Golden Rituals (Named, Known by Friday, Templated)
Culture is the product you build for employees; rituals are how you ship it.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 95%
Great companies run on a very short list of 'golden rituals', each of which passes three tests: it has a name, every employee knows it by their first Friday, and it is templated. Rituals are the observable mirror of culture — when you ask someone what a company's culture is, they answer by describing its rituals. Mehrotra has interviewed 1,000+ people for a book on the subject and installs borrowed rituals at Coda continuously.
Origin
The three-test definition is Bing Gordon's (co-founder of Electronic Arts, investor, board member alongside Mehrotra), quoted by Mehrotra on Masters of Scale and then expanded by him into a dinner series and the book 'The Rituals of Great Teams' (co-written with Erin Dame). The 'culture is the second product, built for employees' framing is Dharmesh Shah's (HubSpot). The installation model — direct the rider, motivate the elephant, shape the path — is from 'Switch' by Chip and Dan Heath.
Core principles
- 01A company builds two products: one for customers, one for employees. The second one is called culture.
- 02Rituals are the mirror of culture — people describe culture by listing rituals.
- 03A golden ritual is named, learned by the first Friday, and templated. Fail any test and it isn't one.
- 04The list should be very small. Amazon has six-pagers; Google has OKRs; Salesforce has V2MOM; Coda has Dory and Pulse.
- 05The tiny implementation details are what make or break a ritual, not the concept.
- 06Rituals have a lifespan: some are great at 100 people and terrible at 1,000; some are peacetime-only and must be actively suspended in wartime.
- 07Borrowing rituals from other companies is the cheapest form of R&D there is.
How to run it
- 1
Audit which of your rituals are already golden
Ask a new hire on their first Friday what the company's rituals are. Whatever they can name unprompted is a golden ritual. Everything else is either invisible or not yet a ritual.
Pro tip If people name a meeting-mechanics ritual, that's fine — it's not that they're meeting wonks, it's that the mechanics are indicative of the culture.
- 2
Let the organic ones surface, then bless them
Many of the best rituals start as one person's fix for an annoyance. Coda's Pulse began when a partner, tired of waiting on Zoom for everyone to speak in turn, said 'can we just write down what we think?' Watch for these, and when one takes off, make it official rather than inventing one from scratch.
Watch out You can't force an organic ritual. If it isn't spreading on its own, it needs a deliberate install (steps 4-6), not more evangelism.
- 3
Steal shamelessly from other companies
Interview peers about how they work. People love sharing their rituals and love hearing about others'. Take the mechanism, then adapt the detail to your context.
Pro tip Ask about the details, not the concept — 'we do that too, but we hit this problem, how did you get past it?' The little details are where the value is.
- 4
Direct the rider — teach it before the first Friday
Put the ritual in new-hire onboarding explicitly. Tell people what we do here and why. This is exactly why Bing's second test is 'by the first Friday'.
- 5
Motivate the elephant — give it a name
Naming is branding. 'Dory and Pulse' is something you can brag about and form identity around; 'voting and sentiment writing' is not. A name gives people something to anchor ideas to.
Pro tip Verbify it if you can — Square 'spades' a decision, Coinbase runs a 'RAPID', Facebook calls a crisis mode a 'lockdown' and everyone instantly knows what gets dropped.
Watch out An unnamed ritual sounds boring, cannot be taught in one sentence, and will not survive contact with growth.
- 6
Shape the path — template it
Make the ritual the easiest possible thing to do: a doc template, a meeting agenda, a form. At Square you see the spade template; at Gusto you're simply invited to the offer call and you do it. The template is what makes the ritual self-propagating.
- 7
Review rituals as the company changes size and season
Actively retire or amend rituals that don't survive scale, and define explicitly which rituals get suspended in a 'wartime' mode. Naming the wartime mode is itself a ritual.
Watch out Rituals that were great at 100 people can be actively destructive at 1,000. Keeping one out of nostalgia is how the ritual list stops being golden.
In the wild
Every Thrive employee records a personal 60-second video — photos of their kids, quotes they love, footage of their hometown, music they choose — built on a template as a breathing exercise. Meetings start with 'spin the wheel': a person is picked at random and the team plays their Reset together.
→ A two-for-one ritual — the team gets the physiological reset of a shared 60-second breathing exercise and learns something personal about a colleague. Mehrotra notes the music people pick is the most revealing element.
When Gusto extends an offer, the call isn't just the recruiter. Every person who interviewed the candidate joins and says why the candidate is amazing and should join — including the interviewers who voted no. Asked what happens if you voted no, the answer was: it doesn't matter, you're on the call, you're going to work with this person, you're going to help them feel welcome.
→ An extraordinary candidate experience and, internally, an unmistakable signal about how seriously the company takes hiring. Expensive in time — which is the point.
Coda's Pulse ritual (everyone writes their view before seeing others') was drifting toward feeling like a vote — a decision-maker facing 30 pieces of feedback couldn't tell whether they needed all 30 yeses or a majority. Coinbase's RAPID (Responsible, Approver, Participant, Informed, Decider) listed each person's role next to their name, and crucially the meeting owner pre-filled what they needed from each person.
→ Coda added a 'role' column to Pulse and grouped by it. Groupthink protection was preserved while consensus-seeking-to-a-fault was removed. Mehrotra cites it as the clearest case of a small imported detail materially improving a ritual.
Common mistakes
Treating culture as values on a wall rather than rituals in a calendar
People describe culture through the rituals they perform. If you can't point to named, templated, week-one-known practices, you have a values statement, not a culture.
Skipping the name
An unnamed practice can't be bragged about, can't be an identity marker, and can't be requested by name in a meeting. It quietly dies as the company grows.
Keeping a ritual past its stage
Some rituals are excellent at 100 people and terrible at 1,000, and some are peacetime-only. Failing to actively retire or suspend them turns a golden ritual into overhead.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and exec teams past ~30 people who feel culture becoming vague, and want a concrete, teachable mechanism for how the company works.
Not ideal for
Teams under about 10 people where everything is still ambient and one person's habits are the culture — formalising too early adds ceremony without benefit.
From the transcript
“great companies has a very small list of golden rituals and there are three rules of golden rituals”
“number one they're named number two every employee knows them by their first friday and number three they're templated”
“we actually build two products we build one for our customers and we build another one for our employees”
“so you can direct the writer so you can tell people what to do you can motivate the elephants”
“it's very important to give it a name”
From the episode
The rituals of great teams
Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft