Stage 3
Transforming Your Company

Once you have worked out what sort of company you have and what sort of company you want it to be, the final and most critical task is to transform the character of your company. 

At Aletheian, we have a number of methods for helping you to do this.    Here are six of the areas that we tend to focus on the most.  Click on each square to see how each area can be used to transform your company.

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A Structured Approach to Changing Culture

In Stage 1 of the Aletheian process you got an idea of the sort of culture your company currently has.  In Stage 2 of the process you developed a detailed blueprint of your desired culture, with a detailed description of what different elements of that culture would look like and how they are intended to encourage particular behaviours, attitudes, beliefs and ways of working.   The job now is to transition from one to the other.   This is how you can do that.  

1. Take the blueprint of your desired culture from Stage 2 and prioritise the various elements of that desired culture. Which will make the biggest difference to your company and its performance, and which will have less impact?  Which will be easiest to change, and which are likely to be more difficult to tackle?   We usually find that there are a few things that stand out – things where clients immediately say “if I could change that, it would make all the difference”.   

2. Choose one element that you want to change – it is better to work on one aspect at a time, particularly to begin with.  For your first efforts to change culture, it may be better not to select one of the most important or critical elements.  Perhaps choose one that is easy to change where the impacts will be easy to see, leaving the most critical elements until later.    

3. Think of which sort of lever might best change the element that you want to change. For example, if you want to change culture so that two teams interact differently, you can try to achieve this via a change in the structure around those two teams (such as reporting lines,  seating arrangements or formal procedures). If you want to improve the effectiveness of your back office operations and align these more closely with your strategy, it might be best to look to change some relevant corporate habits.  If you want to change the way that decisions are made, change the structure of the decision making process itself, such as introducing a different way of gathering and analysing information, or a different way of identifying all the different possible courses of action, or a different way of assessing all of the different options. 

4. Once you have decided on which sort of lever to use to achieve change, work out the fine detail. Remember that many cultural changes are achieved indirectly, by influencing people or by changing the social cues that people respond to.  This is often a very subtle process that changes the way people think and approach their roles.  That in turn changes the way they do their jobs and the results they get.  Other changes are achieved more directly, by direct interventions to get people to do things differently.   

When you influence people to do things differently, that new way of doing things usually feels natural to them from the start.  When you are more directive and tell people to do things differently, the new way of doing things will feel awkward at first, but it will become normalised through repetition and reinforcement and it is absorbed into the culture.   Small changes can have a big impact, particularly if the change will cascade throughout the organisation as people imitate the new way of doing things.  

Most initiatives to change culture will involve some form of communication.   Think carefully about how and when you communicate, and ensure that you are not contradicting or undermining your message, either explicitly via other messages or indirectly via any hidden messages that you may be sending.   For example, a message trying to encourage people to take more initiative would be undermined if there were other parallel messages about centralised control.  

5. Observe the effect of the change and reinforce or adjust as necessary.  The best approach to culture change is one of constant experimentation, to see what works and what does not.  

Changing culture is not a “once and done” process.   It requires constant attention and reinforcement.  Any culture is constantly changing, and as soon as you stop trying to manage and shape culture it begins to develop on its own, often in random directions that do not help your business.   

© Aletheian Advisors Ltd, 2025

What Management Say

People pay attention to what you say, and they adapt their behaviour accordingly.  If you say that something is important, then they treat it as important.   If you rarely mention something, then they treat it as unimportant.  

This is not about inspiring Churchillian speeches but rather about the minutiae of day-to-day communications.

We did an experiment with one organisation we worked with.  We tracked every management communication for several months and found that over two-thirds of them were about internal processes and procedures.   You can guess what the people in that organisation prioritised – over and above profitability and customer service. 

It is vital to get the content and tone of internal comms right.  You are telling people that certain topics are important enough for you to talk about repeatedly – and others are not important enough to get a mention.   People respond to that, and they respond to the way that you speak to them, whether that is open and friendly or authoritarian or patronising.

This is not about a single communication, but about the pattern over time.   It’s about balance – between positive and negative, between fun and social against business focused, between the various different aspects of the business that warrant communication “from the top”.  What are the hidden messages that people are getting from your internal communications?  

What Management Do

People don’t just pay attention to what you say – they also watch what you do very closely, and they imitate you.  If your words and your actions are inconsistent, they will pay attention to what you actually do.  As the old saying goes “actions speak louder than words”.

What issues do you spend your time on?  What is your management style?   What is your decision making style?   Do you consult widely, or do you speak only to other senior managers?     Is your focus mainly internal, or mainly external?  Are you open to new ideas?   What information do you pay attention to – and what information do you ignore?  What is really important to you?

People observe all of these aspects of your behaviour very carefully, even if they are not aware of it.   They then take their cue from you, and mirror your behaviour and your priorities.  They do this almost without being aware that they are doing it.   As primates, we are hard wired to imitate the behaviour of others, particularly higher status individuals.    

