Culture Rules Without Rules.,Perks.,Control.,Consequences.,Authority.,Bribes.,Threats.,Punishment.

Master a common sense approach to emotional intelligence to reshape your culture and optimize how you hire. Replace abstract notions of culture with tangible behaviours, elevate team dynamics, and rethink how you add people to your enterprise to protect it as you grow.

Stop settling for those whose effort is based on what they get. Start attracting those whose commitment is based solely on what they have to give.

Trusted by executive leaders of high-impact organizations:

Even your smartest and most committed people are lost and ineffective if your culture makes speaking up and offering effort harder than it should be…

Is Ambiguity Preventing Alignment?

You’ve invested time & effort to create a vision and values that gets everyone on the same page;

But the words are abstract and aspirational, leaving people struggling to translate them into consistent, shared behaviour.

Has Polite Replaced Performance?

You’ve worked hard to create a ‘nice’ place to work;

But people find it difficult to share ideas and challenge each other - and it’s impacting results.

Attracting More ‘Getters’ Than ‘Givers’?

You hire the best and pay them accordingly;

Only to feel trapped by sudden requests for raises and promotions in order to keep them.

It is a myth that successful cultures are relaxed, friendly places. Successful cultures are energized by people committed to solving difficult problems together.

This requires teams aligned with a shared future. People willing to discuss the gaps between where they are and where they must be. The belief that adding better people to a team does nothing to diminish those already on-board.

CultureSmith creates workplaces that bring out the best in everyone. We accomplish this by aligning culture, enhancing climate, and unlocking commitment.

We Turn The Intangibles of Your Culture Into Measurable Behaviour.

First, we help you distill even the most abstract elements of your organization into a set of observable behaviours. We then translate this ‘secret sauce’ into habits that fit each person’s unique cognitive profile. Falling out of alignment becomes an opportunity to offer a helping hand instead of an excuse to point fingers.

We Create Climates Safe Enough to Embrace Discomfort.

Then, we establish genuine psychological safety, allowing conflict to be seen and felt as compassionate. We then simplify emotional intelligence, transforming everyday stress into the tension necessary to grow people's emotional well-being. You send better versions of your people home each day while boosting engagement and reducing turnover in the process.

We Multiply Commitment Each Time You Add a Person.

Finally, we benchmark your culture's behavioural DNA and the intangibles required for each role. On every hire, fit with the team is clearly measured and revealed, ensuring the people you add make the ones already with you even better.

“At Radicle, we are tackling a global problem. It takes passionate people, equipped with the right tools, to solve problems of this scale. Thanks to CultureSmith, our teams can now articulate specific communication challenges, define them in real, understandable terms, and walk through solutions. Emotion is no longer a distraction. It's our differentiation.”

- Saj Shapiro, CEO

“As a fast-growing technology company, communication and emotional intelligence skills are essential. CultureSmith has proven to be crucial, providing our leaders with real tools and the proven frameworks required to perform at their peak. We've been given a shared language to identify communication challenges, allowing us to work through solutions faster. My team has gained a deeper understanding of themselves, making them better leaders both in the office and outside it.”

- Kirstie Boyle, CEO

“Communication is key to solving business problems. That's challenging if communication is problematic. People fear how conversations will be received, despite knowing what to say. CultureSmith breaks these challenges down into manageable steps. Our people better understand other people's needs. They understand how their own preferences can interfere. CultureSmith's tools & training empower them to find the best path forward. As communication ceases to be a constraint, we can focus on helping those we serve.”

- Chris Bourassa, President & CEO

The Tools of Our Trade

When viewed individually, our services fit common categories. What's uncommon are the results produced when we’re the ones combining them.

Organizational Design

Expertise in multiple areas of organizational psychology allows us to identify, design, and implement custom solutions to improve all facets of team dynamics.

Training & Facilitation

Our knowledge of learning styles and investment in curriculum design ensures every ounce of training offered leads to real behaviour change.

