What’s more normal than playing Ludo after years (decades?).
Nuja is six people, not counting me. Soon to be seven. And for the last two weeks, while everyone around us (including all of us individually) has been sitting with some version of anxiety, uncertainty, or just that low hum of not quite knowing what comes next, these six people have shown up in a way I want to put on record.
Not in a brave, chin-up, let's-power-through kind of way. More quietly than that.
Someone still sent the meme. You know the one - completely horrible timing, absolutely necessary. Someone started a morning check-in that became a little ritual: what are you feeling today, scale of one to ten, no wrong answers. Some days people said nine. Some days someone said one, and nobody flinched or fixed it, they just noted it and kept going. There were still food conversations (of course there were - we are the most food-motivated team in the world!). Still the banter that makes you forget for twenty minutes that the world outside feels strange.
Nobody announced they were going to be normal.
They just brought their normal with them.
And then there was a moment; it had nothing to do with work, nothing strategic about it, where I had a really anxious, low few minutes and I knew I was going to cry, and I did. Right there. In front of two people I absolutely love and trust at nuja. And even as the person who runs this place, I had a safe space to do exactly that.
They were brilliant. It passed in about two minutes. We moved on.
I thought about this a lot in the context of what we do at nuja: brand, identity, how a business actually behaves and feels from the inside out. And I definitely know - you can't manufacture this. You can't just ‘brief’ it.
The meme at the right moment, the one-to-ten check-in, the two minutes where your boss cries and nobody makes it weird, that's culture. Not the version that goes on a website. The raw and real version.
I'm not naturally demonstrative about this stuff. I don't do the big speech. But these people deserve to have it said somewhere, even if most of them will probably send me a meme about it the moment they read it. Thank you. Genuinely.
M.
PS: Know someone whose team has shown up for them lately? Forward this - they'll want to say thank you too.
xx
Manuja
Not for everyone. Never was.
