What Every Company Builder Can Learn From Sport Rituals
What Do the Chicago Bulls, New Zealand All Blacks, and Notre Dame Football Team all have in common?
In 1996 the Chicago Bulls were competing for their 6th championship in a season that would be chronicled in the excellent The Last Dance. They were worn out, beaten down, and experiencing a season of tumult. As the season ended their coach, Phil Jackson, asked each player to write a short poem about what the season had meant to them. After reading the poems aloud, they placed them in a rubbish bin and symbolically burned them to represent the end of their collective experience. Michael Jordan would retire after this season (for the second time) and coach Jackson would leave, but this experience would leave an indelible mark on those who participated.
You might not watch a lot of rugby, but I would guess that you’ve seen the dance below at some point. The New Zealand national team, the All Blacks perform the Haka dance at the start of each game. It’s designed to not only focus the team but also create contagious energy for the start of the match.
If Rugby is too obscure, how about American football? Notre Dame players touch a poster that says “Play Like a Champion” before running onto the field. It’s a small, but important reminder of what they’re playing for at this historic institution.
Each example above is a small but important ritual for the organization. While the examples are different in context and execution, they all serve a similar purpose. They help to physically manifest a set of abstract values and beliefs in the real world.
Rituals are a way to bring a company from a group of individuals to a cult. Great leaders know this and apply it when building sustainable and durable company cultures. Values tend to be abstract. They’re more philosophy than practice. Rituals help drive them into the real world. In this post, we will explore what specific characteristics of rituals work. And, I'll cover numerous examples you can choose from (or use to ideate) for your business.
But what are rituals, specifically? The book Rituals for Work includes the following four principles:
Rituals have a magical Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi factor
Rituals are done with intentionality with the person tuned in to this being a special moment
A ritual carries a symbolic value, that gives a sense of purpose and that is beyond pure practicality
A ritual evolves over time to better suit the people and the situation
It turns out that sociologists have identified a number of compelling reasons to invoke rituals:
Create order and meaning
Create a safe place to experiment
Enhance and enable social bonding
Help people feel in control
Increase performance by decreasing anxiety
Process and deal with negative transitions
Increase creativity
Improve the quality of a specific experience
Not every ritual needs to be filled with emotion like that of the Chicago Bulls, but adding a bit of ritual to your day-to-day drives company values from words to something more concrete. It can help turn your team from a collection of co-workers to a team bound by practices that focus their energies and efforts on a specific shared outcome.
Here are some of my favorite Work rituals that I’ve picked up or created over the past few years.
Hackathon: Done well, it’s a rally for innovation across the company. The best ones that I’ve seen are inclusive of the entire company as ideas frequently come from support, sales, and customer success. If you run a hackathon, you should 1) always review and celebrate the results and 2) publicize extensively before and after. After being especially key as there’s a certain afterglow that lingers when you go through an intense hackathon.
Failure Party: When a big bet fails you hold a party to recognize the effort and intention behind the bet. Especially good if you’re fostering a culture of smart risk-taking. Sometime during the event, there should be a short (5-10 minute) readout of what you learned to reinforce the lessons.
Passion Share Out: At the end of a sprint or during a regularly scheduled team meeting each person takes turns sharing something about their life that they’re particularly passionate about. They prepare a 5-minute presentation. Rotates to a new person each period. Designed to foster collaboration, sharing, and team building. Subjects for the share out are intentionally open.
Secret Handshake: Going to a big meeting or an important call? Do the secret handshake before. Think basketball or baseball. This works to both hype people up and takes off a bit of the anxious edge. The “secret” nature helps drive home the importance of the ritual as something unique and special to your team or group.
Deploy Like a Champ: Less relevant now than in the past due to continuous deployment, everyone involved in a release would touch the “Deploy like a champion” poster. Symbolizes that we’re all in it together and we’re playing as a team.
“Wings” ceremony: At a prior company you would earn your “wings” once you completed training and passed the evaluation. The evaluation was structured as a ritualistic ceremony. Instructors would don special costumes and ask their toughest questions. Candidates that passed would receive a pin enabling them to give client demos.
The No-Work Session: Lots of companies do this via “coffee chat” or a walk around the block. The format matters less than the intent: you need to carve out time to get to know your co-workers. My favorite ritual is a 30-minute no work talk coffee break.
Donut First Day: New employees have donuts or fresh juices near their desks to encourage mingling and interaction on their first day.
Clearing Conversations: Outlined here. Intentional ritualistic conversations for clearing friction between team members. Following the script and intentionally clearing the air is an important part of this ritual.
Diagnostics: A facilitator creates a safe conversation space for airing of issues without blame. The session should be focused on radical candor and action. The facilitator is tasked with pushing the conversation forward and documenting solutions.
Tiny Talks: Address challenging issues in a safe group space. This is an appropriate ritual to use after a re-org, layoff, departure, or disappointment of some kind. Set the topic, invite a limited number of people, and facilitate a candid conversation to address the topic head-on. Ensure that what is said in the room stays in the room. Agree on action items and end on time. It’s action and candor orientated in order to facilitate trust and outcomes.
Sales Gong: Hitting the gong after a big sale. In startups, sales are a team game. Hitting the gong and announcing the details of the deal is a good (if disruptive) way of celebrating the group effort. The salesperson hits the gong and thanks those who helped make the deal happen. Can be applied to recruiting as well.
Weekend Report: If you do a weekly meeting set intentional time for a “weekend report” where each member highlights what they did in some of their off time. If your meeting is late in the week you might do a “trip report” about where people traveled that week. Everyone stands when they share and you go around the room. Brings a human touch to what otherwise be a very business orientated meeting.
Process Buster: Everyone writes down a process that isn’t working, is too complex, or antiquated. Decide to kill or keep every one of those processes. At the end of the session, you hold a ceremony (and publish the results) for those processes you killed.
Sales Kick-Off (SKO): The SKO in itself can be a ritual, but with some intentionality, you can add a launch or kick-off ceremony to end the event. Likewise, to start you can do a ceremony to celebrate results or mourn misses through an airing of grievances. I recommend doing these quarterly.
Out with the Old: At the end of a challenging engineering project you symbolically “smash” the old way of doing things. You might smash an old desktop PC. Everyone gets to hit the item with a hammer.
Burn the Failure: In a culture of experimentation, it is sometimes necessary to put past failures behind you. You can hold a ceremony like Phil Jackson did to recognize the work that went into a project then burn stickies or papers associated with the projects to represent a final “closing”
Magic Words: Everyone knows someone who will hijack the conversation or rehash begone rescissions. Invoking magic words (like ‘Blue Baboon”) can serve to bring the conversation back to the center point. At any time someone senses the conversation drifting too far afield simply invoke the magic words.
Rituals are the acts that tie the abstract philosophies of values and cultures to concrete real-world action. They should be designed around the unique aspect of your culture and should reinforce your foundational values.
How do you bring rituals into your team? It’s easier than you think. They should be designed as a team, supported by a culture carrier, and be full of intent. The most important aspect of creating a work ritual is trying it -- as you create rituals that stick you can evolve them along with your growing company.