Creating Rituals That Reinforce Company Mission

Countless books, my own personal experience, and hundreds of my conversations with CTOs and VPEs underscore how a big part of organizational change starts with culture. This isn't groundbreaking , but the best engineering leaders always start tackling this in the same way – *rituals*. Here's what that means, a 5 step process to help you design your own rituals, and a breakdown of well-known ritual through this process. Rituals are repeated, structured activities that create consistency, reinforce culture and drive tactical progress. I like calling them rituals because they: happen regularly, have a purpose beyond the obvious task itself, and they reinforce culture. Most of us already participate rituals in software engineering: standups, backlog grooming, sprint plannings and retros, code reviews, and so on. But there are other things you may not realize are rituals, including architecture review meetings, demo fridays, and even team all hands. How do you design a ritual? I'd start by answering these questions: 1. Define the cultural outcome you're trying drive. What friction exists today? 2. Clearly outline what new behavior you want to see. How do you want people to feel? 3. Determine the right participants and roles. Who are the influencers? Who are the stakeholders? 4. Choose a cadence and forum. Does it require synchronous review? How often? How urgent? 5. Outline a clear agenda or deliverable. What actual, hands-on-keyboard behavior reinforces the goal of this ritual? Let's break through an example – operational excellence reviews. 1. Define the outcome: an org-wide, cultural reverance for reliability + quality 2. New behavior: Teams take reliability into their own hands and continuously improve without external pressures. 3. Right participants and stakeholders: Team leads (drivers of new behavior), SRE (influencers), and CTO/VPE (to underscore importance). 4. Cadence and forum: Once or twice a month, depending on speed of org (frequent enough to create moment, far enough apart to be able to make changes). Synchronous, 45 minute meeting to drive meaningful conversation, until we're able to go async. 5. Clear agenda and deliverable: Review key metrics, SLOs, broken out by user journey. Scorecard (at a high level, not per-rule) review broken out by team. 15 minute open forum, ideally with one pre-defined conversation topic raised by team leads. Present updates at all hands every month. This ritual creates momentum and provides importance to reliability as an initiative that the organization cares about. Of course, it requires leadership buy in to act on things that come out of the ritual, but it creates the right feedback mechanisms and systems as a starting place. Here are some other ritual ideas: Friday demos, to create a culture of shipping. Hack weeks (shout out to the Cortex eng team for theirs last week!) to drive innovation. Demo at monthly all hands to showcase innovation to cross-functional teams. What ideas do you have?

When I joined Khan Academy, we were just four people in a small office, united by a vision of bringing free education to everyone, everywhere. Over the years, we grew to hundreds of employees, reaching over 100 million students worldwide. This exponential growth brought a significant challenge: how do you scale a team without losing the culture and values that made the organization special? The most crucial lesson I learned was that culture doesn't scale automatically - it demands constant attention and effort. The best way I found to attend to culture was to treat your culture like a product. You have to design it. As we grew, it became increasingly important to consider how to help team members learn about and carry the culture forward. Here are three strategies that helped us maintain our culture during rapid growth: 1. Over-communicate the Mission and the Principles that Guide it: As our team grew, we doubled down on ensuring everyone felt connected to our mission and understood our principles. Three of the most important principles were to focus on the student, Always be learning, and deliver exceptional ROI for donors. We regularly shared stories of how our work impacted students' lives, and what we learned from failures and successes, and calculated the number of learning minutes to keep the team aligned with our "why" and “how” and motivated by our shared purpose. 2. Create Rituals that Reinforce Values: We have meaningful rituals, such as starting meetings with student success stories and celebrating what teams learned, not just what they accomplished when we gave status updates. We also organized a yearly talent show and encouraged people to showcase new talents and skills. These practices served as constant reminders of our principles in action. 3. Adapt, but Stay True to Core Values: Growth necessitated changes in processes, tools, and communication methods. For example, we used to be able to share what we were learning during all-hands meetings, but at some point, it became impossible for each team to give an update. As part of our commitment to learning, we began to document our learnings and shared long-form asynchronous updates with everyone. We then shared summaries during all-hands meetings. Scaling a team while preserving its culture is challenging, and we weren’t always successful, either. But we were lucky that the team let us know when they thought we weren’t living up to the mission or principles and encouraged us to make changes.  It is achievable if you remain open to feedback and stay focused on core principles. What strategies have you employed to maintain culture as your team or organization grew?

