Diagnose before you transform.
No serious engagement starts with a hunch. Engagement surveys, leadership team diagnostics, 360° reviews, individual assessments: we establish the facts before proposing a single action.
- Engagement and performance survey, for a single department or the whole organisation.
- Functional diagnostic of the leadership team, built on the Lencioni model.
- 360° review of managers, across five behavioural themes.
- Individual Hogan and PCM assessments, within a coaching engagement.
Every instrument produces a debrief and an action plan with named owners. Never a report nobody reads.
A diagnostic is not a poll.
A poorly built questionnaire produces reassuring figures and no decisions. Four conditions separate measurement that commits an organisation from measurement that lulls it to sleep. We do not run an engagement without them.
- 01Published, validated instruments rather than untested in-house grids.
- 02Genuinely anonymous administration — the only condition under which answers are honest.
- 03Cross-referenced perspectives — self, peers, team, management — to limit bias.
- 04A systematic debrief: without one, the next diagnostic will mobilise nobody.
Four ways to establish the facts.
Which instrument fits depends on what you are trying to understand: a collective climate, the way a leadership team operates, a manager's behaviour, or what drives a person in individual coaching.
Engagement and performance survey
Measuring climate, engagement and operational friction, department by department, at a granularity that makes action possible.
Leadership team diagnostic
Assessing the five levels at which a leadership team operates, and identifying the one actually blocking the others.
360° review
Setting a manager's self-assessment against the perceptions of their team, their peers and their own management.
Hogan & PCM assessments
Structuring personal and professional development work around a recognised psychometric foundation.
The engagement and performance survey.
A survey is not there to produce an overall score. It is there to surface the gaps: between departments, between populations, between what leadership believes it knows and what the field actually experiences. That granularity is what makes action possible.
We build every survey to measure. A generic questionnaire only surfaces generalities, and no organisation transforms itself on the basis of generalities.
Framing with leadership
We define the scope, the populations concerned and the themes to investigate. Questions are adapted to the company's actual context and to what is at stake right now.
Building the questionnaire
Agreement scales across the dimensions of engagement — meaning at work, recognition, quality of management, working conditions, cross-department cooperation — complemented by open questions that capture verbatim comments.
Anonymous administration
Distributed to every employee in scope. A minimum number of respondents per department is set beforehand: below it, results are not broken down, so that no answer can ever be attributed.
Analysis and cross-referencing
Read by department and by population, gaps made explicit, quantitative data systematically cross-referenced with verbatim comments. An isolated figure explains nothing; holding the two in tension is what produces the diagnostic.
Debrief to leadership, then to teams
Leadership receives the results first, so they can take ownership of them. Each department then receives its own. Employees hear what their answers produced: that is precisely what makes the next survey credible.
Prioritisation and action plan per department
Each department sets its own priorities in a workshop. For each one: a stated objective, a named owner, and first actions with dates. Without a named owner, a priority stays an intention.
Repeated at regular intervals, a survey measures the effect of the actions taken and becomes a steering instrument. Run once, it only measures a mood.
The leadership team diagnostic.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni set out five levels of team functioning, each conditioning the next. A team cannot work on one level while the level beneath it remains unsecured.
That is exactly what makes it a diagnostic tool rather than merely a descriptive model: it does not only say what is wrong, it indicates where to start. A leadership team missing its collective results is rarely working on the right level.
Trust
Absence of trustYou cannot build a team without trust. Its members must agree to let their vulnerability show. The obstacle is the fear of being judged: the temptation is strong not to share mistakes or weaknesses in order to avoid exposure to criticism. Without a degree of comfort between people, no foundation is possible.
Recognise your points of vulnerability
The untouchables, the super-heroes
Constructive conflict
Fear of conflictA team unable to engage in productive debate on key topics creates two problems. First, stifling conflict increases the likelihood that members stay in a destructive defensive posture. Second, it leads to sub-optimal decisions, because the team never benefits from the honest ideas and perspectives of its members.
Move towards constructive confrontation and feedback
Artificial harmony: "collectively, all is well"
Commitment
Lack of commitmentWithout constructive exchange, it is hard for members to genuinely commit to decisions: they do not feel they had a real part in them. The resulting ambiguity and confusion frustrate high performers first. Once a decision is made, it must be put into action without reservation.
Support decisions and follow through on them
Creating ambiguity and vagueness
Mutual accountability
Avoidance of accountabilityWhen a team does not commit to a clear action plan, collective responsibility deteriorates sharply. Even the most results-oriented people hesitate to challenge peers on counterproductive behaviour if they doubt the decision was genuinely made in the first place.
Everyone accountable: encourage and challenge one another
Mediocrity, lowered standards, "the boss will notice"
Attention to collective results
Inattention to resultsWhen members do not feel collectively accountable, individual ego and the need for recognition are more likely to outweigh the team's results. The business suffers and the team begins to fall apart, as some place their personal goals ahead of the collective ones.
