-audit at 90 and 365 days turns 'culture fit' from a feeling into a tracked variable with an owner.
New CEO or executive onboarding
An incoming leader inherits the real map — where trust is, where bureaucracy is, and which behaviors the current system actually pays for.
Comp and performance redesign
Before you change the plan, measure what the current plan is producing. The Performance section prices the culture in hours, meetings, and retention.
Turnaround and crisis mode
'Everything is an emergency' is a scored item for a reason. We identify what is manufacturing the urgency and what it is costing you.
Investor and board reporting
A repeatable, comparable cultural score across a portfolio — with benchmarks — instead of anecdote at the quarterly.
We have done many of these. Here is where the work landed.
Moving a health system from reactive to strategic.
A regional health system and its behavioral-health arm were operating in permanent crisis mode. The audit showed the culture wasn't broken — it was being paid to react.
Auditing a public-safety culture under budget pressure.
Modernization had stalled — not for lack of will, but because the reward structure protected manual process. The audit made the cost visible in hours.
Disrupting the largest cross-functional team.
A cross-functional division where every function was individually high-performing and collectively slow. The assessment found the handoffs, not the people.
Assessing an institution where credibility is the product.
For a think tank, culture is the brand. The assessment focused on where internal incentives risked drifting from the institution's credibility standard.
Culture assessment for a membership organization.
Members were joining and going quiet. The assessment found the organization was rewarding sign-ups rather than the connections members actually joined for.
Assessing culture across 176,000 classrooms.
A volunteer network at national scale where the culture is carried by people who aren't paid. The assessment focused on non-monetary incentives.
Designing a culture where the incentives do the work.
A network built from the incentive layer up — the clearest demonstration of what the audit is looking for when it looks at any organization.
What leaders say after the work.
"Aaron helped our exec team replace 11 meetings with 3 systems. We move twice as fast with half the noise."
"Two days with Aaron unlocked a strategy we'd been circling for eighteen months."
"Aaron is the rare advisor who can hold the vision and the next move at the same time."
"Aaron has a rare combination of vision and execution. He doesn't just talk about transformation — he architects it, then ships it with you."
"Six-month roadmap → working system in three weeks."
"He didn't just deliver a talk — he installed a new mindset in 4,000 leaders in 45 minutes."
Measure what your organization is actually rewarding.
Tell us the decision the audit needs to inform — a deal, a re-org, a comp redesign, a new CEO's first 100 days — and we'll scope the population and the timeline.