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

Changes in demographics and technology have turned the rules that once guided high-growth organizations' success into their primary chokepoint. Our practical take on emotional intelligence reshapes your culture and optimizes your hiring, replacing rules-based approaches with the more powerful choice-based model embraced by market leaders.

Welcome To The Choice Economy

Autonomy is a fundamental psychological need, driving choice in every facet of the modern economy, from customizing sneakers to selecting dinner. To win marketshare you must offer more choice, faster, and with less friction than anyone else.

Choice powers customer engagement. We’ve entered the era where it drives employee engagement as well.

Rules never really ruled.

Changing jobs was once labor-intensive and risky. People stayed, obeying often punitive rules, because they had no choice. Rules didn’t ensure compliance. A lack of options did.

Now, technology empowers individuals to choose a new job with a simple click, turning their current employer’s rigid rules into a choice to seek opportunity elsewhere.

The Perfect Storm

Until 2029, 10,000 baby boomers retire daily, creating skilled expertise gaps. In response, remote technology allows access to seasoned talent globally, while local jobs are filled by younger, tech-savvy workers. Technology has also cut routine tasks, making innovation a competitive necessity. Creativity now defines success or failure.

Each shift fuels the next, driving exponential change. The void left by mass retirements reset expectations. People want a say in when, where and how they work. Rules stifle creativity. In an economy where workers expect choice and ingenuity is non-negotiable, rules are not simply inefficient—they can be disastrous.

“MORE ORGANIZATIONS DIE OF INDIGESTION THAN STARVATION.”

- DAVE PACKARD, CO-FOUNDER HEWLETT PACKARD.

The lifespan of a S&P 500 firm in 1958 was 61 years. Now it's less than 18. Three quarters of today's S&P 500 areprojected to vanish by 2027. These are successful firms benefiting from access to capital. Easy capital may solve hunger, but rules cause harmful indigestion. Choice let's you:

Increase Performance

People can ‘hit their numbers’ without being made to feel like one.

Lose The Carrots & Sticks

Effort & performance shouldn’t require bribes or threats.

Forge Authentic Engagement

Accountability doesn’t need to be synonymous with blame.

Turn Feedback Into A Gift

Discussing performance gaps should’t be an ‘awkward’ conversation.

“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

We Create Cultures That Create Choice. (Which Creates Some FAQs):

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’ll make you a better leader. We’ll grow your emotional understanding, improve your team’s harmony, and make you better at hiring. Our system fosters trust, psychological safety, and growth.
Why the name CultureSmith?
How does CultureSmith differ from an Executive Coaching Firm?

Executive Coaching develops individual leader’s skills. Our program enhances leadership holistically.

Behaviour is a measured or observed response to stimulus. Coaches work to modify leader’s responses. We also tackle stimuli.

Environment creates the stimuli. Stimuli’s dictates behaviour. We craft environments where leaders understand their behaviours, by first establishing a culture of trust, safety, and belonging.

Using this foundation, we introduce an advanced emotional intelligence system to deal with the triggers of a growing company.

Our HireEQ division ensures culturally aligned people are added, ensuring sustained progress.

We are advocates for Executive Coaching, often referring those who don’t fit us to coaches we trust. However, if you know your issues are ‘around you’ as much as they’re ‘within you’ there's no better service than ours.
How does CultureSmith differ from a Recruiting Firm or Staffing Agency?

Recruiting firms address the "pain of the empty chair". Growth or turnover leaves you missing a key person, 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 fivefold.

Technology has made finding people easy. Every recruiter accesses the same talent pool. The difference lies in selection and onboarding.

With 5 decades of recruiting experience we’ll match up with any recruitment firm. However our HireEQ platform, birthed from our CEO’s Organizational Psychology Masters program, is the first to leverage the stress of hiring to grow a leader’s EQ.

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 team from all others, rendering generic benchmarks relatively useless. Your team's unique culture deserves more than generic benchmarks.

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 to 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. That's the first win. String a couple of workouts together, and you'll begin to grow stronger and be able to do more things. More and more wins pile up.

