Winter Blog Series – A Purpose-Led Approach to Organisational Culture: Behaviours and Values

Let me start by wishing all of our friends and colleagues a very happy New Year! We ended 2025 with some reflections on the concept of purpose-led leadership and organisational culture. We considered the importance of aligning your organisational culture with your purpose as a means of ensuring resilience with integrity, along with the need for a new approach to leadership development which breaks down the traditional hierarchies surrounding leadership and instead centres leadership development on purpose.

At Achates we define organisational culture as the embodiment of your purpose as realised through the values, behaviours and experiences of key stakeholders, which are in turn underpinned by the structures, systems and processes within which your organisation operates. Aligning your culture to your purpose means that the values you uphold, the behaviours you embody, and the systems and processes you employ are all organised in a way which hold true to your distinctive organisational purpose – that is to say in a way which accurately reflects the work that you create or curate and the impact you are generating with and for your identified priority audiences (stakeholders). But what does this actually mean in practice? How can we tell if our organisational values and the way they manifest in our organisational behaviours are actually in line with our purpose or not? And does it really matter that much if they’re not joined up?

Put simply, yes. It matters a great deal. If your organisational culture does not stem from a clearly articulated, transparent and shared organisational purpose, then it’s likely that the experience of those working within and connected to your organisation will be affected as a result. A misalignment of purpose and culture can be evidenced in a myriad of ways but generally these can be summarised as: a lack of clarity around decision-making and prioritisation, an increased feeling of staff working in siloes, higher levels of absences as a result of mental health concerns, increased instances of burnout, greater staff turnover, a lack of accountability and an expanding gulf between different staffing levels, a slowdown in productivity, challenges in recruiting new talent and general frustration.

For many organisations, ‘values’ have become well-intended buzzwords, often created in isolation from the organisational purpose and which in turn have become hollowed out of meaning and application. We often see this manifest as values employed as decorations in office settings or used as yardsticks within difficult conversations, but are never fully able to be integrated naturally for all organisational stakeholders to live, breathe and embody in their day-to-day work.

So, whilst this paints a sobering picture and indeed is the reality for many of us in this sector, it need not be the status quo. Organisations who can clearly articulate a shared sense of organisational purpose can use this as a jumping-off point for an improved organisational culture. From the shared purpose, clear organisational values can be developed, which can be upheld proudly in day-to-day activities and not simply used as buzzwords in difficult conversations or as office decoration. Clear decisions can be made and priorities outlined which give space for stakeholders to collaborate, create, think, and critically to rest. Values become lived.

So how do you move forward from here? Firstly, think about your organisational purpose. If you were to ask any 3 people involved with your organisation in different ways, could they answer the question ‘what is your organisation for’ in roughly the same way? We aren’t talking about reciting the same sentences, but a shared understanding of exactly what you are trying to do with and for whom and the change you are bringing about.

Once your purpose is clear and owned by staff and Board, you can then review your organisational values in line with it because your values are a way of embodying your purpose. Assess how your stated values show up within that purpose and how those values enable the organisation to fulfil its agreed upon purpose. Do those values encourages a way of behaving which feels true to your organisational purpose and which in turn feeds into a set of systems and processes which enables you to drive the impact you want to drive with and for those key priority audiences (stakeholders)?

With a clear organisational purpose, you can then develop clear values which inform the behaviours that make up your organisation and the systems and processes which keep the motor of your organisation running smoothly. In doing so, you will bring a truly purpose-led approach to your organisational development, thereby enabling resilience with integrity.

At Achates all of our work is underlined by our purpose-led approach. Our digital membership platform, Achates Community, provides support, tools and resources to support organisations in implementing a purpose-led approach. The membership includes the Purposeful Leader Programme (PLP), which is our approach to leadership development in the sector, and supports participants to think about the concepts of purposeful leadership within the context of real topics and challenges faced by those in the sector today, and to develop the skills and tools needed to face those in a purposeful way.

In late November 2025, we launched PLP Advanced. This new programme – available to Achates Community members who have completed the first PLP programme – will apply the concepts of purposeful leadership to organisational culture, supporting participants to deepen their understanding of purposeful leadership and to develop an approach which adapts their organisational culture to align with purpose.

Access to these programmes is included in all Achates Community memberships, which is just £50p/m for cultural sector charity employees (for a minimum 12-month subscription), or £500 when paid up front.