For HR Leaders
You already have the data.
Now get the language.
HR has been naming the culture problem for years. The Human Alignment Diagnostic gives you the framework to help leadership finally see it as the business problem it actually is.
Start the Conversation →The frustration HR knows well
Only 18% of employees feel their organisation's stated values match the reality of its culture.
You already know this. You see it in the engagement scores, the exit interviews, the quiet resignation that doesn't show up in any metric until someone has already left.
Leadership says collaboration. The reward system says individual heroics. Leadership says psychological safety. The culture says don't make us uncomfortable.
You've raised it. You've presented the data. You've commissioned the surveys. And yet the same patterns keep returning — because the intervention keeps targeting the symptoms rather than the source.
The source is a gap between the values the organisation declares and the values that are actually running the show. And it won't close until leadership can see it precisely enough to act on it.
The cost of misalignment
This is not a soft problem. It has hard consequences.
18%
of employees feel their organisation's stated values are strongly aligned with the reality of its culture. The other 82% are navigating the gap every day.
↑ Turnover
Employees who experience a gap between declared values and lived culture are significantly more likely to disengage and leave — often without naming the real reason.
↓ Performance
Misalignment creates a hidden tax — energy spent navigating politics, managing around unclear values, having the same conversations repeatedly. It compounds silently until it doesn't.
What this gives HR
The evidence base and the language to make the business case leadership will finally act on.
Precise diagnosis, not vague survey data
The Values Integrity Model locates exactly where the gap sits — which values are declared but not lived, which are operating underground without accountability, which conflicts are driving the behaviour nobody can explain. Not a heatmap. A precise address.
A Situation Appraisal in business language
The diagnostic produces a report that translates the culture problem into cost — in measurable terms leadership understands. Not engagement scores. Business impact. The conversation HR has been trying to have, in the language the boardroom responds to.
Leadership owns the solution
The diagnostic closes with a co-design session — leadership builds the response with us rather than receiving it from us. Which means HR isn't pushing a solution uphill. Leadership is pulling it forward. That is the only way culture change actually happens.
HR's credibility as a strategic partner
When HR brings an external diagnostician with a rigorous methodology and a clear business case, the conversation shifts. You stop being the department that raises soft issues. You become the function that identified a structural problem before it became a crisis.
Does this sound familiar?
The symptoms HR is managing every week.
Leadership models behaviour that contradicts the values on the wall
High performers leave without giving the real reason
Engagement initiatives launch with energy and quietly disappear
The same dysfunctional patterns persist despite repeated interventions
New hires leave once the real culture becomes apparent
Collaboration is the stated value — silos are the operating reality
Bad news travels slowly upward, good news travels fast
People know what to say in performance reviews
These are not behaviour problems. They are values problems. And they have a precise address.
The process
Two weeks. One honest picture. A co-designed way forward.
Week one — we gain access to the whole organisation. Senior leadership, middle management, frontline teams. Semi-structured qualitative interviews using the Values Integrity Model surface what is actually driving behaviour — not the official version.
Week two — we produce a Situation Appraisal. A clear, honest account of what is happening, why, and what it is costing — framed in business terms against the organisation's budget and strategic priorities.
The co-design session — leadership builds the response with us. Not receives it. The solution is theirs. Which is the only reason it will stick.
Who you are working with
Mark Buchan MSc
Mark has spent more than twenty years working inside organisations where the gap between declared and operating values was quietly doing its damage. As a consultant, coach, and facilitator he has worked at every level — from frontline teams to executive leadership — surfacing what is actually driving behaviour and creating the conditions for honest, lasting change.
He is the author of The Hidden Gap: Solving the Human Alignment Problem — the most complete account of the Values Integrity Model, ECHO framework, and the practical tools for closing the gap between declared values and operating reality.
He is not a soft skills trainer. He is an organisational diagnostician — and he will tell your leadership what HR has been trying to tell them for years.
Ready to make the business case?
Start with a free 30-minute conversation. Bring the problem as you see it. We will tell you honestly whether the Human Alignment Diagnostic is the right intervention — and if it isn't, we will say so.
No pitch. No proposal. Just an honest conversation.
Book Your Diagnostic Conversation →Or email iam@markbuchan.co.uk directly.