How the Leaders You Chose Shape the Culture You Build
Most organizations think they know their leaders.
They’ve sat across from them in performance reviews, watched them run meetings, and promoted them based on results. But knowing someone’s track record is not the same as understanding what drives them, and that gap is costing organizations more than they realize.
For C-suite leaders and HR executives tasked with building high-performance teams, leadership assessments offer something a résumé and interview simply cannot: a scientifically grounded picture of how a leader actually thinks, what motivates them, and whether their style will strengthen or strain the culture you’ve worked hard to build.
The most complete picture of a leader comes from a multi-science approach, layering different assessments together so you’re not seeing just one dimension of a person, but the full picture.
At Waterstone, we use five sciences that together give leaders and organizations a genuinely actionable view of how people behave, why they do what they do, and what they’re truly capable of.
The Five Sciences — And What They Actually Tell You
1. Behaviour (DISC)
DISC reveals how a leader communicates, makes decisions, and responds to conflict. It’s not about labelling people. It’s about giving teams a shared language.
When leaders understand each other’s behavioural styles, they stop misreading each other and start collaborating with intention.
2. Motivators (Driving Forces)
Driving Forces reveal the “why” behind the behaviour. A leader can have all the right skills for a role and still disengage within 18 months if their work isn’t aligned with what genuinely drives them.
Understanding motivators is one of the most underutilized levers in leadership development.
3. Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
EQ measures a leader’s ability to manage their own emotions and read the room. These skills matter in boardrooms, performance conversations, and moments of organizational change.
The leaders building Canada’s Most Admired™ organizations consistently demonstrate strong EQ. It’s not a soft skill. It’s a performance skill.
4. Competencies (Personal Skills)
Competencies assess 25 specific capabilities, from conflict management to conceptual thinking, so you can see not just what a leader does, but how naturally and effectively they do it.
This is particularly powerful for identifying where a leader will thrive versus where they need deliberate development.
5. Acumen
Acumen measures how a leader thinks, how they process information, how they assess risk, and how self-aware they are about their own blind spots.
For senior leadership roles, this is the lens that helps organizations evaluate not just what someone has done, but what they’re genuinely capable of in conditions they haven’t faced before.
Assessments Are Only As Valuable As What You Do With Them
Here’s where organizations leave results on the table.
They run assessments, share the reports, and move on. The insight never translates into behaviour change, role design, or team development.
The science matters. The debrief, the strategy, and the follow-through matter more.
At Waterstone, we don’t administer assessments in isolation. We use them as the foundation in executive search to find better leaders, through our leadership and culture advisory practice to build better cultures and embed them directly into LeaderX, our 6-month leadership development program.
Every LeaderX participant completes a 360° feedback assessment, a TriMetrix HD, and an EQ assessment at the outset. Not as data collection, but as the starting point for a personalized growth plan that lasts the duration of the program and beyond.
The result? Leaders understand how their behaviour shapes the culture around them, and leave equipped to build high-performance teams and cultures.
The Standard You Should Be Measuring Against
The leaders of Canada’s Most Admired™ Corporate Cultures didn’t earn that recognition by accident.
What the data from more than two decades of that program consistently shows is that high-performance cultures are led by people who know themselves, who align their teams around shared purpose, and who build environments where people bring their best.
The science exists to help you build a leadership team that operates at that level. The question is whether you’re using it.
Ready to build leaders who know themselves and the culture they’re shaping?
Click HERE to apply for the next cohort.
Learn more about Waterstone’s Leadership Assessments, the LeaderX program, or get in touch with our executive search team to help you find your next culture builder!