Culture & Leadership Assessments
The numbers tell you what happened.
This tells you why it's about to happen
again.
Barrett Values Centre culture and leadership diagnostics, read the way a finance architect reads risk.
The question every CHRO and CEO is quietly asking
Is our culture actually working for us,
or against us?
Most leadership teams can’t answer that with anything more solid than an engagement survey and a gut feeling. They know attrition is up, or a key initiative stalled, or the merger integration is taking longer than the model said it would — but nobody can point to the specific values gap driving it, or put a number on what it’s costing.
The Cultural Values Assessment (CVA) exists to answer that question directly — with data, not anecdote.
The problem with waiting for the numbers
By the time attrition shows up in your HR dashboard, or a merger’s synergy targets quietly slip, the damage was already priced in months earlier — in the decisions your leaders made when values were under load and nobody was measuring it.
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I spent 25 years making sure the numbers told the truth. What I learned is that the numbers only tell you the truth after it’s already cost you something. Culture and values are leading indicators. Financial statements are lagging ones.
The CVA gives leaders a measurable, forensic view of what’s actually driving behavior — before it shows up on the balance sheet or in an exit interview.
Impact
This isn't a soft-skills exercise. The
link between culture and financial
performance is well documented.
4×
Employee Engagement
Organizations where culture aligns with purpose and values report engagement levels four times higher than those with misalignment.
PwC Global Culture Survey, 2021
+42%
Financial Performance
Organizations that actively manage culture see 42% higher return on equity than those that don’t.
Harvard Business Review, 2020
Misalignment between values and behavior is the most common root cause of organizational dysfunction — and it’s rarely visible until it’s measured directly.
What Gets Measured
Every Barrett Analytics™ assessment maps three layers of values — Personal, Current Culture, and Desired Culture — against the Barrett Model®’s seven levels of consciousness, producing two numbers every leadership team should know.
Cultural Health Score
A benchmarked read on the strength of your culture relative to comparable organizations.
Cultural Entropy®
The measurable cost of fear, friction, and dysfunction quietly taxing performance.
This is where the gap between what your people value and how your organization actually operates stops being anecdotal and becomes evidence — and exactly where that gap is compounding.
The Assessment
The CVA isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s built to capture personal, current, and desired values, and it scales to whatever unit of your organization needs diagnosing.
Organizational CVA
A short, confidential survey capturing personal, current, and desired values across your whole organization — sliceable by business unit, tenure, location, level, or any demographic that matters to you.
Best for
Organizations that suspect a culture problem but have only engagement-survey data to go on — data that tells you people are unhappy without telling you why.
Merger & Acquisition CVA
Compares the values of both entities side by side, surfaces where they align, where they'll clash, and where each side has something to teach the other.
Best for
Leadership teams heading into a merger, acquisition, or major restructuring who want to price in cultural risk before it shows up as post-close attrition.
Team & Small Group CVA
A focused values map for a single team or leadership group — useful for diagnosing dynamics inside a function, a newly formed leadership team, or a group heading into significant change.
Best for
Teams that need alignment before they need a strategy.
Why this, not another engagement
survey
Engagement surveys tell you that people are disengaged. They rarely tell you why, and they almost never connect it to a financial number a CFO will act on.
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The assessment is the evidence. What we build from it is the
argument.
The CVA is a proven, benchmarked instrument — refined over nearly three decades and used by thousands of organizations worldwide — not something built for a single engagement and forgotten.
This is where my background does something an HR consultant’s doesn’t: I read the entropy score the way I once read a balance sheet — as evidence, not sentiment. Twenty-five years underwriting risk in commercial real estate finance means I don’t present a culture problem without also showing you what it’s costing, and what fixing it is worth.
How this fits into working with me
The CVA is rarely the end goal — it's the diagnostic that makes everything after it defensible.
Depending on what the data shows, that might lead into:
- One-on-one executive coaching for leaders the data flags
- A structured CEO/CFO advisory engagement
- A culture transformation roadmap for a team or full organization
- Pre- or post-merger integration support
- A Leadership 360° assessment as a follow-on for individual leaders
Assessments are delivered as a Barrett Certified Consultant. CVA products and reports are proprietary to the Barrett Values Centre; I administer and interpret them as part of a broader coaching or advisory engagement.
Proof it works
The CVA has been tested across industries and organization sizes. Three examples from Barrett Values Centre’s own case studies show the pattern: the trigger is rarely “bad culture” in the abstract — it’s a transition point. And the outcome is always the same two things: a measurable number that moved, and a specific decision the data made possible.
01
BlueShore Financial
Canada · Financial Services
The situation
Rebranding from a community credit union into a boutique financial institution, BlueShore found its existing values had lost meaning — some employees couldn’t even name them, and the values no longer matched the client base they were building toward.
What moved
80% employee participation. Four values matches between Current and Desired Culture. Cultural Entropy of just 6% — well inside the healthy range. Values were embedded into recruitment, onboarding, and manager toolkits. The organization went on to be named among Canada’s most admired corporate cultures and best employers for three consecutive years.
02
Bolton NHS Foundation Trust
UK · Healthcare
The situation
After two years of paused engagement work during a financial recovery process, the Trust’s existing values no longer felt aspirational to staff, and confidence needed to be rebuilt coming out of formal “special measures.”
What moved
The assessment identified precisely where the organization sat on the consciousness model and what shift was needed. Staff satisfaction scores rose double digits within a year. Regulatory rating improved to “Good.” One of only three NHS organizations nationally recognized with a Lotus Award for workplace culture that year.
03
Wegmans
USA · Grocery Retail
The situation
Not a crisis — a growth challenge. A family-run business with an already strong culture needed a systematic way to develop leadership without diluting that culture as it expanded regionally.
What moved
A structured leadership program used two rounds of individual assessment data to track measurable shifts in each leader. Roughly 150 leaders went through the program over a decade. In at least one case, the data itself informed a personnel decision that led to better outcomes for everyone involved.
Across all three: the assessment didn’t just describe a problem. It gave leadership a specific, defensible decision to make next.
Your CVA
Here’s what it looks like in practice: a short, confidential survey your people complete in minutes. I administer it, interpret the results, and bring you back a clear picture of your Cultural Health Score and Cultural Entropy — sliced however you need it — along with a specific, prioritized set of next steps.
No lengthy rollout. No off-the-shelf template. Just a measurable answer
to the question you’ve been asking without data to back it.
Ready to see what your numbers aren't telling you?
CA (India) · CPA (Canada) · iPEC Certified Professional Coach · ELI Master Practitioner · Barrett Certified Consultant. Barrett Values Centre, Barrett Analytics™, the Barrett Model®, and Cultural Entropy® are trademarks of Barrett Values Centre.