Leadership Coaching

Through coaching we apply our specialized understanding of emotional intelligence to remove unseen barriers, replacing them with habits that lead to lasting growth.

Recruitment & Retention

With over four decades of combined recruitment experience, we know how to identify, evaluate and engage top talent.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How would you explain to me what CultureSmith does if I was 5 years old?

We're like a special school for grown-ups who are the bosses of the companies they work for. We teach them to understand their feelings, how to play nice with their teams, and how to teach the people on their teams to play nice with each other too. We also help bosses pick the right game for their company to play, the right rules for that game, and how to choose the right people to ask to play the game with them. Most importantly we make sure everyone feels happy and safe especially when the game gets hard to play.

For the non-five-year-old in you, we make you a stronger leader. You'll better understand emotions, enhance team cohesion without sacrificing performance, and increase your hiring effectiveness. Our approach builds the trust, safety, and and emotional intelligence the modern workplace demands.
Why the name CultureSmith?
How does CultureSmith differ from an Executive Coaching Firm?

Executive Coaching develops individual leaders. Our program enhances the practice of leadership.

Behaviour is a measured or observed response to stimulus. Coaches work to modify leader’s responses. But they rarely address stimuli.

Environment dictates behaviour. We craft environments where leaders understand their behaviours, by creating cultures that replace ambiguity with alignment.

We then use a common sense approach to EQ to build psychological safety at individual, team and organizational levels, creating the bandwidth for leaders to focus on self-development.

For those still seeking 1-on-1 support, Executive Coaching programs are available by application only.
How does CultureSmith differ from a Recruiting Firm or Staffing Agency?

Recruiting firms address the "pain of the empty chair". Growth or turnover causes a vacancy, and that pain causes you to emphasize speed while hiring.

The real priority should be protecting your team from bad hires. A wrong hire costs roughly 30% of their salary. Yet losing top talent due to a mismatch can cost you 5x this amount.

Technology has made finding people easy. All recruiters have access to the same talent pool. The difference lies in selection and onboarding.

With 5 decades of recruiting experience we can compete with the top recruitment firms. However our HireEQ platform is the first to eliminate the emotional bias and noise found in all hiring processes - especially those led by conventional firms.

We're unique. It’s cliched, but in our case true. We’ll guide you to understand who you need, how to identify them beyond the resume, and how to integrate them so they make your existing team better.

And we do it all just as fast as conventional recruitment firms for roughly two-thirds of their fee.
How does CultureSmith differ from HR Advisors, Trainers or Management Consultants?

Many HR firms offer best-practices based on general benchmarks. Culture is what separates your firm from all others, rendering generic benchmarks largely useless.

We provide "mass customization". Our frameworks are standardized, validated, and proven for easy adoption, yet tailored for each organization. Our solutions understand your unique needs, translating them into practical, jargon-free frameworks that increase adoption.

In short, while others offer amazing research and information, we offer actual behaviour change. If enduring change is what you're looking for, then look no further.
When can we expect to see results from our work with you?

The simplest analogy we can offer here is to think of us like personal trainers for your company.

You'll feel better after the first workout. String a couple of workouts together, and you'll begin to grow stronger and be able to do more things.

Timing can vary based on your "level of fitness" and the effort you put in, but eventually the outcomes are achieved. We even guarantee it.

You'll get unmatched organizational clarity, better team dynamics, increased engagement & retention and stronger leaders, all while increasing the emotional well-being of everyone involved.
How much do you charge?

How much a company spends on our services depends largely on the situation.

Our most consistent fee is $0.00. We tend to solve a client's most pressing issue for free during an Exploration Call.

Those who for all engage us begin with hiring support or a CultureSprint - both of which are complete within 30 days and for less than $6k.

An organization undergoing transformative change can spend over $100,000 in a single year once training, coaching, and recruitment are factored in.

Regardless, you'll only spend what's necessary. Each service is designed to be outcome-based so you buy based on the results you need. Services can be bundled and pre-paid to reduce rates, ensuring budget is not an obstacle to employee well-being.

