Culture is an important part of an organization, but it can be difficult to define. Unlike other areas, such as finance and operations, which have concrete metrics like revenue, EBITDA, and number of employees, quantitatively measuring culture can be challenging. Leaders often rely on their “gut” to understand another company’s culture, but this leaves an incomplete picture.
When pursuing mergers and acquisitions, fully understanding the seller’s organization, including its culture is critical to your success. Rather than relying on subjective impressions, we use the Cultural Assessment Tool to measure a company’s culture.
We look at about two dozen key areas and scrutinize how the company goes about doing business in each area. For example decision-making: Is it centralized or decentralized? It is fast or is slow? Is the company consensus-building or dictatorial? We use this tool in the first place to look within, and then to analyze a prospective acquisition. For implementation, we use an online questionnaire tool, such as SurveyMonkey, which is easy to deploy and delivers quick results.
The Cultural Assessment Tool
How we apply the Cultural Assessment Tool depends on the size of the organization. We typically approach the process on four levels: shareholders, executives, managers, and employees in the organization. What we’re looking for is the perspective on the company’s culture at each level, so we can create a crosspollination of views across the organization. What often causes surprise is how differently people at various levels may view the same company culture.
For example, we worked with a company where the shareholders felt the culture was open and transparent, with flexible, nimble decision-making that nurtured innovation. The rank-and-file staff held a diametrically opposite view. They didn’t feel that the mission and operational plan were at all well communicated. In fact, they saw the culture as closed, dictatorial, and averse to consensus-building. It was almost as though we were talking about two different companies.
Using the Cultural Assessment Tool is one way to objectively measure and evaluate your own culture and the seller’s culture during due diligence.