What we can say is that our core services: CultureSmithing and HireEQ, both guarantee specific outcomes that leaders have told us they need.

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

You'll get a stronger team, more discretionary effort from them, happier people, and reduced turnover.
How much do you charge?

Prices for core services are listed at the bottom of their respective pages and in the main menu at the top of this page - along with the cost of not going with our services.

The actual total spend varies greatly from client to client however. For many it’s $0.00. We often solve a client's most pressing issue for free during an exploration call.

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.

Be among the market leaders who have revolutionized their teams through the science of choice. Achieve consistent, repeatable results previously deemed unimaginable. Book an exploration call with one of our experts today.

THE PROBLEM WE SOLVE:

As you grow, initially helpful rules become both barriers and burdens, causing conflict and tension as employees face increasingly complex standards to perform simple tasks. Keeping policies that are no longer relevant only increases friction. Yet, many leaders still ‘rule by rules’.

Control Now Means Letting Go.

Growth demands heightened standards, emphasizing speed and accountability. This leads many to tighten control over their teams, encouraging short-term results, penalizing mistakes and adding oversight.

But the data shows that sustainable leadership relies on autonomy and vulnerability. Employee wellness and mental health are now core priorities. Choice-based leaders are steadily displacing their rule-bound predecessors as a result.

The Past: Rules-Based Cultures:

1. Success Is Defined By Outcomes Achieved:
Why Leaders Still Do It
- Outcome-Driven Success Definition:
  - Predictability: A clear yardstick for measuring success.
  - Consistency: Enables uniform assessment of various individuals.
Why It No Longer Works
- High Emotional Cost:
  - Stress: Constant pursuit of outcomes is exhausting.
  - Underutilization: Ignores individual potential.
- Leadership Challenges:
  - Motivation: The growing burden of encouraging "number" feeling staff.
- Increased Turnover:
  - Recruitment Expenses: Autonomy reduction spikes turnover and hiring costs.
- Lost Opportunities:
  - Innovation: Tunnel vision on outcomes stifles critical questions and innovation.
2. Motivation Via Rewards (Bribes) & Penalties (Threats):
Why Leaders Still Do It
- Carrot and Stick Approach: Leaders often resort to rewards and penalties, driven by the belief that it can steer employee behavior effectively.
- Immediate Results: A system promising rewards or threatening penalties can produce short-term outcomes, giving an illusion of efficiency.
Why It No Longer Works
- Employee Well-being:
  - Stifled Engagement: The cycle of seeking approval and fearing punishment dampens genuine engagement.
  - Intrinsic Motivation: External incentives can eclipse intrinsic motivation, fostering isolation.
- Financial Repercussions:
  - Lack of Innovation: A failure to encourage long-term thinking hinders innovation.
  - Increased Costs: The approach can incur high costs due to employee burnout and disengagement.
3. People Are Held Accountable To Outcomes:
Why Leaders Still Do It
- Accountability tied to outcomes: Simplifies management and creates clear benchmarks for responsibility.
- Perceived efficiency: Leaders find it easier to measure performance through concrete results.
Why It No Longer Works
- Dampened employee morale:
  - Sole reliance on outcomes: Generates anxiety and fosters a defensive work approach.
  - Suppresses motivation: Employees feel undervalued, focusing more on results than collaborative effort.
- Negative business implications:
  - Stifled creativity: Missed opportunities for innovation.
  - High turnover: Can incur substantial financial losses for companies when people feel pushed into leaving.
4. Mistakes Are Met With Judgement & Punishment:
Why Leaders Still Do It
- Clear Expectations: Leaders can foster discipline and emphasize high performance through punitive responses to errors.
- Order Maintenance: This approach signals a zero-tolerance policy for failure, promoting strict adherence to established rules.
Why It No Longer Works
- Deteriorating Morale:
  - Fear Culture: Scrutinizing each misstep fosters a fearful work environment, hindering creative thinking.
  - High Scrutiny: Employees constantly feel trapped, suppressing their potential to think innovatively.
- Financial Setbacks:
  - High Turnover: This leadership style inadvertently increases turnover rates, raising operational costs.
  - Lost Opportunities: Punishing failures stifles controlled risk-taking, preventing potential breakthroughs that could benefit the business.
5. People Are Praised For Their Talent:
Why Leaders Still Do It
- Intuition in Recognition:
  - Leaders naturally praise talent
  - Seen as a boost to morale and a way to spotlight top performers
Why It No Longer Works
- Ignoring Effort:
  - Praise focuses on innate talents, overlooking effort and growth
  - Employees feel valued only for their natural gifts, not their potential
- Missed Financial Opportunities:
  - Companies fail to fully leverage their entire team’s potential
  - Results in underutilization of human capital
- Loss of B Players:
  - B Players leave to find growth opportunities elsewhere
  - Competing firms snatch up underdeveloped talent, nurturing them into A Players

