How to Mange Culture the Aletheian Way

The Aletheian process is designed to transform your culture into one that fully supports your strategy and your objectives.  The purpose is to create a culture that encourages your people to think and act in a way that is coordinated, that is driven by a common set of priorities, and that is always consistent with what you are trying to achieve.  

We do this via a three step process:

  • Find out where you are – assess your current culture
  • Decide where you want to go – decide what sort of culture you want to create
  • Work out how to get there and take the journey – Design and Implement a Programme for Change

You can read more about each stage in the sections below, that take you to other pages that have more details about each stage.  When you’re ready, start applying the Aletheian method to your culture.  To get you started, hit the button below to see 5 things you can do today to start actively managing your culture.  What are you waiting for? 

Start Managing Your Culture TOday - 5 things you can do immediately

Stage 1:   How to Assess your Current Culture

The first step is to find out what sort of organisation your company is.  How do people habitually do things?  How do you make decisions?  How do you communicate, internally and externally? What is important to people?  The view from the top of the organisation isn’t always the whole picture.

When we work with clients, this is quite a nuanced process.   However as a quick guide and a useful tool for self-diagnosis, we divide companies into four different archetypes.  Most companies fit one of these.   To help you to decide which archetype your company might fit, we have prepared a 10 question quiz which is intended as a quick, fun but useful tool.

Obviously you can get quite a lot of information from looking at the archetype that your company fits, but you can also get some interesting insights by looking at the archetypes that your company doesn’t fit.  It often seems that there is only one way of thinking about things and one way of doing things – until you see that other companies that fit other archetypes take a completely different approach.  It can be eye-opening to look at these.

You can take the quiz by clicking here or hitting the button to the right.

Take our Quiz

Stage 2:  Decide What Sort of Culture You Want to Create

What sort of company should your company be?   What sort of culture should it have?   How should it make decisions?  What approach should it take to employees and customers?   How should it organise itself?   What priorities should it have?

As we have seen, the best form for your company is the one that best enables it to follow its strategy and meet its objectives.  This not only aligns your operations and the way that people naturally behave with what you are trying to achieve.  It also means that your company is much more authentic – it does things with honest intent to meet a clear goal rather than doing things for the sake of appearances or because it seems like the right thing to do.

Look at our module here (or click the button below) to learn how to take a structured approach to designing your ideal culture.   You can start by thinking about how each archetype would suit your own company’s objectives.  You can try on different corporate characters, and think about how things would work if your company naturally operated in this way or that way.  Which one would not work for you at all?  Which one would make it easiest to achieve your goals and objectives?   That is the archetype that you should model your company on.

Once you have done this, you can then go on to consider other areas in more detail.   How should your operations work?  Do you need a more structured approach to decision making, or one that considers more factors and more options?  Is your teamwork working?  Are your communications consistent with your priorities and strategy?  Do you live your values rather than talk about them?   These are the sort of issues that Aletheian look at when we work with clients.

See Stage 2 process

Stage 3:  Designing and Implementing a Programme for Change

Look at our module here (or click the button below) to see six of the key areas where we look to make changes when we help you to transform the culture of your organisation.   You can try making changes to these areas yourself.   Remember that making small changes in these areas can often have a big impact, potentially changing the whole company’s mindset or approach to certain aspects of your business.   However these changes are rarely irreversible, so feel free to experiment with them.   Try doing small things a little bit differently and observe the impact. 

See Stage 3 process

© Aletheian Advisors Ltd, 2025

5 Things You Can Do Today to Start Managing Culture

Here are 5 things you can do today to start managing your culture.  Pick one and dive in.

1. Take our quiz here to decide which archetype your company currently fits.  You can read more about the Aletheian archetypes here.

2. Audit your internal communications  Look at your communications with staff over the last 3 – 6 months (whether that is via “To All Staff” emails, “Town Hall” meetings or just “walking the floor”) and answer the following questions:

  • What do you talk about most in your communications to staff? What hidden message does this give about what is most important to you?
  • Have you made a clear statement to staff of your strategy and priorities (or do you just expect them to know)? Do you repeat this often?   Is it consistent with your own actions and your other communications to staff? 
  • When you explain a new strategy or set of priorities to people, what terms do you explain them in?  Do you talk about them in terms of achieving greater efficiency, or improved customer service, or profitability, or something else?   
  • Try to identify several times that your internal communications (or the hidden messages they give, such as what is most important to you) is inconsistent with your priorities and strategy. What will you do differently in future?

The ultimate aim is to develop an internal communications strategy that gets people to prioritise the objectives and activities that you want them to focus on, because they pick up on the hidden messages to be found in what you choose to talk about most, and how you choose to talk about it.  

3. Audit your values  Think about the following questions:

  • What are your company values? Do they actually mean anything?  If nobody would ever say the opposite (e.g. nobody would ever say that their company thrives on dishonesty, or lack of integrity), does that value actually mean much?
  • Are the values something that you put on posters in the office and on your website, or do you live those values and let them speak for themselves?
  • Do you live your values all the time? Can you think of instances where you have not fully lived those values – or theoretical scenarios where you might compromise your values? 

The values that you actually live by are the only ones that count.  Those are the real values of the company.  Develop a strong set of values and your company will have a strong ethical foundation that will feed through into how you treat customers, how you treat staff, how staff treat each other, how you deal with suppliers and competitors and how you take tricky decisions.  

4. Read our article on Corporate Habits (you’ll find it here) and start working out whether the way your company habitually does things best serves your objectives and strategy.  Do people do things in a certain way just because “this is the way we have always done things”?  Are there better ways to do things?  Do your various processes and procedures fit together in a way that works well and makes sense?  Does anyone every review how things are done? What do your staff think – have you spoken to them about this? 

Remember that habits don’t just include habitual actions, but also attitudes,  habitual ways of thinking about markets, customers and staff, and habitual ways of making decisions.

Develop an integrated set of Corporate Habits that support your objectives and your corporate strategy and watch your results improve.   

5. Contact Aletheian if you would like to discuss how we can help you to mange any aspect of your corporate culture email us.  We like to hear from people about their culture challenges and we enjoy answering questions.  

Aletheian Advisors

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