There has been a lot of talk about ‘founder mode’ lately. Not only am I a big believer in founder mode—I don’t think it goes far enough. The core question is this: “When companies scale, should founders step back and let professional managers take over, or stay deeply involved at every level?” As someone who’s been both a founder and a hired exec, I’ve seen firsthand that neither extreme works perfectly as companies grow. As crucial as it is for founders to live and breathe their company’s details, the missing piece in the conversation is how to scale founder mode effectively. It's tempting for founders to remain deeply involved—pressing the “more” button to handle things themselves or swooping in on the details—since that’s how they’ve always done things. This mindset becomes harder to maintain as the team scales to hundreds or thousands of people, but stepping back entirely isn’t the answer either. To keep the founder’s vision, energy, and values alive as our companies grow, the answer lies in embedding those qualities into the fabric of the organization. We need tools and processes to translate our “founderness” into the hearts and minds of our employees. Here are 3️⃣ ways I’ve seen companies do this well: 🤝Hire for outcomes + values:  Using a clear hiring process with scorecards that reflect both the results you want to deliver and the values you expect people to live by ensures that as you scale, people behave in the same way they did in the early days. Publicly rewarding people for living those values can help entrench them as you grow. 🤩Create traditions: One of the best ways to scale founder mode is to craft traditions and rituals that represent what you want to see in the company behavior. Examples I’ve seen or started in the past include things like Friday afternoon tech demos where people highlight what they are working on, #FestivalOfFailure Slack channels where people openly share mistakes, founder holiday gifts to the team that show deep appreciation, and themed team meetings that help people connect and have fun (the photo in this post is from a recent “heat” themed team meeting). These traditions can scale from a small team to hundreds of teams who carry them forward. 📈Scale leadership:  One thing that can happen when companies bring in outside execs is they neglect to properly train and support the existing managers and others in the organization who need to scale their own skills as the company grows. We built Rising Team to equip managers at all levels to learn and practice the skills they need to run high-performing teams. Giving the right tools to leaders at all levels instills ‘founder mode’ behaviors across every team. Founder mode doesn’t mean you have to choose between staying in the weeds or stepping back. The key is to scale your leadership through your team, empower them to carry your vision forward, and dive in deep when needed. #FounderMode #Scale #StartupLife #TeamBuilding

We recently had our 100th Townhall at Guru. This is one of my favorite rituals, and we’ve found it to be a great way to build culture and alignment. Here are 7 learnings on what we have found works well: 1. Set the mood - we play an opening and closing song at every Townhall. It breaks the ice and there are usually strong opinions shared in the Zoom chat. And yes, I choose the songs with no input allowed so I can force my musical tastes on the rest of the team. 2. Create a level playing field - we have a hybrid team so we made the difficult decision to ask all presenters to deliver their topics via Zoom vs on stage in the office. That way remote and in-office employees get the same experience. 3. Values in action - at every Townhall we have a section dedicated to Guru’s core values. Employees can nominate a teammate who “lives” our values, and I thank that person publicly. It’s a way to acknowledge this important work while also reinforcing our values. 4. Voice of the customer - at every Townhall we interview a customer or play a recording of a customer call. These usually center on a theme, like a challenge we’re having or a new capability we released. Nothing beats hearing it straight from the customer. 5. Avoid heavy financials - we used to review financial performance at Townhalls, but it’s a lot to digest live. We found that it works better for our CFO Dennis to send a video that employees can watch on demand. 6. Anonymous questions - we give employees the ability to anonymously submit questions which are answered live at Townhalls. We debated this decision because ideally we want everyone to feel comfortable asking questions without anonymity. But we found this ritual to be a good way to normalize asking tough questions day to day. 7. Don’t sugar coat it – it’s important to share bad news as well as good news. Yes we want everyone to leave a Townhall feeling fired up by recent wins, but the team has always responded well to the transparency of hearing the not-so-good news too. A Townhall to me is a place to bring the whole team together, reinforce strategy, and celebrate momentum. We’ve had some hits and some misses, but these sessions have been a great ritual for Guru. How does your company do Townhalls or All-hands meetings? #companyculture #townhall #allhands