One route to changing organizational culture
A short guide to the small daily building blocks of culture: rituals.
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In previous posts we’ve talked about how to begin to spot what kind of culture you’re working in. Once you’ve done that, you might see new gaps and opportunities—ways of making the organization (or even just your team) more effective. There are many ways to influence culture, but one that almost any manager can influence is through rituals.
Before we dive in, a quick definition: An organization’s culture is “the how”: the collection of values, expectations, behaviors and practices that guides and informs the actions of a group. The hardest part to get right, and perhaps the most important—because it drives the culture on a moment-to-moment basis—is how a group behaves together.
A behavior is simply the way any organism interacts with its environment. Every one of us behaves the way we do for innumerable reasons, but when individuals behave consistently at scale, it powerfully reinforces (or undermines) a culture.
With a few exceptions, singular behaviors matter less to culture than behaviors we repeat over and over again. When we expect a behavior—in ourselves, in another person, a team—that’s what we’d call a ritual. The word may call up a scene from Indiana Jones, but we’re just referring to the sorts of things people do daily, as simple as brushing their teeth or eating the same breakfast every morning.
So what does a ritual look like in the workplace? Some teams have accidental rituals that seem to happen because they have always happened, like a morning coffee run, or lingering around a manager’s desk for an unofficial gossip-swapping stand-up. When repeated (whether or not such behavior is written down or reinforced), it starts to look like a ritual.
Other rituals are more deliberate, like teams that ring a bell when they achieve something—a sales team closing some new business, or an engineering team successfully shipping bug-free code. Humans can be very simple, and at some point, a ritual like this becomes self-perpetuating. We look forward to it, and adjust our behavior to fit it.
Considering which rituals might support your desired organizational culture can be a powerful first step to influencing it, and there are all sorts of moments in the day where a new ritual might be embedded. When starting a meeting, when starting a new project, or even when something ends—it’s worth having a discussion with your team to consider your existing rituals, and where you might develop new ones.
What rituals have you observed in your team? How do they have an impact on the ways your team behaves?
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