How does your culture treat people? With manners or etiquette?

When we recorded our interview with Sean Dyche, which featured in the first series of High Performance Podcast, he met us with a firm handshake and an unwavering gaze: qualities which he explained were essential to his culture.

I was reminded of this discussion when I read a book about the great English eccentric Quentin Crisp, the hero of Sting’s famous song, Englishman in New York.

Like Dyche, he defined ‘manners’ as a way of putting people at ease, of making everyone feel comfortable, of including people within a group. ‘Etiquette,’ however, is a way of identifying those who are part of a certain class, and can used to exclude people from the group.

For example, when using manners at a party, the onus is making sure your guests felt relaxed and enjoyed the food, whereas etiquette would be seeing if they knew which knife and fork to use with which course and the correct way to use a soup spoon.

This distinction is useful when creating high performing cultures. Dyche explained that these basic manners make people feel seen, recognised and welcome. When we clearly express the trademark behaviours we want, it feels more like using manners. Simply using lots of rules and regulations to keep people focused on what we want them to do, feels like we are using etiquette.

In a culture where everyone feels they matter, our objective should be to discover what we have in common - the behaviours which define us at our best - and to relate through that. In contrast, when we simply give out a list of rules, it is a strict learning process. To be accepted, you must learn the customs of the group, otherwise you cannot be part of it.

How does your culture treat people? With manners or etiquette?