Culture and Rituals

Last night, I went to Kuuraku for dinner. As is a ritual in most good Japanese restaurants, we were greeted by the host with “irrashaimasen” or welcome.

What followed was beautiful - the entire crew of the restaurant including the cooks welcomed us. Over the next hour or so while we were there, I heard them do this over and over again every time a new guest entered the restaurant.

It was almost mindless. But it wasn’t meaningless. In that second or two it took to yell out this welcome, everything was suspended as the entire team came together to welcome their customers. Not just physically, but at a much deeper level.

Building a unique culture in any organisation is a very deliberate exercise. It takes a lot of intention, dedication and effort by leaders to ensure the culture permeates across levels in an organisation.

So, in that sense, I find myself extremely fortunate to have started my career in a company like Toyota which did a stellar job of creating a world-class culture and ensuring it translates not just across levels but across geographies.

Like this restaurant, we had a ritual - every morning, we started our work day with a group exercise with music through the PA system. Those few minutes every single morning was a reminder that we are one team. It didn’t matter if you were an engineer or the managing director, everyone was together in this ritual.

No matter which country I was in, we followed the same ritual. This one time, I was in Japan to oversee the build of a new Corolla prototype. I was standing next to our Pakistani colleagues, doing the morning exercise together, and I remember thinking how in that moment, everything in the world was suspended and the only thing that mattered was that we were all one team - team Toyota.

Similarly, when I played college basketball, we had a ritual - at every tournament, we’d enter the court to a specific song, do a few layups, put our hands together and scream “Go Ramaiah” before the start of every match. It was a reminder that no matter what happened, over the next 40 minutes, we are one team.

These rituals might seem frivolous at first, but we all need constant reminders of being part of a team - no matter what team that is.

The beauty of modern day organisations is that we are able to bring together very diverse individuals who create unique value. But this also creates silos within an organisation. Unless the organisation has invested in deliberating creating a unique culture, a lot of energy gets dissipated everyday in aligning these diverse individuals with diverse incentives towards common organisational goals.

In an era of venture capital and hyper growth, very few companies try to build a strong organisational culture from day 1. When we over-index on speed, the “rocketship” doesn’t care about parts of it falling off along the way. While this outlook might serve us in being propelled initially, sustenance can be challenge.

When we lay a solid foundation of strong values or tenets, create rituals to translate these values into culture, people start to identify with an overarching common theme that brings them together as team, despite their differences.

This is especially important today as work has become so mentally strenuous, and sometimes, isolating. We all need constant reminders that we are a team, a community, in it together, and that we are creating something grander than each of us - no matter what it is.

At Amazon, we used 14 leadership principles that guided all the work we did, and all the discussions we had. We applied them for hiring, appraisals, new product launches and restructures. Sometimes, it was misused, and that’s expected of any system. But more often than not, it helped half a million of us across the globe stay true to the vision of Amazon.

I must confess that I am not a very ritualistic person. My friends and I made fun of our exercise at Toyota, using Amazon’s leadership principles sometimes felt overbearing and waltzing onto the court to our song sometimes felt silly.

But last night’s dinner made me realise the importance of rituals in our life, especially when we are coming together as a family or a team or an organisation. It has a tremendous impact on what we can create together.

If you’ve got a fun ritual in your team or organisation, I’d love to hear.

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What I’m reading, watching and listening to:

Shivamma Yarehanchinala - I chanced upon this trailer on Youtube, and I loved it. I am so looking forward to watching this movie.

How Repressed Emotions Make Us Sick - This was an interesting perspective on processing emotions and how it affects our physical bodies.