Edge Assessment: The Organizational Anthropologist’s Lens on Your Sales Team
Applied Anthropology-Based Diagnostics for Revenue Leadership Teams
What is the Edge Assessment?
Every sales team has a culture, but most of it was never planned or designed.
It's tempting to think team culture is just what the CRO prioritizes and applauds, or what's in the comp plan and the sales playbook. In reality, it's the collection of unspoken, unwritten rules that are constantly being co-created by everyone in the group. These hidden rules define what "normal" looks like on your forecast calls: which deals get called honestly, whose numbers get a pass, how a struggling rep gets talked about behind closed doors versus in the room.
As an Organizational Anthropologist, I study these invisible rules the way a field researcher studies a community: by observing patterns, listening beneath the surface, and identifying the root causes behind behaviors that pipeline reports and CRM dashboards miss entirely.
Most sales cultures break down in one of two directions, and both do the same damage:
A manager who leans toward interrogation, too much accountability, and not enough empathy gets pipeline visibility, but no one tells them the truth willingly.
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A manager who leans toward over-protection, too much empathy, and not enough accountability keeps the trust but loses forecast accuracy.
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Both signal the same thing to a rep, whether the manager means to or not: I don't think you can handle this. The Edge Assessment is built to show you which direction each of your managers leans, and where.
The result is a clear, specific picture of where your team's forecast honesty is breaking down, and a concrete roadmap for closing the gap.
This is for you if:
Your team already has real trust and real relationships. The gap isn't caring about each other. The gap is what happens to the forecast the moment someone needs to say a hard number out loud.
This is not for you if:
You need a consultant to convince your sales leaders that psychological safety matters or that emotional intelligence is a necessary leadership skill. This assessment assumes that your leadership team already has empathy and self-awareness.
Why It Matters Now
Sales leaders are under pressure to hit an aggressive number, adopt new AI tools, and manage a team that's stretched thin, all at once. When a dysfunctional norm like sandbagging a forecast or avoiding a hard coaching conversation becomes "just how we do things here," it calcifies. No new CRM, comp plan redesign, or motivational SKO will change it until the norm itself is named and deliberately replaced.
27% of managers are "very skilled" at resolving conflict
The gap is well documented. The Workplace Peace Institute's 2024 State of Workplace Conflict survey found that only 27% of managers are rated as "very skilled" at resolving conflict. That's not a sales-specific number, but it's the general condition this assessment is built to correct in your team specifically, with your actual pipeline reviews and forecast calls as the material.
25% Tipping Point to create a new normal across an entire team
The good news: you don't need to convert your whole team to close that gap. Research on behavioral norms consistently finds a tipping point around one in four (Damon Centola, Change: How to Make Big Things Happen). When roughly 25% of a team adopts a new norm, it becomes the standard the rest of the group follows. Finding the right 25% and equipping them to become Edge Catalysts is the fastest lever to shift how your team handles forecast honesty and accountability.
Interpersonal Conflict Resolution is an AI-Proof Skill
McKinsey Global Institute's research on AI and the future of work adds the longer-term stakes: as automation spreads, a small set of skills is likely to remain uniquely human, rooted in empathy, judgment, and interpersonal conflict resolution specifically. That's not a soft-skills footnote. It's the actual skill this assessment is built to strengthen.
The Three-Phase Culture Assessment
Establish a Baseline
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Before anything can change, you need an honest picture of where you are.
Using a proprietary blend of qualitative and quantitative research methods, including structured interviews, behavioral observation, sentiment analysis, and validated assessment tools, Cultivate Empathy will map the cultural terrain of your team:
Assess transformational readiness: capacity for change, psychological safety, and leadership growth mindset
Identify the unspoken rules driving current behaviors, both the ones serving your team and the ones silently undermining it
Surface the friction points, trust gaps, and cultural debt that are fueling dysfunction, burnout, or resistance to change
Identify individuals with the influence and disposition to become Culture Catalysts
Deliver a clear findings report with prioritized recommendations; a map of leverage points
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Culture Baseline Report with prioritized findings and recommended interventions.
Activate
Culture Catalysts
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Top-down cultural change will break down. Sticky cultural change comes from the inside out.
Research consistently shows that leaders cannot shift a team's behavioral norms on their own. But a small number of well-positioned, well-equipped peers can. Cultivate Empathy with Edges identifies and develops these Edge Catalysts: the individuals within your team whose relationships, credibility, and influence uniquely position them to model and normalize new behaviors.
Build core skills in empathy-based leadership, psychological safety, and high-EQ communication
Learn to apply these skills across three critical dimensions of team management: conflict navigation, change communication, and inclusive decision-making
Develop peer mentoring circles to co-create solutions to real, live team challenges in real time
Create accountability structures that sustain behavior change without top-down enforcement
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Culture Catalyst cohort trained and activated; peer mentoring structure established.
Measure and Sustain
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What gets measured gets changed. What gets named gets normalized.
Organizational culture change is not a one-time event. Change is a consistent, persistent shift in the gravitational field of your team. Phase 3 ensures that the changes take root, tracks their impact over time, and provides leadership with the data they need to demonstrate ROI.
Measure qualitative and quantitative impact, including: employee satisfaction index, psychological safety scores, reported interpersonal friction, and voluntary attrition rates
Compare against baseline findings to track meaningful movement
Ongoing strategy calls to address emerging challenges and adjust interventions in real time
Final ROI report with documented cultural shifts, data-backed outcomes, and recommendations for sustaining the change
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Impact Report with quantitative and qualitative ROI documentation; sustainability roadmap.
Who This Is For
The Edge Assessment is designed for:
HR and People Ops Leaders
You know something is wrong with your team culture, but you don't have the diagnostic tools to identify exactly what the issue is, or the bandwidth to fix it.
Mid-Size Executives
You are navigating an AI rollout, reorg, or post-merger integration, and are seeing unexpected resistance, conflict, or attrition.
L&D and Talent Development Teams
You want to build manager capacity and culture from the inside out, not just train skills in a vacuum.
You don't need to have all the answers. You need the right questions.
And someone who knows how to find them.
What Makes This Different
Built on Organizational Anthropology: the science of studying human behavior inside social systems.
Most culture assessments are surveys that tell you how people feel but leave out why they feel that way, and they rarely surface the root causes driving the behaviors your leadership team is losing sleep over.
The Cultivate Empathy Culture Assessment is built on Organizational Anthropology: the science of studying human behavior inside social systems. In addition to sentiment analysis, I map the invisible architecture of your team's culture with the precision of a researcher and the practicality of someone who has led teams through real transformation.
The difference is the level of depth. And depth is where the leverage is.
Investment
The Culture Assessment is included in the Growth and Transformation consulting retainer tiers or available as a standalone engagement.
Standalone pricing is available upon request.
Quarterly Team Workshop (half-day)
Bi-weekly 60-min Strategy calls
Asynchronous email support between sessions
Monthly summary report
Full Culture Assessment (entire organization)
Monthly Team Workshops (60 minutes)
Quarterly Team Workshops (half-day)
Weekly 60-min Strategy calls
Asynchronous email support between sessions
Bi-weekly summary reports
Minimum engagement: 3 months. Engagements are billed monthly at the start of each period.