Shishir Mehrotra: recommendation

Transcript context

…There's a whole section of the book on ... I get this question a lot of how do I find the rituals we have? How do I adjust the rituals to match? Are they supposed to change? There's lots of things you see because some rituals are great when you're 100 people and they're terrible when you're 1,000. And you should actively change those things. Some are great in what sometimes people call peacetime versus wartime. You should do this during this time, but you should actively not do it when you're in this other time. And actually, that in itself is a ritual. I mean, every company has some form of a war room ritual that is ... I guess Facebook I was learning. We did a dinner last night, so I learned a little bit about it. Facebook apparently calls them lockdowns, which is a term I hadn't heard before, but apparently it's well understood. When they say lockdown, everybody knows exactly what it means. It's like we no longer do the goal setting process, you drop this type of work and everybody just knows this is what it means. But I would say that when we talk to people about rituals, a set of rituals that happen organically. I mean, those are the easiest. Dory and Pulse for us was one of the product managers running a meeting just thought it was we're a distributed first culture, but hadn't really adapted to it properly. And this product manager is just annoyed at waiting around on Zoom for everybody to go around and say their piece and it just took forever. And by the end everybody's like, "Can we just pause? Everybody just write down what you think." And he just happened to do it in this thoughtful way and it just took off. And so some rituals grow organically and you just got to wait for them to do it. But there are cases where companies actively form a ritual to drive a certain behavior. And the best advice I've given on this topic is to read one of my other favorite books. It's a book called Switch. It's by Chip and Dan Heath. All their books are amazing, but they also wrote Decisive and Made to Stick and Moments and so on. But this one is, if I could recommend five books, this would take two slots on the list. And the subtitle of the book is How to Change Things When Change is Hard. And the basic idea of the book is they use this analogy of a writer on an elephant on a path. And when you're trying to change things, you have three options for what you can do and it actually kind of maps to Bing's analogy. So you can direct the writer, so you can tell people what to do. You can motivate the elephant, so you can give this thing a kick in the butt and it's going to move. You don't know exactly where it's going to move, but it's going to move. And you can shape the path. Shape the path is I'm going to set this way up so that you can only do these things. The way I think about it is direct the writer, tell people what to do. That's why if you look at Bing's tests, that's why you teach employees this before the first writing. u can only do these things. The way I think about it is direct the writer, tell people what to do. That's why if you look at Bing's tests, that's why you teach employees this before the first writing. You tell people this is what we do. And so some rituals, how do you get this ritual to work? You put it in your new hire onboarding and you make it work that way. Motivate the elephant, a lot of that's about branding. So what do you do with rituals? It's an amazing number of rituals where I'll tell people that seems like a great ritual. I would highly encourage you to give it a name. Give it something that lets people anchor ideas to. Names a very powerful thing. If I said, "Yeah, at Coda we do voting and sentiment writing or something," I don't even know what you would say. It would sound boring. It wouldn't sound like something you could brag about, something you could form identity around. And so it's very important to give it a name. And then finally, why do you shape the path or you set things up? You templatize, make it as easy as possible to follow this ritual. And make it just a part of what we do enough, then if you're at Gusto and you're like, "I don't really understand that hiring cult thing," where it's like guess what? You're going to be invited to one soon. You're going to see it and then you're going to have to do it. Or if you're at Square, you're going to see the spade template and you're going to learn how to do it. So I think Switch is ... I recommend this book for lots of purposes, but as you're thinking about rituals for your teams, it's a particularly relevant frame. Awesome. By the way, that's a little plug for the YouTube version of this podcast, which is now a thing we do. So if you're like, hey, I don't see what you're talking about, just search for Lenny's podcast, YouTube, and I think you'll find it and we'll probably link to the ad in the show notes. I'm also reminded of Airbnb's rituals, which you probably already know about, but they're kind of all hilarious and weird. One is formal Friday, where people dress up in suits and gowns on Fridays. Another is a human tunnel for all new employees, where every new employee has to run through a human tunnel and jump into a beanbag or something. And then there's a new hire tea time, where new hires drink some tea with some veterans and chat about where they're from and things like that. There's a bunch more, but those are the ones that are my favorite.…

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