The Five Weekly Rituals Every Leader Should Master
The Owl and The Beetle: Thursday Memo
Leadership is not just about giving orders. It's about creating a culture that encourages success. One of the best ways to do this is by implementing rituals.
This essay explores five weekly rituals that every leader should implement for successful leadership:
Status updates for accountability 📊
One-on-ones for individual performance management and people’s well-being 👥
All-hands meetings or town-hall sessions for transparency 🗣️
Retrospectives for process improvement 📈
Celebrations for boosting motivation and appreciation 🎉
These rituals promote accountability, transparency, continuous improvement, and positive work culture.
Dive in to learn more about each ritual and how to implement them! 💡
Let’s see them a little more in-depth:
1. Status Updates for Accountability
Status updates are a simple yet effective way to keep everyone on track. By sharing what each team member is working on, we can ensure everyone is responsible for their tasks. This ritual promotes accountability and helps identify any potential roadblocks early on.
Examples of status updates in development teams are daily standups and weekly team meetings.
An asynchronous status update may happen through a weekly recap of the project management boards, via internal blogging, or, more traditionally, using recap emails.
As a director of a large distributed company, I was following this process, which was fully asynchronous and based on internal blogging:
Every week, all the team members posted a memo on the internal team board, including the top 3 tasks they completed, 3 other tasks they worked on, and, optionally, 3 personal items they wanted to share with the team.
Every second week, every team lead condensed all the personal updates and published a team update to recap everything that happened that fortnight.
Every organizational structure above followed the same principle at fortnightly frequency, surfacing the status updates from the bottom of the organization to the very top.
Most dialogue regarding status updates was conducted in written form in the comment section of every posting. This eliminated the necessity of discussing status updates verbally during team meetings and one-on-one conversations.
It was unfrequent, yet possible, to have conflicts arising from such a level of transparency and accountability. For more insights on resolving team confrontations, check out this guide:
2. One-on-Ones for Individual Performance Management and People's Wellbeing
One-on-one meetings are a powerful tool for managing individual performance and ensuring people's well-being. These meetings provide a safe space for team members to share their concerns, discuss their goals, and receive personalized feedback.
Regular one-on-ones can lead to improved job satisfaction and overall happiness.
A few general principles for great one-on-ones are:
Ensure the consistent scheduling of these meetings.
Maintain complete engagement and concentration during the entire discourse.
Promote questions, and make sure to answer them thoroughly and patiently.
If you want to learn more about the power of one-on-one meetings, Paolo Belcastro, my manager, and mentor for many years, recently published a masterpiece article on the matter. If you happen to run one-on-one meetings, you cannot miss it.
3. All-Hands Meetings or Town Hall Sessions for Transparency
All-hand meetings or Town Hall sessions are a great way to promote organizational transparency. These meetings allow team members to ask questions, share ideas, and discuss topics openly.
They can help foster a culture of openness and mutual respect.
An all-hands meeting, sometimes called “Town Hall,” is an excellent opportunity to discuss topics such as:
Highlights: These events typically begin with a brief overview of the highlights from the previous business cycle. It’s a good idea to include photographs of team members engaging in lighthearted activities, any significant events such as introducing a new initiative or product, and any joyful, memorable moments the team has shared recently.
Key Metrics: All-hand meetings allow sharing of critical figures with the whole organization. This practice makes sure everyone is on the same page regarding the business.
Impact: People may lose sight of your organization’s impact on the surrounding community, and it becomes crucial to encourage the team to take a moment to reflect and commend themselves for their daily contributions towards improving the world.
Business Goals & Challenges: It’s great practice to remind the team about short-term and long-term goals and strategies. This ensures that everyone on the team understands what they strive to achieve now and in the coming weeks and months.
New Initiatives: In this segment, you can discuss all the new ideas the team has conceived, the experiments they plan to execute, and the objectives for each. Team members contribute by sharing their thoughts and ideas, sparking a free-flowing discussion.
Ask Me Anything: Often, people have questions they are hesitant to ask in the day-to-day setting, and it’s a good idea to offer a platform that encourages transparency and psychological safety. If you host an AMA session, remember that “anything” truly means "ANYTHING.” Be ready for the fun!
4. Retrospectives for Process Improvement
Holding regular retrospectives provides valuable insights for future improvement. These rituals allow the team to reflect on what went well, what didn't, and what could be done differently next time.
A retrospective allows you to reflect on your team's work to improve teamwork, looking at what was successful and failed and understanding why.
You can run retrospectives on every process you have in place. However, the two primary flavors are team retrospectives and project retrospectives.
The team retro helps improve the team’s processes regularly. If you adopt agile processes, you might want to have a team retro in sync with your sprints.
The project retro is a ritual you can establish as part of your project management bureaucracy.
When I was directing engineering teams, we had the rule that a project could be marked as completed only after the retrospective was published on the public board.
I recommend you conduct a retrospective with your team every few weeks or after reaching a project milestone.
Here you can find a good starting point for conducting a successful retro.
5. Celebrations for Boosting Motivation and Appreciation
Celebrating successes, big or small, can significantly boost team morale. Whether it's a project completion, a team member's work anniversary, or hitting a sales target, taking the time to celebrate can show your team that their efforts are appreciated. It's a simple yet effective way to motivate your team and foster a positive work culture.
As a leader, it's crucial to acknowledge your team's hard work, but various factors can make this challenging. A leader might not fully understand the team's achievements if they're not involved in daily tasks, making it hard to celebrate successes. This excellent piece explores all the challenges of celebrating success with your team and offers great advice on recognizing people.
Remote teams may celebrate their success in person, organizing off-sites together, often called “meetups.” The importance of such events in distributed companies is well explained in this excellent article you should not miss.
Wrapping up
In conclusion, these five rituals are crucial to successful leadership. By implementing these rituals, leaders can create a positive and productive work environment where everyone feels valued and motivated.
So, why not give them a try?
They might be the missing piece in your leadership puzzle.