It is part of the culture of any organisation to pay a great deal of attention to certain elements of its business, and to ignore others.  You can’t focus on everything.    If you change the focus, this in turn changes what people pay attention to and prioritise, which in turn changes how they do their jobs, which in turn changes the results the company gets. 

Corporate Habits

Corporate habits are the way that people naturally do things without thinking.  If you ask people why they do things that way, the answer will often be “that’s just the way we do things around here”.  These corporate habits are a direct expression of the culture of the organisation.  Like culture itself, they often develop over time almost randomly – there is often little rhyme or reason to them, and they often survive long after the initial rationale for doing something that way has disappeared.  Sometimes they can be helpful shortcuts, but sometimes they get in the way of the company operating efficiently or achieving its objectives.

These habits don’t just include certain ways of doing things.  They can also include a particular way of viewing the world and certain attitudes towards staff, competitors, the market, customers or the business.  This can create blind spots as people fail to consider any alternative perspective.  

Changing these corporate habits can be very hard work because they are so ingrained.  You can meet a lot of resistance.  But the scope to change the ways the organisation operates are obvious.  You can tailor-make new habits that are designed around your corporate strategy and the way you need the organisation to function in order to maximise your results.

Decision Making

Most people don’t think about the way that they make decisions.  They don’t give any thought to the information that they call upon before making the decision or the analysis they do.   More often than not people rely on instinct (rather than a more structured process) to make decisions, and they are not even aware that there are other ways of going about decision making.  They do not use any system or technique to identify the various different choices, nor do they use any of the available tools to evaluate and compare the various alternatives.

Changing the way that decisions are made can have a big impact on results.  It can also have a significant influence on culture.   If management are seen to consider certain factors when making decisions, those factors become important within the company.  Equally, the company’s culture will devalue and ignore things that are rarely considered when making decisions.  

If senior management adopt a particular style of decision making and consider certain factors in their decisions, that will tend to cascade down the organisation.   Managers at lower levels will be keen for senior managers to support and approve of their decisions, and so will consider the same factors and adopt the same decision making techniques.  

Structure

The structure you put around people has a profound impact on the way they do their day-to-day jobs.  Structure can include anything from reporting lines and team structure to rules and regulations to seating plans.  Each of these can determine the way that people do everyday tasks and in particular who they interact with and what they prioritise.  This can have a huge impact on results.  

Two people who sit next to each other will interact far more than if they were on different floors.  If one of those people completes one stage in a process and then hands on to the other for the next stage, obviously their work will be far better coordinated if they sit next to each other.  But not everyone can sit next to every other person, so operational priorities have to be made.   Where does the organisation gain most via better coordination, and where is it less important? Getting this right can make a big difference both to performance levels and to the approach taken to the work. 

Similarly, adding extra steps or double checks into a process, or changing reporting lines, can have a significant impact.  For example, suppose you have a team that is only responsible for sales (but not for delivery).  The Head of Sales will push them to sell more and more, even if the delivery team is struggling to keep up and customer satisfaction is suffering.   The sales and delivery teams are probably antagonistic and blame each other when things go wrong.  If you combine the two teams under a single manager then the sales team will be made to ensure that what they sell is deliverable.  

Changing structure is so powerful that it takes a complete and thorough understanding of all elements of operations to make changes effectively.  Unintended consequences can be very damaging, so caution is advised. 

Your Story

The stories that people tell about your business are very powerful.  That could be your brand story, but for these purposes we are mostly concerned with the narratives and beliefs about the company that circulate among management and employees.   Those narratives aren’t just established and maintain via the stories that are told and re-told – about what the CEO did at the Christmas party, or about that time that Bill landed that amazing sale.  They are also embedded in traditions, ceremonies, celebrations and other events.   What do these say about the company and its culture? What elements of the business do people talk about?  What successes are celebrated – and which are not celebrated?

These narrative elements make a huge difference to the way in which people inside the company see their work, their roles and the company itself. The stories don’t have to be profound or world changing, in fact the simpler the better.  A simple underlying message often has more emotional resonance, and is therefore usually the best way to engage your employees and give them a sense of belonging and of common purpose.

Story telling is a great way to build a sense of identity and bind employees into the company’s mission.  There is an old story about John F. Kennedy meeting a janitor on a visit to the NASA Space Centre.  Noticing the janitor mopping the corridor, the President asked him what he was doing.  Without missing a beat, the janitor replied “I’m helping to put a man on the moon, Mr President.”

An obvious question is how to tell and seed such stories and narratives into the fabric of your company.  You could do what we did and make it a habit to discuss why we founded our company and what we want to do for customers.  You could include appropriate story telling about your business in final round interviews of prospective employees. You can also tell stories and build narratives through actions – you can build up an identity and a narrative through the things that you choose to celebrate, through the welcome given to new joiners and even through the reception people get when they arrive at work in the morning,  

Aletheian Advisors

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