High Performance Culture Evolution
Most leaders know culture matters. What’s harder is knowing exactly what culture you have, whether it’s helping or hindering your performance – and what to do about it.
Our High Performance Culture Creation approach gives you the clarity, the direction and a practical roadmap to shape your culture deliberately – not leave it to chance.
One thing we hear from leaders more than almost anything else: “A consultant came in, gave us a report, and nothing changed.” That’s not our approach. We partner with you through every stage of the journey – from diagnosis to lasting change.
83%
of delegates who completed the programme reported ‘being more excited and motivated about the future direction of their organisation‘.
+95
Average NPS (considered world class)!
*from scores received in 2025 & 2026.
When do organisations typically need a culture diagnostic?
Leadership usually seek a culture diagnostic when they sense something in the organisation is slowing progress, but they can’t quite identify what. Common triggers include:
Strategy not translating into execution
Silos and fragmentation
Growth and organisational change
Leadership transitions
Performance below potential
Our 4-step approach to cultural transformation:
Our approach is end-to-end – we don’t just deliver a report and leave – we stay with you through the whole journey.
Step 1: Diagnose
Uncover the culture that's really shaping your performance
Organisational culture is often misunderstood. It isn’t perks, values posters or stated intentions. It’s the shared mindsets, behaviours and habits that shape how things really get done – and in most organisations, it operates largely beneath the surface. Our diagnostic lowers the waterline. It reveals the beliefs, assumptions and unwritten rules driving behaviour today – so you can make deliberate choices about what to keep and what to evolve.
How we diagnose:
- Leadership Interviews – One-to-one conversations with senior leaders and key stakeholders
- Culture Assessment – Organisation-wide survey and facilitated sessions to map cultural patterns across teams
- Culture Analysis Report – A comprehensive report covering cultural strengths, hidden tensions and implications for performance
- Leadership Workshop – A facilitated session to interpret findings and agree the shifts required
What our diagnostic reveals:
Your Cultural Style Spectrum – a quantitative map of your organisation’s cultural DNA – showing your dominant and secondary cultural styles across nine culture types. Most organisations don’t operate with one culture; they run with a blend. Understanding that blend tells you which styles are enabling performance and which are creating friction, tension or blind spots.
An important nuance: cultural strengths, when overplayed, become weaknesses. For example, a highly collaborative culture that avoids challenge can stall decision-making.
The diagnostic can be delivered at whole-organisation level or segmented by business unit, function or team – surfacing the subcultures that exist across your organisation and where cultural tensions are having the greatest impact.
Deep Qualitative Insight – Alongside the quantitative cultural profile, our analysis provides a thematic read of what your people are actually saying – using in-depth semantic analysis to surface the patterns, lived experiences and underlying concerns that numbers alone can’t capture. This gives you a holistic view: the data tells you what the culture is; the qualitative insight tells you why.
Step 2: Forge
Define the culture that will drive performance – Understanding your current culture is only valuable if it leads somewhere. The Forge phase is where insight becomes direction – working with your leadership team to define exactly what needs to shift, and what your future culture needs to look like to support your ambitions. Culture change works best when it’s co-created, not handed down.
What this often surfaces: your natural next step – The Forge phase frequently reveals the specific performance challenge your organisation needs to tackle next. For some that’s strategic alignment. For others, leadership capability or team performance habits. This is where our broader programmatic interventions can come in and where we help you identify which intervention will have the greatest impact.
Steps 3 & 4: Advance, embed & sustain
We stay with you
Diagnosing and defining your culture is the foundation. What makes the lasting difference is activation – working alongside your leaders and teams to embed the mindsets, behaviours and ways of working that will drive real performance change:
- Future Culture Workshops and launch events to bring the new culture to life
- Leader and team workshops to embed new ways of working
- Culture Change Champions – briefed and equipped to drive change from within
- Executive coaching for leaders modelling the culture shift
Results that speak for themselves
Insurance
Company
- +88% employee engagement
- Claim length reduced by 100 days
- +30% customer satisfaction
Following our Culture Programme, Sage won two awards at the Business Culture Awards 2025:
- Highly Commended for Best Business Transformation
- Winner Best Large Organisation for Business Culture
After we delivered the Culture transformation programme, at a leading insurance company, thye saw a significant shift in Culture metrics:
- 66% increase in Employee Engagement
- 66% Increase in excitement and energy about the future
- 74% increase in internal communication
Are you ready to understand the culture shaping your organisation?
If you suspect culture may be slowing progress in your organisation, the best place to start is understanding it.
