Culture is built by rituals, argues leadership expert

Alain Hunkins, CEO of Hunkins Leadership Group, has spent his life teaching leadership. It’s his business. He know leadership. That means he also knows people. Supply chains, they say, are said to be about people. While processes are important, it is the people that drive supply chains.

Hunkins gave a presentation on leadership at the ASCM CHAINge conference in Columbus, Ohio, and the room was packed with attendees. In an industry that is increasingly dominated by metrics and technology, Hunkins offered his version of the key to success—people.

“Supply chain is the people business,” he said. “We’ve got process, we’ve got systems, we’ve got procedures [but] the only thing that makes it work is people.”

As more and more technology is implemented, Hunkins’ message was simple. While he spoke about leadership, he repeatedly came back to a single word: rituals. Rituals, he said, is what builds a culture by design rather than a culture by default. It is the ability to create rituals that lead to organizational success, he argued.

Why rituals matter

Hunkins illustrated the point with a personal story. Early in his career, his mentor gave him a gift box with a T-shirt inside. On the front it read “Leader.” On the back was a giant archery target.

“If you’re a leader, you always have a target on your back,” Hunkins recalled. “Now if you’re a great leader, you’ll be a target for people’s hopes, their dreams, their aspirations. If you’re a bad leader, you’ll be a target for people’s disappointments and their criticism and their blame.

The question, he said, is not whether you’re a target; it’s what kind of target you want to be.

Routine vs. ritual

The problem is that too many leaders manage through routines rather than rituals, he said. The difference is more than just semantics.

“A routine is a habitual action with no emotion or meaning,” Hunkins explained. “A ritual is a repeated action with meaning, with emotion, and with shared experience.”

So how do leaders in supply chain create rituals that stick? Hunkins laid out the building blocks: purpose, cadence, format, leadership signal, and test-and-adjust.

He shared the story of “Matt,” a district manager in retail he once met on a consulting assignment. When they first met, Matt, a first-time manager, was ranked near the bottom of the company’s leadership rankings. Over a short period of time, Matt improved his ranking and became number one among nearly 90 company district managers. The shift didn’t come from working harder on numbers, Hunkins related, it came from changing how he worked with people.

“He learned that the key to hitting the numbers was to stop focusing on the numbers and start focusing on the people,” Hunkins said. That meant spending time getting to know his employees and involving them in—rather than dictating to them—the process of improving their numbers.

3 rituals to start today

Hunkins offered three practical rituals supply chain leaders can adopt right now and don’t involve large investments:

• Connection: The 3-question check-in. “How are you feeling? What’s on your mind? How can I support you?”
• Communication: “Ask for a receipt.” At the end of every meeting, confirm what was discussed and who will take action. “It’s not that we’re not smart professionals,” Hunkins said. “It’s that we know misunderstanding happens. So we want to make sure we put guardrails in place so it doesn’t happen too much.”
• Collaboration: The daily 7-minute huddle. Teams answer three questions: “What are we focused on today? What’s in our way? Who needs help?” The consistency, Hunkins said, is what creates alignment and energy.

Start small, scale up

Big cultural shifts don’t require big leaps. They require small, consistent habits.

“Pick one ritual. Start ridiculously small. Commit to 30 days. Consistency beats intensity,” Hunkins urged, noting that he once visited the dentist and asked which toothbrush of the hundreds on the market was the best choice. His dentist’s reply: “It’s the one you use twice a day.”

“The best ritual?,” Hunkins asked. “It’s the one you actually do.”

The takeaway

Supply chains thrive when leaders design culture intentionally rather than leaving it to chance, Hunkins concluded. Rituals—small, meaningful, and repeatable actions—provide the rhythm and clarity people need to perform at their best.

“If you put people before tasks, and create rituals around connection, communication, and collaboration, you’ll get so much more out of them. This isn’t a cost. It’s an investment,” Hunkins said.

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