The Future: Choice-Based Cultures:

1. Success Is Defined By Progress Toward A Shared Future:
Why Leaders Struggle To Shift
- Nebulous Concept: Leaders find it challenging to grasp the fluid and evolving notion of a shared future.
  - Abstract Idea: Progress toward a shared future feels elusive.
  - Difficult to Quantify: Hard to measure using traditional metrics.
What They Risk By Not Shifting
- Employee Flourishing: Thriving employees who feel a deep sense of belonging and share the company's vision.
  - Belonging and Well-Being: A choice-based environment nurtures employee well-being through shared aspirations.
- Financial Benefits: Harnessing the economic advantages of a united, forward-thinking workforce.
  - Increased Loyalty: Adopting this approach retains employees effectively.
  - Spurred Innovation: Committed employees drive unprecedented innovation.
2. Motivation Achieved Via Granting Autonomy:
Why Leaders Struggle To Shift
- Relinquishing Control: The process of granting autonomy requires a deep level of trust in employees.
  - Trust: Few leaders understand the psychological underpinnings of trust enough to grant it easily.
  - Fear of Failure: Many are concern that employees may not succeed independently.
What They Risk By Not Shifting
- Employee Well-being: Autonomy fosters a nurturing environment that can enhance employee satisfaction and productivity.
  - Culture: Autonomy fosters well-being and connection to work through independence.
  - Innovation and Passion: Both are unleashed when employees feel in control.
- Financial Growth: Companies leading with autonomy tend to see improved financial performance through innovation and talent retention.
  - Innovation: Autonomy-driven teams foster creativity which leads to innovation.
  - Retention of Top Talent: Creates a magnetic workplace culture where people stay because they want to and attract others who are like them.
  - Enhanced Collaboration: Freedom to express oneself increases collaboration.
3. People Are Helped To Account For Their Choices:
Why Leaders Struggle To Shift
- Intimidation Factor: Leaders find nurturing autonomy over rules challenging.
  - Unstructured Approach: Nurture over dictation feels chaotic.
  - Trust Requirement: Relies on team judgement, not rules.
What They Risk By Not Shifting
- Missed Benefits: Failing to transition overlooks empowering through autonomous choices.
  - Emotional Empowerment: Employees feel valued for intentions and efforts, not just successes.
- Financial Downside: Sticking to the old way misses out on proven financial gains through choice-accountability.
  - Proven Revenue Generator: Cohesive teams and attractive organizational culture bring in higher paying customers and create less waste.
  - Talent Retention: Creates a magnetic culture that retains top talent and attracts more of it.
4. Mistakes Are Met With Curiosity & Education:
Why Leaders Struggle To Shift
- Shift to Curiosity & Education Response: Encouraging a mindset where mistakes are opportunities for growth, not just setbacks is counter-intuitive to many leaders.
  - Challenges: Requires patience, resilience, belief in growth through failure, and emotional intelligence.
  - Misconception: Not reprimanding might seem like letting mistakes slide.
What They Risk By Not Shifting
- Benefits of the New Approach: Employee well-being improves by cultivating a nurturing and educational response to mistakes.
  - Employee Well-being: Creates a secure, trusting workplace environment.
  - Learning Over Fear: Replaces fear of reprimands with learning opportunities.
- Long-Term Gains: Positive, forward momentum is also derived from a learning-centric approach to mistakes.
  - Intangible Immediate Returns: Despite less noticeable immediate returns.
  - Significant Future Benefits: Fosters innovation and forward momentum by viewing mistakes as stepping stones.
5: People Are Praised For Their Vulnerability:
Why Leaders Struggle To Shift
- Counterintuitive Praise: Leaders often find the idea of praising vulnerability over natural abilities unsettling, equating it to focusing on weaknesses rather than strengths.
  - Perceived Weakness: Celebrating vulnerability over natural abilities can feel like spotlighting weakness.
  - Transformative Power: Harnesses untapped potential in vulnerability recognition.
What They Risk By Not Shifting
- Forgoing Cultural Transformation: Not embracing the vulnerable sides of employees can prevent the cultivation of an authentic and open work environment, where each individual is valued not just for their successes but for their human experiences and authenticity.
  - Authenticity and Support: Celebrating vulnerability fosters a culture of openness and understanding.
  - Employee Recognition: Allows for a deeper connection by recognizing both triumphs and struggles.
- Missing Competitive Advantages: Ignoring the power of vulnerability can stifle innovation and trust, essential pillars for a competitive edge in today's market.
  - Innovation: Encouraging vulnerability promotes innovative idea sharing.
  - Collaboration: Builds a fear-free space for collaboration and calculated risk-taking.
  - Trust: Creates a competitive edge through a trust-centric culture.

