The first step on your journey to High Performance Culture
Imagine setting out on a road trip without knowing where you are. Even with a clear destination in mind, if you don’t know your starting point, every decision you make along the way is just a guess. Do you head north or south? Take the motorway or the back roads? Without that critical piece of context, you’re navigating blind.
The same is true for your company’s culture.
You probably have a very clear picture of what you want your culture to be. You dream of a truly High Performance Culture, a collaborative environment where people are aligned, engaged and pulling together to achieve a collective mission.
But when it comes to understanding where your culture is right now, today, most leaders are in the dark. And it’s in the dark that the trouble starts.
Culture is notoriously intangible. It’s not a clear-cut financial statement or neatly laid out product roadmap. It’s made up of countless interactions, behaviours and unspoken norms. Because it’s so hard to pin down, leaders suffer the same symptoms again and again:
They launch random initiatives - team offsites, new values, wellbeing programmes - without connecting them into a coherent strategy.
They become frustrated when their efforts are ineffective, blaming teams or processes without really understanding the root cause.
They feel like they’ve lost control and influence over the most important lever there is for driving company performance.
The result is lots of effort, little real change and a sense that they’re missing something.
To truly transform your culture in a lasting, tangible way, you need a map. For any map to be useful, you need two key pieces of information.
First, you need to know where you want to go. This is usually the easy part, but if you’re not sure what good looks like for you and your company, make sure you work on this first. Get very clear on what “high performance” means in your context.
Second, you need to know where you are now. This is more difficult. Being transparent about your current situation, warts and all, can be painful. It’s like stepping on the scales after a holiday - you might not like what you see. But without facing the truth, any action you take is unlikely to succeed, and you’ll probably find yourself tackling entirely the wrong problems, wasting time, energy and resources on things that don’t matter.
If understanding your current culture feels challenging, you’re not alone. Culture is complex, driven by dozens of factors, all interacting to shape how people think and act. It’s hard to describe, constantly shifting and knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Alongside this, you’re too close to it. People behave differently around you because of your position, so you see a filtered version of reality, not the day-to-day experience of your employees.
The good news is that clarity is possible. It’s why we designed the Culture Operating System that Versapia’s built on - to provide a repeatable, structured approach that makes culture tangible and actionable.
We’ve just finished building a new tool as part of the OS - our Culture Scorecard. It’s a simple but powerful way to get a quick read on where you stand today. By answering 16 multiple choice questions (which takes about three minutes on average), you’ll get a personalised Culture Score, broken down into eight categories. Think of it as part of your map: it shows you where you are, so you can plan the right route to where you want to be.
It’s completely free of charge and you’ll get your results instantly, so come and get your Culture Score now.
Instead of scrambling around in the dark, you’ll have real clarity on your current position, so you can take the first steps on your journey to High Performance Culture.
(P.S. If you know someone who needs to read this today, send it to them and encourage them to subscribe to the Versapiens blog. If you haven’t subscribed yet, come join us on our journey through the intersection between culture, technology and business.)