Craft Your Culture, Boost Your Business

It’s tough running a business.  And let’s be honest – many businesses don’t realise their full potential.  You may have a great, inspiring vision for what you want your company to become, but it’s hard turning that into reality.

One of the biggest issues is getting others to act in line with your plan.  No matter how clearly you articulate your vision, and no matter how often you explain it, people always seem to implement their own version of your vision – and each of their interpretations is slightly different.  So they end up pulling in different directions – and you end up tearing your hair out.

Culture can change all of that.  A strong, positive culture brings people together with a common purpose, a common way of doing things and a common way of approaching situations.

If a business strategy provides the “what?” and a broad outline of the “how?”, then culture completes the “how?” and, most importantly, provides the “why?”.  It is an essential part of your strategy implementation (and needs to be considered alongside strategy).  It is the route to success.

If you would like to read more about why “top down” approaches to culture are destined to fail, and how you can design and create the ideal culture for your organisation with the help of our tools, then look at the rest of our website.   If you are impatient and want to dive straight in and try making some changes to your organisation then click the link below to try out some steps you can take immediately.

start here - 5 actions you can take today

© 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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