The Real Villain.

Low-EQ is the real enemy. Organizations experiencing rapid growth or leadership change need help moving beyond antiquated rules-based ways of working. Reshaping culture and optimizing hiring for today's workplace requires a no-nonsense approach to emotional intelligence.

Our proprietary tools, thoughtfully designed and field-tested in high-performance teams for over a decade, are the answer. They're proven to develop Self-Awareness, boost Self-Regulation, increase Empathy, and cultivate true Accountability.

Cognitive Colours

Capacity Unlocked: Know the enduring traits of everyone on your team and how they influence thoughts & actions.

How It’s Unlocked: By going beyond ‘personality tests’ to reveal unconscious drivers of actions including Biases, Motives & Conflict Responses.

What This Gives You: Increased understanding makes you a better leader. Know what to say and how & when to say it to get the most out of yourself and everyone around you.

MoodSwing

Capacity Unlocked: Extreme self-awareness, allowing control over your emotions and their influence on behaviour.

How It’s Unlocked: By translating over two dozen common emotions into their base 'code' increasing your emotional literacy with each use.

What This Gives You: When emotion ceases to control your behaviour, you take more risks, leading to growth you could not achieve otherwise.

Uncommon Norms

Capacity Unlocked: Fully-aligned group behaviours that place the team's interests at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts & actions.

How It’s Unlocked: Using the science of peer influence and distinguishing between positive behaviours and 'ok' behaviours that lead to poor outcomes.

What This Gives You: Feedback increases, healthy conflicts become normal, and your hiring accuracy dramatically improves once these norms are integrated into your process.

Each of these tools is powerful alone. Book an exploration call to learn how we integrate them to revolutionize how leaders build cultures and add talent to their teams.

The Solutions We Offer:

It's easy to adopt rules assuming they bring order. But as you grow they become the biggest constraint holding you back. The only scalable solution is a culture of trust and understanding. One where people are free to choose and feel safe to be corrected when those choices create issues. We help you build this culture and improve your hiring by forging emotional intelligence into both.

How We ‘Smith’ Cultures.

The impact of recent economic, demographic, and technological shifts demands strong, innovative workplace cultures promoting creativity and innovation. Success in the evolving world of work belongs to those who embrace trust, reject outdated rules, and foster choice-centric cultures.

Our strategic 3-level approach to shaping culture will allow you to build a unified team, eliminate obstacles, and develop yourself into the leader you want to be.

Lead a team where everyone collaborates seamlessly, focused on excellent results, guided by the best possible version of yourself. That's CultureSmithing.

