Assessment Results: Your Lowest Category is Ritualize
How Systematic Is Your Approach to Company Culture?
Based on your assessment, it appears you need the most help ritualizing the practice of your Fundamentals – the behaviors that are critical to your success. Chapter 6 of Culture by Design will be of particular importance to you at this stage in your culture’s development.
A ritual, in the way that I use that term, is some behavior or practice that you do over and over again until it becomes a habit. Doing it is almost reflexive or second nature. It’s just “one of those things we do around here.”
It’s our nature as human beings that very few of us are good at sticking with things. In fact, we’re pretty poor at it. How many times have you started a diet or exercise program, only to give it up after a few weeks or months? How many programs have you rolled out at work, determined to make this one last, only to see it forgotten or pushed aside when you got busy or a new initiative took its place?
Rituals are what help us to stick with things when we wouldn’t normally have the motivation or discipline to do them ourselves. It’s the ritual that keeps the thing going, not us. So here’s the key idea I want you to consider: If there was a way to create rituals that were as automatic as brushing our teeth, or doing the national anthem at a baseball game, around how we teach and practice the behaviors critical to your company’s culture, it would be a game-changer. Ritualizing culture works because it removes the dependency on our discipline or motivation to make it stick. It’s the rituals that keep the practice alive, not our discipline.
There are a few really great examples of how you can ritualize your culture behaviors in Chapter 6 of Culture by Design. You can take a free peek inside the book here. You can also purchase your copy today on Amazon. If you’d like to explore how my team can be of further help, reach out today.