Since our initial culture assessment, the Will It Make the Boat Go Faster team has been a trusted and invaluable partner in our journey to build a high-performance culture at Sage. Their ability to translate insight into action, particularly around stakeholder engagement, behavioural storytelling, and audience connection, has been second to none. They bring a rare blend of creativity, intuition, and credibility that has helped us navigate complex challenges and unlock real opportunities. Their impact is felt not just in what they deliver, but in how they do it, with empathy, energy, and a deep understanding of what high performance really means in the world of work.
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
FAQ
An organisational culture diagnostic is a structured process used to understand the behaviours, habits and assumptions shaping how work gets done in an organisation. It typically combines surveys, leadership interviews and facilitated discussions to uncover cultural strengths, hidden tensions and opportunities for improvement. By diagnosing culture, leadership teams gain a clearer understanding of the patterns influencing performance and can make deliberate decisions about the culture needed to support their strategy.
Organisational culture influences how decisions are made, how people collaborate and how effectively strategy turns into action. When culture aligns with an organisation’s goals, teams work together with greater focus, accountability and clarity. When culture works against strategy, organisations often experience slower decision-making, misalignment between teams and lower levels of engagement.
Diagnosing organisational culture typically involves a combination of methods, including leadership interviews, organisation-wide culture surveys and facilitated culture conversations with employees. These insights are analysed to identify cultural patterns, strengths and tensions that may be helping or hindering organisational performance.
A culture diagnostic can reveal a number of important insights, including:
- The dominant cultural styles shaping the organisation
- Hidden tensions or behaviours slowing performance
- Differences in perception between leadership and employees
- How culture affects decision-making and collaboration
- Opportunities to align culture more closely with strategy
These insights give leaders a clearer picture of the environment shaping performance across their organisation.
The timeline for a culture diagnostic depends on the size and complexity of the organisation. Most diagnostics are completed over 4–8 weeks, allowing time for interviews, surveys, analysis and leadership workshops.
For many organisations, the diagnostic provides the starting point for shaping their future culture. Leaders use the insights to identify cultural strengths to build on and behaviours that need to evolve. This often leads into a broader culture evolution or leadership development programme designed to embed new ways of working across the organisation.
Engagement surveys typically measure employee sentiment at a point in time. A culture diagnostic goes deeper by exploring the behaviours, habits and assumptions that influence how work gets done. It focuses on understanding the patterns shaping organisational performance rather than simply measuring satisfaction.
There are often early signals that organisational culture may be holding a business back. These can include slower decision-making, silos between teams, lack of accountability, or a sense that people are busy but not focused on what matters most.
Leaders may also notice that strategy is clear on paper but not consistently reflected in day-to-day behaviours across the organisation.
When these patterns appear, it often indicates a gap between the organisation’s ambitions and the culture required to deliver them. A culture diagnostic helps leadership teams understand these patterns and identify where cultural shifts may be needed to support stronger performance.
A culture diagnostic is most valuable for executive teams and senior leadership groups who want to better understand the environment shaping performance across their organisation.
It is particularly relevant for organisations experiencing:
- Rapid growth or scaling
- Leadership transitions or a new CEO
- Mergers, acquisitions or restructuring
- Strategy shifts or ambitious new goals
- Cultural tensions or siloed ways of working
In many cases, leaders recognise that the organisation is capable of more – but want clearer insight into the cultural dynamics influencing how work gets done.
A culture diagnostic provides that clarity and gives leaders the evidence needed to shape culture deliberately.
A high-performance culture is an environment where people are aligned around a clear goal, take ownership for results and collaborate effectively to achieve them.
In these environments, expectations are clear, feedback is honest and behaviours consistently support the organisation’s ambitions.
High-performance cultures do not emerge by accident. They are shaped deliberately by leaders through the standards they set, the behaviours they reward and the ways of working they reinforce across the organisation.
Organisational culture is often misunderstood. It isn’t office perks, ping-pong tables, or a set of corporate values gathering dust on the wall. At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?, we define culture as:
“The shared mindsets, behaviours and habits that shape how things get done around here.”
Culture shows up in everyday moments:
- How people handle conflict
- How decisions are made
- What behaviours are rewarded or tolerated
- How teams respond under pressure
- How leaders model expectations
It shapes how quickly organisations move, how effectively people collaborate and how well strategy turns into results. In this way, culture acts as the bridge between strategy and execution.
When culture supports strategy, organisations gain momentum. When culture works against strategy, progress slows – no matter how strong the strategy itself may be.