Level 1: Replaces Ambiguity With Alignment:
- Ambiguity results in multiple interpretations of identical situations, wasting time and effort.
- Through alignment, organizations unlock synergies that would otherwise be unreachable, fostering innovation and facilitating unprecedented progress.
- Developing a strategic plan doesn't guarantee alignment. You must dig deeper to understand the social, mental, and emotional factors that prevent stable and consistent alignment.
- Our proprietary process begins by defining individual identities, allowing people to align their thoughts, actions, and emotions in any situation. This eliminates ambiguity at its root.
- The result is consistent behaviour and effective feedback, creating a team that understands each other better. In addition, it establishes a benchmark that facilitates improved hiring and decision-making.
- True alignment begins with individuals first. Get it right and a united group will follow, unlocking invaluable potential that grows as you do.
Level 2: Replaces Randomness With Reliability:
- With the alignment gained in Level 1, Level 2 addresses team dynamics.
- Fear of exclusion drives human behaviour, demonstrating the enormous influence of teams.
- An organization's culture sets a foundation with consistent beliefs and behaviours, but team dynamics determine the day-to-day climate. Belonging is something all people crave. Teams offer belonging with more immediacy than the broader culture, giving them outsized influence over behaviour.
- Level 2 therefore takes advantage of the alignment achieved in Level 1, expanding on that foundation to remove dysfunction from teams.
- The three core concepts we deconstruct are vulnerability (openness and trust), healthy conflict (constructive disagreement and diversity of thought), and accountability (responsibility for actions and commitments), improving team performance.
- Team members feel empowered to challenge each other, naturally steering daily operations and shaping behaviour.
Level 3: Replaces Potential With Performance:
- Potential refers to unrealized strengths and untapped talents waiting to be developed in your people.
- Organizations that thrive achieve business goals while allowing people to find true fulfillment, unlocking performance's dual purpose.
- You need more than an aligned culture and a high-functioning team to unlock differential performance. The key is to nurture each team member's hidden potential, seeing and honing what even they cannot see.
- Our process is unique in its combination of emotional intelligence and transformational leadership principles. Through it, leaders are equipped with knowledge and tools to extract the best out of every team member, fostering environments where everybody thrives.
- Team dynamics established in Level 2 and the cultural alignment created in Level 1 form the foundation for this. They create the bandwidth necessary for leaders to venture deeper and foster individual growth, contributing to exponential organizational growth.
- Nurturing transformative leadership is the only way to ensure your organization's potential is not wasted, and your hard-earned work on your culture is fully realized.

What You Get:

Expert Facilitation

Struggles with communication, trust, and conflict resolution are often rooted in underlying issues. Our facilitators pinpoint and reveal these hidden obstacles. Using their expertise in emotional intelligence, organizational psychology, and psychological safety, they facilitate learning that identifies and resolves causes over symptoms.

Mass Customization

Generic training ignores your unique workplace culture. Learner engagement and training ROI both suffer. We customize learning to meet individual needs. The 3 hour expert facilitation is followed by 30 days of individual training tailored to each person's Cognitive Colour. Group sessions ensure alignment, while individual learning meets everyone's needs.

Enduring Benchmarks

An organization cannot accurately identify areas of improvement or success without benchmarking tailored to their unique needs and goals. Our training process naturally identifies and benchmarks specific areas for improvement. The resulting tools remain, and can be used to improve hiring and performance management long after we leave.

Earn Verified PD Hours

Maintaining PD requirements can be time-consuming with content that’s often tedious or repetitive. We’re recognized by most major professional designations as verifiable professional development. We issue certificates for each hour completed. Learn soft skills essential to all aspects of your leadership while easing the burden of maintaining your designation.

Learn More About The Solution

Click here for a deep dive into our process and pricing.

Book An Exploration Call

Book a live call with one of our experts, for a solution tailored to you.

Sure, you've got skilled talent. But do they use those skills in ways that reflect your culture? Are they elevating the skills of others? Can you accurately predict if your most skilled people will become invaluable A Players or costly C Players when times get tough? The only way to be sure is to clarify and tangibly benchmark your culture. We pioneered this, which makes us unique.

Not only does this approach enable us to help transform your current team into an army of A Players, it allows us to ensure every person you hire is top-tier, safeguarding your existing team's engagement as you grow.

