Rituals Can’t Save You from Your Routines
Any good couples therapist—or romance novel—will tell you: grand gestures are sweet, but they won’t save a relationship that’s starving for care in the in-between. If you're not tending to the small moments—everyday kindness, accountability, presence—then no amount of balloons or birthday brunches will carry you through the hard parts.
Same goes for work!
Swap “grand gestures” with rituals, and “doing the dishes” with meetings, emails, and task lists—your routines.
We love our rituals. They give us a sense of intention, a moment of pause, a reason to gather and reflect. But we often mistake them for the whole culture. As if a well-designed offsite can cover up the fact that no one feels safe speaking up in your daily stand-ups. Or that a gratitude circle on Monday morning can undo a week of burnout, overbooking, and performative check-ins.
Here’s the truth: Rituals are not your culture. Routines are.
How are they different?
Rituals are recurring, meaningful moments—designed to help us make sense of where we’ve been and amplify who we’re becoming.
Routines are the habitual actions—what your team actually experiences day to day.
When we describe our team culture to someone new, we don’t say, “We run amazing project retros.” We say, “You’ll love our Friday jam sessions. There’s always good food and real talk.”
But what tells the real story? The jam session or the unspoken tension in every Monday meeting?
Routines drive your team’s rhythm. Rituals remind you what the rhythm is for.
Why it matters
The danger comes when we try to use rituals to fix what our routines keep breaking. We over-rely on the big moment—the reset, the retreat, the reflection—hoping it will make up for the frayed edges we tolerate the rest of the time.
Routines are the habits and systems that shape your work: stand-ups, email tone, how decisions get made.
Rituals are the intentional pauses that invite connection, reflection, and alignment. They help us grow, together.
You need both. But when routines fall out of sync with your values, rituals become performative. They ring hollow. And your culture starts to drift. Rituals can’t save you from what you’ve permitted to permeate your routines.
The Invitation
Take stock. Here are a few questions to begin to sense what’s happening in your team’s day-to-day.
Where do things in our work seem stalled, stuck, or tense?
Are we creating work-arounds to avoid discomfort or to protect a value that’s being eroded?
If so, where & why?Where am I seeing signs of fatigue? Joy? Renewed or lagging energy?
These are signs of the system. Opportunities to investigate, get curious, and maybe try a small experiment to realign your routines to better serve your team. Whatever you do, remember, this isn’t about doing more.
It’s about choosing differently. Intentionally.
Because culture isn’t what you preach.
It’s what you permit. And what you practice. Everyday.