Get Peace of Mind Uncommon In Our Industry.

The thought of shifting one person’s behaviour can be scary - let alone an entire team or company. We help you move forward with confidence.

We’ll help identify your issues. We’ll then reveal the behaviours you must adopt to solve them. We'll tailor our approach to draw those behaviours from you and your team. Embrace these habits, and if the agreed upon goals aren't met, we'll refund your money and offer free support until they are.

Help Us Give Something Uncommon To Our Communities.

Our guarantee is backed by more than a simple refund. It's rooted in our core promise to send better versions of the people we work with home to their families each and every day.

A promise our founder first made to his family when he realized how poorly he was showing up at home.

Presenting: Leaderhood & Parentship - The CultureSmith Podcast

Understand leadership and parenting better than ever thanks to emotional intelligence. Each episode explores emotion's impact on our behaviour from the boardroom to the living room.

Weekly episodes drop Tuesday. Follow our LinkedIn page for video clips.

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Apple Podcasts

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How To Get Started:

Pricing & Packages: learn how we put you in charge of what we charge with bundling options, pre-payment discounts and the best guarantee in the industry.

Culture Building: see how we help our clients align culture & climate, creating organizational clarity & enhanced team dynamics that lower turnover and improve emotional well-being.

Hiring Solutions: learn how we take the anxiety and guesswork out of hiring ‘A Players’ by benchmarking culture and EQ to make it as tangible as the skills on a resume.

Or get a guided tour. Schedule an Exploration Call today. To demonstrate the power and simplicity of our frameworks, we'll help you solve the most pressing issue in your team free of charge.

Need To Learn A Bit More First?

Continue scrolling to learn who we serve, why your past success may be the biggest threat to your future, and how we solve the underlying issue behind this as you scale.

Who We Serve

We Make Emotions Work For Those Whose Work Is Emotional

Human emotion is a code. 1's and 0's built to shape reactions to subtle changes in your environment faster than thoughts can. It’s so efficient that our ancestors, lacking their neighbours' horns, scales, and claws, used little more than this code to defeat natural selection.

We are emotional coders. Expert coders if we're honest. We don't develop software - we develop soft skills. It should come as no surprise then, that our clients are those whose work is so hard, they can't afford to leave soft skills to chance.

Non-Profits

Nearly half of our long-term clients are non-profits. Each day, they take on systemic problems they know may never be solved. Underfunded - yet emotionally invested. Working tirelessly every day - yet hoping they see the day their work is no longer needed.

Our purpose is to make work a source of emotional well-being. We proudly serve those whose work asks them to risk their emotions in service to others.

Scale-ups

Scale-ups take up near equal space in our roster given their unique challenges. Having exhausted personal networks, they're hiring outside their original circle for the first time forcing culture to become the benchmark for fit. Teams become more complex making EQ more essential. Collisions now happen daily.

Being lean, most interpersonal issues make their way to senior leadership. Suddenly overseeing people instead of shepherding ideas - we often become the reason these leaders stay leaders.

Teams In Larger Firms

Individual teams are influenced by the broader company culture. In large firms, this can make sharing ideas and dealing with arbitrary rules and policies an issue. Emotion builds and simple disagreements quickly escalate. For the company to thrive, teams must thrive first. Yet changing the entire culture is difficult.

We act 'surgically' in these situations. The team becomes the organ we restore to health, making the organism that is the firm healthier by extension.

The Problem We Solve:

Why Past Success Creates Your Biggest Risk of Failure:

“More companies die of indigestion than starvation.”

Dave Packard - Co-Founder Hewlett Packard

In 1958 the lifespan of a S&P 500 firm was 61 years. It’s now less than 18. Three quarters of today's S&P 500 are projected to vanish by 2027.

These are firms benefiting from the easiest access to capital and talent. Fast capital and a pipeline of smart people keep firms from ‘starving’. But they actually increase the likelihood of ‘indigestion’. Consider:

A 3-person team has 3 bonds of trust that must be maintained.