How we fixed hiring with Hire-EQ.

Conventional hiring is plagued by two main problems: bias and noise. Bias, the result of unconscious patterns, distorts the perception of a candidate's fit, leading to flawed hiring choices. In contrast, noise emerges from inconsistent interview processes. Not only does this fail to counteract the influence of bias, but it also poses its own set of reliability concerns.

HireEQ^TM eliminates these problems by providing a transparent and consistent hiring process. We minimize bias and eliminate noise so you can make informed hiring choices.

Our 3-phase process pairs established, evidence-based principles of emotional intelligence with over 50 years of collective recruitment expertise.

Whether you bring us talent to screen, or outsource the entire hiring process to our team, you'll have the evidence you need to make confident hiring decisions.

Phase 1: Benchmarking
Why We Do It: Defining the requirements and expectations of the culture, the role and you as a leader is the first (most often missed) step to a successful recruitment process.

How We Do It:
- Culture Benchmarking: Document the existing culture through the lens of established team norms. It is important to set clear expectations for the new hire and document the existing culture so that they can understand what they need to bring to the table.
- Competency Benchmarking: List the critical competencies required for the role in question, aligned with team dynamics. This ensures role expectations are clearly defined allowing the new hire to set goals and develop strategies to meet them.
- Leadership Style Benchmarking: Analyze the prospective supervisor's leadership style using comprehensive assessments. Identifying trends in the supervisor's leadership style ensures you hire someone you can lead without unwanted stress.
Value It Unlocks: Keeps the developed culture from diluting and maintains strategic alignment by ensuring new hires understand and value the way the team currently operates, making it easier for them to add value quickly upon hire.
Phase 2: Evaluation
Why We Do It: Assesses candidates' strengths and potential in alignment with the organization's culture and the requirements of the role.

How We Do It:
- Online Assessments: Use online tools to evaluate candidates against Phase 1 benchmarks.
- Detailed Reporting: Prepare comprehensive reports that explain the results of the assessments so that they are understandable to both candidates and hiring managers.
- Custom Interview Questions: Create interview questions tailored to fill in any gaps found during the assessment, so you can have a more productive interview.
Value It Creates: Utilizes insights from the Culture, Team, and Leadership to craft a hiring process that respects and aligns with the existing culture, ensuring smooth integration of new hires and positive team dynamics.
Phase 3: Decision-Making
Why We Do It: Facilitates an unbiased selection process, eliminating potential pitfalls and ensuring a mutually beneficial match between the candidate and the organization.

How We Do It:
- Uncovering Biases: Use psychometric assessments to identify and understand biases that may be present in both hiring managers and candidates.
- Balanced Hiring: Provide insight derived from the evaluation process to assist leaders in making informed hiring decisions, thus aligning hiring with the organization's culture and leadership frameworks.
- Offer Presentation: Ensure a transparent and conscious offer presentation phase, avoiding last-minute biases, and ensuring the hiring process is completed smoothly.
The Value It Creates: Hiring is almost always done under pressure. This has a considerable impact on biases. It is also one of the most expensive decisions a leader will ever have to make. By ensuring sober decisions, we ensure a better hire, and prevent countless waste and longer-term financial losses in the process.

What You Get:

Tailored Benchmarks

Match candidates to your organizational culture, role requirements and even your own leadership style using our Custom Benchmarking tool. We tailor every role - every time, resulting in a hiring process that reduces turnover by identifying individuals aligned with what matters.

Detailed Reporting

Our Detailed Reporting provides insights on behaviour patterns, emotional intelligence, culture fit, communication skills and more. Why hire based on how many words on the resume match your job description when we offer real insights just as easily?

Interview Questions

Fully explore a candidate's fit using our Custom Interview Questions tailored to the role, your culture, the applicant’s behavioural profile, as well as your own. This approach offers clarity about potential hires and reduces interview anxiety for all involved, improving the entire hiring process.

Your Bias Neutralized

Hiring is a key decision routinely made under pressure. Which is why you’ll not only receiving data on all applicants, but on the unconscious tendencies and emotional triggers in your own decision-making profile. No more red flags ignored or diamonds in the rough dismissed.

