Napkins help you keep a healthy company culture

Have you ever been to a gastronomic restaurant and had the waiter artfully place the napkin in your lap? Did you notice that you had stopped talking with your dinner companions? It’s a perfect example of rules over principles. In high-end restaurants, service is meant to be seamless and cover your every need so you can focus on the food and the conversation. Unfortunately, a lot gets lost in translation when the principle is put into rules for the waiters to follow. Over time, the rules take over and the principle is forgotten. Then, customer’s expectations change and, before you know it, the waiters are doing their best to interrupt everyone’s conversation.

The example above is only common in old-fashioned restaurants, but you can observe the same trope in companies of all sizes and across all industries. In my experience, it takes less than twelve months for an unexamined rule to lose its original spirit. But if a team has high turnover, it happens in less than six months.

An interesting practice to counter this effect is that of selecting and training “values champions”. I learned the pattern from Desray Shuck, head of Leadership Development at Anglo-American, as a practice they had adopted to turn around the culture of the gigantic mining company. Since hearing about it, I have been using values champions in my clients’ organisations to keep alive the core beliefs and purpose of a team. The idea is to select an employee or small group to periodically reflect how the values and purpose are reflected (or not) in the workings of the team. Incoherencies can then be addressed on a case by case basis or with a specific process. It serves as a sort of cultural hygiene or, for those of you into coding, as a way to pay ‘cultural debt’ and keep the organisation healthy.

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