‘Having a dinner together’ and other familial engagements in Organizations

‘Having a dinner together’ is an old concept, in fact very old. Most families followed this ritual (many families continue even today) and regardless of age and tastes, the family took the same meal together sitting around a table or in some cases sitting on the floor as in olden times. In many European countries this is still followed on specific days of the week.

Today most researchers have come out with statistics that this old habit in families helped to reduce anxiety and depression, delinquency and substance use and was instrumental in improving grades in schools. It also helped to improve health in children.

In all my childhood every dinner was taken together, never in parts or left to the vagaries of individuals. It was a ritual that had my grandfather at the head of the table with the rest of us surrounding him. It was one menu with only some limited servings as we all knew that there were not going to be too much leftovers at the end for our grandmother who ate after we finished; it was my grandmother’s classical distribution of food and she always said she had enough at the end. So we calibrated our intake if the food was to our liking.

The conversations in the table had no holds; there was no hierarchy, nor even any planned arrangement. It was as much about the day’s experience as about the stories we heard. One conversation led to the next, but I had learnt more about life’s lessons from these conversations than what I would have from my reading or from the school curriculum.

Having a dinner together is about celebrating diversity, it is about respecting others’ opinion and tastes, while making allowance for one’s own to be moderated by others.

Having a dinner together is about many things; learning from others’ life’s experience is one of them, but it also about sharing and having a healthy food together. Individuals having a quiet meal on their own would never get anywhere close to this healthy meal that is most likely to have higher share of vegetables and fruits. It is also about initiating a conversation among elders and juniors, which is never that easy in the first place.

I had noticed that these conversations led to arguments sometimes, but it never left the table. The contenders left the table with new ideas, in most occasions it served as food for thought. The coaches on the table hardly ever got into any serious appraisals of the topics, nor were they willing to get into details or take sides of any argument. At the most they added some new dimensions to the topic.

‘Having a dinner together’ is a form of engagement that has many benefits, could we replicate such an engagement process in organizations?

Organizational engagement processes stray away from this in many respects. First of all engagements in organizations are hardwired, they are formal, too rigid and rule based, lacking all the things that the familial engagement brings in at the dinner table.

The first challenge is hierarchy in the first place followed by lack of diversity.

Some country cultures have a way of dealing with this better, like in Europe you have France as one extreme example; ‘having a dinner together’ works so well there. This is also true in Korea in the Far East, where long dinners together breaks the barriers and creates the bonds for working together on a common goal.

But ‘having dinner together’ is a metaphor, a symbolism for creating a way in organizations to get the rigid rules of the matrices not come in the way of useful conversations to be exchanged between people. The best conversation is not the one that can be timed out during the day in formal meetings where it is left to a chance event that this could happen in spite of so many deterrents working against it.

A useful conversation on the other hand could be the one that could be orchestrated by informal initiatives that breaks away from rules and structures that bind the matrices together.

The most innovative organizations, who deal with products of the future, are not particularly well versed or regimented on this aspect as they believe in individual space and freedom far too much more. In these organizations the metaphor is better found in individuals coming together to converse on their own without any formality.

For traditional organizations this remains a challenge as they get anchored in specific initiatives to deliver specific results; guiding and coaching conversations becomes an initiative rather than a way of life. But that is still a way to move away from the status quo in which many others are entrenched.

‘Having a dinner together’ is a way of life for the oldest families who live together. For large corporations who have survived for more than hundred years are not exactly in that same mold. They have become far too big and far widely spread out geographically. The ownership itself has become far more diverse and it needs constant effort to keep the culture of such corporations as one.

But to think of large families living in one roof, the principles of living has not changed one wee bit over centuries. They remain as examples of anti-fragility in a world that remains vulnerable to the influence of new structures, many of which could have a debilitating effect.

When we make organizational matrices hardwired to achieve an end, this should act as a reminder that a completely structure-less conversation like ‘having dinner together’, could be as impactful as the most tenuously built matrix inter-connected by KPIs with reinforcements of all kind to make performance measurement look like a roll call.

My series about organizational matrices and their role in career building ends on this note. There is no alternative to a good coaching. The best leaders of our times are the best coaches. It does not matter whether they were the product of good organizational matrices that delivered superior results or just the product of good conversations.

It could well be that they were the ones who came from the familial traditions of ‘Having dinner together’ and they kept these traditions alive wherever they worked.

Read my next article “How best to remember 2016”.