Discover Your Options.

From screening to selection to onboarding, get detailed information on products, pricing, process and our unbeatable guarantee. Explore hiring as it's meant to be by clicking here.

How To Get Started:

We offer as much support to help you decide if we’re a fit for you as we would any decision we may coach you through as an active client. We create choices, we don’t impose them.

Think you might be ready to team up? Here's what to expect:

Book Your Exploration Call:

Book a call below.
We'll talk about your issues; you'll get your Cognitive Colour, and it may reveal obstacles you're unaware of.
Get actionable plans, with guaranteed value, regardless of whether we work together.

Discover ‘The Working Pitch’:

Get a free 'working pitch'. We join your team to solve a real problem in 60 minutes or less.
Witness the effectiveness of our tools as we address an actual issue.
Facilitates team buy-in. Available online or in person.

Decide on Your Price:

Receive quotes for issues revealed during initial call and working pitch.
Enjoy reduced rates with bundled or pre-paid services.
Secure your team's emotional well-being within your budget.

Engage With Our Expertise:

Quickly & effectively solve issues from shaping culture, to hiring, to growing EQ.
We leave behind tools to promote self-reliance, saving time and money.
Benefit from high-intensity, short-duration 'sprints' or ongoing on-demand support.

Continue to level-up:

Assess delivered outcomes and identify future needs.
Initial engagements last 3-12 months, with multi-year partnerships common beyond this.
Trust in sustained support and proven results.

Our Guarantee.

We know entrusting us with your people is no small thing. We take it seriously, and back it up a guarantee uncommon in our industry.

Let us help you shape your culture or optimize your hiring and we'll identify the essential behaviors you need to succeed. With our deep expertise, we'll tailor our approach to draw those behaviors from you and your team. Embrace these habits, and if the goals we agree upon aren't met, you get a full refund and free support until they are.

Our Promise.

Our guarantee means more to us 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.

Book a call with an experts. Get a plan to boost your team's emotional stability, regardless of whether we work together. It's a choice you won't regret.

Still not sure? Join our newsletter. Get tips on leadership, culture, and emotional intelligence delivered weekly.

Perhaps You Prefer To Listen?

Check out Leaderhood & Parentship- the CultureSmith Inc. podcast, available on all your favorite platforms.

New Episodes Drop Each Tuesday.

Podcast Site

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Yellows

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Greens

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EQ 101

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

Welcome To The Choice Economy

Autonomy is a fundamental psychological need, driving choice in every facet of the modern economy, from customizing sneakers to selecting dinner. To win marketshare you must offer more choice, faster, and with less friction than anyone else.

Choice powers customer engagement. We’ve entered the era where it drives employee engagement as well.

Rules never really ruled.

Changing jobs was once labor-intensive and risky. People stayed, obeying often punitive rules, because they had no choice. Rules didn’t ensure compliance. A lack of options did.

Now, technology empowers individuals to choose a new job with a simple click, turning their current employer’s rigid rules into a choice to seek opportunity elsewhere.

The Perfect Storm

“MORE ORGANIZATIONS DIE OF INDIGESTION THAN STARVATION.”

- DAVE PACKARD, CO-FOUNDER HEWLETT PACKARD.

The lifespan of a S&P 500 firm in 1958 was 61 years. Now it's less than 18. Three quarters of today's S&P 500 areprojected to vanish by 2027. These are successful firms benefiting from access to capital. Easy capital may solve hunger, but rules cause harmful indigestion. Choice let's you:

Increase Performance

Lose The Carrots & Sticks

Forge Authentic Engagement

Turn Feedback Into A Gift

- Saj Shapiro, CEO

- Kirstie Boyle, CEO

Chris Bourassa, President & CEO

We Create Cultures That Create Choice. (Which Creates Some FAQs):

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

Why the name CultureSmith?

How does CultureSmith differ from an Executive Coaching Firm?

How does CultureSmith differ from a Recruiting Firm or Staffing Agency?

How does CultureSmith differ from HR Advisors, Trainers or Management Consultants?

