The importance of ritual in effective teams

Ritual is one of the least recognised and most powerful forces at work in teams, organisations and society. Rituals provide a basis for a sense of community and belonging – shared behaviours that have special collective meaning, even when that meaning is not explicit.

Rituals can be conscious or unconscious. They can also be individual or collective. As individuals, many of us have routines that we perform without thinking – like how we brush our teeth. All societies have rituals relating to greeting others, from the Māori haka to the simple handshake[1]. 

Ritual can also be an expression of power – for example, in many teams, the ritual of discussion requires the leader to be the first to give an opinion. In others, the leader speaks last, because he or she values diversity of perspective.

Rituals may only become obvious when observed by an outsider or when someone takes the perspective of an outsider – which isn’t always easy. They may also become disconnected from their original purpose. A wonderful example given top me recently was a hospital, where everyone, who cycled to work, had to sign in each morning with the number of miles they had travelled. No-one had a clue why. Eventually, the reason was traced back to the end of the Second World War, when food was rationed. Essential workers, who had further to travel to work, were given extra ration coupons. 

Once you start looking for rituals in teams, you find them everywhere, from the routine of meetings and the agenda in meetings, to how someone delivers bad news. The longer a team exists, the more rituals it accumulates and the less people are likely to question them – even if, like traditional regular performance appraisals, everyone hates them and they don’t have any practical benefit.

One of the insights a team coach can bring is to help the team identify its rituals, with a view to adapting them to the current environment. This may involve dropping some rituals that get in the way of efficacy and devising new ones that will be more helpful -- for example, rituals for showing each other respect and looking after each other’s well-being. 

When identifying a ritual, it helps to try to pin down what its original purpose was. Amongst the most common purposes are:

·      To build rapport and belonging. When a team develops its own language, it strengthens the sense of in-group, for example.

·      To create consistency of process. The traditional formula for a board agenda, for example, aimed to bring structure to what had previously often been disordered conversations. It also wastes time and creates process rigidity, so teams may seek to create new rituals that achieve the same objective more effectively.

·      To either clarify or obscure hierarchy. In the US, for example, it is common to have teams where everyone addresses everyone else by their first names, yet the accepted familiarity does not extend to questioning the boss’ decisions.  Many teams also have rituals relating to the onboarding of newcomers.

Shining the torchlight on ritual gives the team choices. It also allows it to examine ritual not just from the perspective of its specific purpose but also in the context of the evolving team purpose. A key question is How does this enable us to be the team our stakeholders need us to be?

A simple tool for making ritual more transparent is to ask everyone in the team to reflect at intervals through their day, over the course of a week. What am I doing right now and why? Am I doing it this way because that’s the way we always do it, or am I consciously reflecting upon whether this is the best way? 

Similar reflections can also be useful for coaches and team coaches. How much of the way we coach has become an unconscious ritual? A simple exercise is to record several coaching sessions and observe the routines and similarities. What would be the impact of not sticking to the pattern, experimenting with a different approach? Ritual can be a purposeful part of the conversational structure. It can also be a cosy routine that substitutes from having to be fully present and creative. So, a key message is that, before we help our clients, whether individuals or teams, to explore their rituals, we had best be attentive to our own!

© David Clutterbuck 2022

[1] For an insight into the role and evolution of the handshake, I recommend Ella Al-Shamahi’s The Handshake, Profile Books, 2021