Add a 4th member and the amount of trust needed doubles from 3 bonds to 6.

A 5th member sees it almost double again, from 6 bonds to 10.

At 10 people, a staggering 45 bonds of trust must be upheld.

Trust is essential in teams. Psychological safety is even more crucial. It's proven to be the deciding factor in a team's success or failure. The challenge? Trust is built directly. Safety is indirect.

Person 1 leads Persons 2 and 3. 1 builds trust directly with 2, and with 3. But there is no safety until 2 and 3 trust each other. Otherwise 2 and 3 will come to 1 with each issue.

How many meetings have you been pulled into because people trusted you but not each other? What should you have been focused on instead? That's the cost of low safety.

Developing trust as a leader is hard. You must ask people to be vulnerable and risk their emotions, then ensure nothing bad happens. High EQ is required.

It's difficult enough to manage your own behaviour under pressure. To build safety, you must not only read each person's vulnerability, but also know what buttons to push in every other person, to change their behaviour.

Establishing safety between 2 people is therefore more complicated than keeping trust with both individually.

Lead 3 people? That’s 3 now bonds of safety on top of the 3 bonds of trust you must still maintain.

A 4-person leader has 10 bonds to maintain. The 4 direct bonds of trust plus the 6 more complicated bonds of safety.

10 people? Which seems harder - keeping the trust of the 9 you lead - or the 36 bonds of safety between them?

Workplace gossip is talking about a work problem with anyone who cannot fix it. It is both the most obvious sign and the primary cause of low safety.

An issue emerges. Someone feels unsafe taking it to the right person. So they turn to someone they trust. Suddenly, the new person knows a secret. This puts them in a bind. Push back on their teammate? Out the other person? Avoid conflict by doing nothing? They still trust the person who brought the issue to them, but their sense of safety with others just took a hit.

It's why safety issues spread quickly. Like blown fuses, cutting through and disrupting even the strongest connections between team members, blacking out entire sections of collaboration. Growing companies are most vulnerable. The sheer number of S&P 500 failures shows how adding driven people and giving them big budgets with bigger goals is like eating too much, too fast - resulting in catastrophic indigestion.

Plus, everyone you lead has unique "dietary restrictions" based on their Cognitive Colour. Each experiences safety differently. Some need control, others approval. Some fear rejection, others failure. Emotions and situations affect each.

You build trust well. You wouldn't be a leader if you didn't. But the game has changed. Building trust with people is no longer enough. You must build it between them. All leaders of growth organizations hit a point where that gets complicated.

So, Do You Trust Yourself To Build Safety Without The Right Expertise?

THE Solution You Need:

Safety Simplified = Safety That Scales.

First We Help People Speak Up

No matter how well you master safety, you can't be in every room at once. To promote safety, you must develop yourself as a leader. But even more crucial is a system that scales the same sense of safety across your organization.

We turn your culture into that system. Transforming values and beliefs into tangible behaviors creates alignment and eliminates ambiguity. This creates clear opportunities for your people to ask questions, provide feedback, and challenge the status quo.

Then We Ensure No One Talks Down

To ensure your culture stays safe, we integrate high-empathy, high-accountability feedback techniques into performance management. We also improve conflict - both within and between teams - to ensure safety does not come at the expense of performance.

Best of all, our work can be distilled into pre-hire benchmarks. You'll get the clearest picture possible of what 'fit' looks like, allowing for more effective hiring and onboarding.

We Don’t Eliminate Tension. We Give It A Purpose.

Connecting it all is the simplest, yet most powerful EQ framework ever designed for the workplace. Evidence-based techniques are translated into simple, common words, increasing team awareness, empathy, and accountability.

Tension offers the resistance needed to grow EQ. Your people go home better versions of themselves than when they arrived. You become better and more fulfilled as a leader. We fulfill our mission of turning work into a source of emotional well-being. All without sacrificing a single growth target.

If that sounds like a partnership worth pursuing, book an Exploration Call with an expert today.

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