Put collective results ahead of personal status
Ego and the pursuit of individual recognition
38 statements scored individually
Each member of the team rates how the team operates across thirty-eight statements spread over the five levels — from "team members admit mistakes" through to "the team sticks to decisions".
An explicit reading of the scores
A score below 3.25 signals a dysfunction that needs fixing. Between 3.25 and 3.75, the level requires particular attention. Above 3.75, it is not holding the team back. Thresholds are stated before administration and never adjusted afterwards.
Cross-interviews in pairs
Members interview each other in pairs about their individual perceptions — twice twenty minutes — then report back in plenary on what they heard from the other. The exercise works on active listening and feedback practice at the same time.
A shared diagnostic, then an action plan
The team formulates the diagnostic of its own way of working. From it comes an action plan with quick wins: observable behavioural commitments that take effect the following week.
A demanding diagnostic, not to be run at any moment.
- A prior session introducing the model, so that everyone puts the same meaning behind the words.
- A level of collective maturity already built: feedback practice, active listening, familiarity with relational styles.
- A genuine willingness among members to improve how effectively they work together.
- While an open conflict is running: it must first be handled on its own terms, with the people concerned.
- When the environment is degraded to the point where people cannot speak freely.
Running this diagnostic in an unprepared climate produces the opposite of the intended effect. We would rather postpone an engagement than conduct it under the wrong conditions.
The 360° review.
A 360° sets a manager's self-assessment against the perceptions of their team, their peers and their own management. Its value lies not in the score but in the gap between intention and perception. Awareness comes from that gap.
We work across five behavioural themes. They do not measure technical skills but observable behaviours — the ones that concretely determine whether a team feels safe, heard and fairly treated.
Transparency and integrity
How consistently the manager communicates and acts. Reliability, honesty, and whether information is shared openly rather than withheld.
Walking the talk, maintaining a consistent message, and taking accountability during challenging times.
Psychological safety and work environment
The manager's ability to create a safe space. Do employees feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas, or reporting mistakes without fear of retaliation or mockery?
Emotional stability, respectful and constructive feedback, and fostering positive motivation rather than using pressure.
Performance management and employee support
How the manager sets expectations and supports the team in reaching its goals. Are evaluations fair, objective and free from micromanagement?
Clear objectives, collaborative monitoring, and genuine care for the team's professional development and growth.
Equity and team dynamics
How the manager handles the collective group: impartiality and the promotion of a collaborative, supportive culture rather than internal competition.
Fair treatment of all members, team cohesion, and proper public recognition of everyone's contributions.
Listening and receptiveness
The manager's openness to different perspectives and their ability to process and accept constructive criticism.
Active listening, approachability, and the willingness to adjust their own behaviour without becoming defensive.
- A 360° only has value if it is developmental. The results belong to the manager being reviewed, are debriefed with them individually, and feed a development plan.
- They never serve, on their own, as the basis for a career decision taken without the person's knowledge.
- We gather enough respondents in each category to preserve the anonymity of contributions, and we decline to break down any category that is under-represented.
Assessments in individual coaching.
An assessment is not a verdict on a person. It is a basis for dialogue: a structured hypothesis the coachee tests against their own lived situations. The value does not come from the report, it comes from the debrief conversation and the work it opens up.
We use these tools where they are relevant: taking on a new role, a professional transition, leadership development, or a relational difficulty that resists the usual explanations.
A psychometric instrument developed in the 1980s and continuously re-normed since, among the most recognised in the American and European markets. Its distinctive feature: it does not report what a person thinks of themselves, but the reputation they produce — what others observe.
- MVPI
Values and motives
The environment in which the person will genuinely thrive: what sets them in motion, what they seek out, and what eventually wears them down.
- HPI
Work habits and behaviours
How the person operates and interacts when functioning at their best, under normal conditions.
- HDS
Derailers
The behaviours that emerge under pressure — or conversely when someone is far too comfortable. These are defence mechanisms, and studying them helps explain how a decision can be distorted by a view that has become less objective.
Most of the value in the debrief lies in cross-referencing the three parts: their alignment — or their contradiction — opens up the most fertile development paths.
A model created by psychologist Taibi Kahler, structured around six personality types. It describes preferred communication channels, psychological needs and each person's stress sequences. It is not a classification tool but an operational framework for reading relationships.
- Rapidly decoding one's own communication preferences, and those of others.
- Identifying one's psychological needs and the concrete conditions under which they are met.
- Spotting one's stress sequences — the predictable behaviours that appear when a need stops being met — and intervening early rather than after the break.
Particularly useful when the difficulty is relational rather than a matter of skill: two people who cannot work together, a manager who does not connect with part of their team.
The results belong to the person assessed.
- The debrief takes place in a confidential one-to-one conversation, always led by a certified practitioner.
- No result is passed to a third party, employer included, without the person's explicit consent.
- An assessment never constitutes, on its own, the basis for a hiring or mobility decision.
- Our coaches are HEC-certified and bound by the EMCC code of ethics.
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