When can we expect to see results from our work with you?

How much do you charge?

Be among the market leaders who have revolutionized their teams through the science of choice. Achieve consistent, repeatable results previously deemed unimaginable. Book an exploration call with one of our experts today.

THE PROBLEM WE SOLVE:

As you grow, initially helpful rules become both barriers and burdens, causing conflict and tension as employees face increasingly complex standards to perform simple tasks. Keeping policies that are no longer relevant only increases friction. Yet, many leaders still ‘rule by rules’.

Control Now Means Letting Go.

Growth demands heightened standards, emphasizing speed and accountability. This leads many to tighten control over their teams, encouraging short-term results, penalizing mistakes and adding oversight.

But the data shows that sustainable leadership relies on autonomy and vulnerability. Employee wellness and mental health are now core priorities. Choice-based leaders are steadily displacing their rule-bound predecessors as a result.

The Past: Rules-Based Cultures:

1. Success Is Defined By Outcomes Achieved:

2. Motivation Via Rewards (Bribes) & Penalties (Threats):

3. People Are Held Accountable To Outcomes:

4. Mistakes Are Met With Judgement & Punishment:

5. People Are Praised For Their Talent:

The Future: Choice-Based Cultures:

1. Success Is Defined By Progress Toward A Shared Future:

2. Motivation Achieved Via Granting Autonomy:

3. People Are Helped To Account For Their Choices:

4. Mistakes Are Met With Curiosity & Education:

5: People Are Praised For Their Vulnerability:

The Real Villain.

Low-EQ is the real enemy. Organizations experiencing rapid growth or leadership change need help moving beyond antiquated rules-based ways of working. Reshaping culture and optimizing hiring for today's workplace requires a no-nonsense approach to emotional intelligence.

Our proprietary tools, thoughtfully designed and field-tested in high-performance teams for over a decade, are the answer. They're proven to develop Self-Awareness, boost Self-Regulation, increase Empathy, and cultivate true Accountability.

Cognitive Colours

Capacity Unlocked: Know the enduring traits of everyone on your team and how they influence thoughts & actions.

How It’s Unlocked: By going beyond ‘personality tests’ to reveal unconscious drivers of actions including Biases, Motives & Conflict Responses.

What This Gives You: Increased understanding makes you a better leader. Know what to say and how & when to say it to get the most out of yourself and everyone around you.

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MoodSwing

Capacity Unlocked: Extreme self-awareness, allowing control over your emotions and their influence on behaviour.

How It’s Unlocked: By translating over two dozen common emotions into their base 'code' increasing your emotional literacy with each use.

What This Gives You: When emotion ceases to control your behaviour, you take more risks, leading to growth you could not achieve otherwise.

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Uncommon Norms

Capacity Unlocked: Fully-aligned group behaviours that place the team's interests at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts & actions.

How It’s Unlocked: Using the science of peer influence and distinguishing between positive behaviours and 'ok' behaviours that lead to poor outcomes.

What This Gives You: Feedback increases, healthy conflicts become normal, and your hiring accuracy dramatically improves once these norms are integrated into your process.

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Each of these tools is powerful alone. Book an exploration call to learn how we integrate them to revolutionize how leaders build cultures and add talent to their teams.

The Solutions We Offer:

How We ‘Smith’ Cultures.

The impact of recent economic, demographic, and technological shifts demands strong, innovative workplace cultures promoting creativity and innovation. Success in the evolving world of work belongs to those who embrace trust, reject outdated rules, and foster choice-centric cultures.

Our strategic 3-level approach to shaping culture will allow you to build a unified team, eliminate obstacles, and develop yourself into the leader you want to be.

Lead a team where everyone collaborates seamlessly, focused on excellent results, guided by the best possible version of yourself. That's CultureSmithing.

Level 1: Replaces Ambiguity With Alignment:

Level 2: Replaces Randomness With Reliability:

Level 3: Replaces Potential With Performance:

What You Get:

Expert Facilitation

Mass Customization

Enduring Benchmarks

Earn Verified PD Hours

Learn More About The Solution

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