Organizational Health Assessment

Assessing Organisational Character

 The Inside First® framework, promoted by the Vail Leadership Alliance, holds that leadership and business success are built on character and ethics before technical skills. This approach maintains that success begins with the internal work of strengthening the “head’ and "heart" of a business and its leaders. This changes the behavior of people in the business, builds mattering and flourishing, and improves results.

To assess the health of a business, we measure how well Inside First® principles define the business's character. This approach provides an assessment across the four pillars of our model:

• Foundational (Values, Beliefs, Worldview) Moves an organization from stated values to lived values: the shared ethics that guide hard decisions and behavior.
• Character (Purpose - sometimes called Mission, Integrity, Commitment, Attitude) How ethics drive action and impact.
• Skills (Vision, Communicating, Learning, Executing) High-character leaders build technical and interpersonal skills like psychological safety, so people can speak up, learn, and grow together.
• Relationships (Service, Trust, Love, Spirituality) Where mattering and flourishing become a daily practice that drives lower turnover and higher performance.

The outcomes of implementing these can further identify themes to drive performance:

• Ethics (Character): Low scores suggest a “head” or "competence-only" culture that risks derailment from not having the guard rails and inspiration of lived values.
• Purpose (Clarity of "Why"): Healthy businesses have shared direction and clarity of why the business exists and what difference it is working to make in the world.
• Connection (Collaboration/Community): Healthy businesses work across internal silos to create healthy competition, and high trust.
• Impact (Significance): The best businesses move beyond self-serving profits and focus first on serving to create valued impact for all their stakeholders.

Character Health = Hard Impact

We are in a transformative moment of history. Rapid advances in technology, shifts in policy, politics, and culture are redefining how businesses operate and how people live and work across the globe. And we see more examples of ethical lapses and hubris in high profile leaders. These trends are culminating in increasing pressure on performance while making it harder to find connection, purpose, and growth and to know that we are valued and have impact.

To address this, organizations need to return to basics to rethink what stability, trust and meaningful experiences mean in an increasingly dynamic world. This unique time calls for core practices that shape how we lead, innovate, and grow. It demands two leadership approaches many organizations keep separate: head and heart.

Head leadership ensures a business and its people serve others and have significance. It develops skills to ensure the business performs. Not just technical skills, but also inter-personal and emotional skills to create meaning, growth, and learning.

Heart leadership is about values, passion, and human connection. It centers on ethics and answers the question every employee carries, often silently: Does my presence here mean something? It comes from a wider awareness tuned into the emotions and needs of the people around us. Without it, people feel like resources, not human beings. With it businesses and human beings flourish.

This Head and Heart leadership is the "character" of a business which is at the intersection of the four pillars of our Inside First® model. A healthy character exists when values-driven principles of purpose and connection, not short-term pressures, define the right behaviors and culture. When all the pillars are strong, employees feel a deep connection to each other and to the business and have freedom to act according to the company’s identity (mission, vision, and values).

The results are measurable improvements in engagement, retention, resilience, performance, and results. Businesses with strong character have:

• Higher Engagement and Retention: Emotional connection drives discretionary effort and higher retention rates. Organizations with highly engaged teams are 21% more profitable and see 22% lower turnover, resulting in lower recruitment and training costs.¹
• More Resilience: The ability to navigate the "permanent white water" of business change without personal burnout or losing the moral compass. Portfolios of highly ethical firms have been shown to generate an annual excess return (alpha) of 1.36% to 6.42% compared to industry peers.²
• Governance Savings: Ethical leadership acts as a governance mechanism. It reduces earnings manipulation, enhancing the quality of decisions.⁶ And, firms with strong ethical codes for financial officers enjoy higher profits and valuations, along with lower costs from disputes and audits.^1.7 And, it prevents catastrophic failures and high fines like those seen at Enron, Wells Fargo, and US Bank.
• Pricing Premium: 55% of shoppers are willing to pay more for sustainable and ethical products, improving revenue and margins.⁵
• Better Performance and Results: Leaders and businesses rated highest on character deliver a Return on Assets nearly 5× higher than self-focused peers.³ Companies on the "World's Most Ethical Companies" list outperformed a comparable large-cap index by 24.6 percentage points over a five-year period ending in 2022.^1.4

Implementation Strategy: A Continuous Loop

The Inside First® assessment is not a checklist but a continuous improvement loop of reflection and action:

Discovery: Use the questionnaire as a 360-degree tool for leaders and staff at all levels provide input to identify "blind spots." Ensure people responding feel like their honest input is valued and will help create a better place to work. Reassess annually or more to uncover progress and ensure today's success does not undermine tomorrow's character.

1. Dialogue: Hold "Cafe Conversations" or small group RoundTables to discuss the results, seeking understanding rather than immediate closure. Practice two-way dialogue and psychological safety to get valuable input and start identifying real issues and how to improve. Vail Leadership Alliance can help facilitate these discussions and interpret findings.
2. Action: Create and execute specific personal and shared Action Plans with due dates to address the lowest-scoring pillars. Consider Inside First® modules and workshops that address specific high-priority, low scoring areas. Each of the assessment questions has an associated workshop that we can bring separately or in combination to teams to create action plans to improve their performance in that dimension.
3. Renewal: Stay engaged during action phase to ensure actions deliver the desired outcomes and results.

By systematically measuring and improving the pillars, a business ensures it is both high-performing and building a meaningful legacy that is excellent, ethical, and enduring.

You can take this assessment for yourself at:

https://vailleadershipalliance.org/inside-first-survey/

You’ll have the option to create an account when you are done so that you can revisit your results.

How to use it with a team:

An administrator will set up your company account and set up a new company and then create a survey code (e.g. acme-q1-2027). Contact Jon.Strickler@gmail.com for more information and assistance.

Send the code to participants along with as much of this introduction or your own as you like and instructions for completion:

Please complete the survey considering how we interact as a team. Be candid so that we get useful insights.

1. You can start your survey at:  https://vailleadershipalliance.org/inside-first-survey/
2. Use our survey code >eg: Acme-Q1-2027 < when asked after you start your survey
3. You have the option to submit your answers anonymously or with your contact information. Either way, you'll be able to view your results after taking the survey. Creating an account will allow you to revisit results, but you can still share your responses anonymously with everyone.
4. Once responses are in, we'll share the overall result with this team and use them to generate dialogue for how we can improve. Please complete your survey before Due Date