Within weeks of joining a small startup over a decade ago, I posted a message in our team chat: “Hey, I think we should have a place to store quotes and jokes from our team!” I set up a board for it, and the next day I added 17 teammates.

I was the agile project manager. I was the one introducing planning poker, a definition of ready and done, and retrospectives with surveys every sprint. Some of my new teammates were already tired of meetings and a little resistant to Scrum. So, you might reasonably ask why the new manager’s early contribution was a place to save jokes.

I had seen it work before. At the software company where I worked before the startup, the office had a quotes wiki, and somehow several of the lines on it were attributed to me. My favorite was a sprint joke: “So what is it you’d say… you did this sprint?” Anyone who has seen Office Space will recognize the source.

A quotes wiki does something a team-building exercise rarely does. It turns the team’s own voice into a shared thing. A new person can read it and learn who everyone is faster than they could from any org chart. It’s a tiny piece of culture that belongs to the team, and nobody had to mandate it.

So, at the startup, I didn’t wait for someone else to start one.

Think about the dance floor at a wedding. Everybody wants to dance. The DJ is playing the right song. However, nobody moves, because nobody wants to be the first one out there alone. Then one uncle with no shame and good knees walks out, and two songs later the floor is full. The uncle didn’t make anyone dance. He just made it safe to.

Humor on a team works the same way. Most teams want to laugh together, and someone has to go first. It often helps if that someone has a little authority, because that’s the signal that laughing is allowed here.

It mattered more than I expected. In my first retrospective at the startup, the team listed my arrival as one of the things that went well. I’d like to believe that was about my sprint planning. I suspect the quotes board had something to do with it, too.

I’ve learned a couple of things from being the first one on the dance floor.

The manager can also be the fun person, and it helps when they are. When the person asking you to fill out a retro survey is also the person who saved your best one-liner, the survey feels less like paperwork. People will follow a process more willingly when they like the people running it.

Also, let the team own it. I started the board, but the quotes had to come from everyone. A quotes board full of the manager’s jokes is just one person getting busy on the dance floor all alone.

Small shared spaces like that build culture faster than any committee-driven and HR approved copy on the company’s website. Nobody remembers the values poster in the break room. People do remember the place where their teammate’s terrible pun was preserved for all time.

Since we’re in the month of Thanksgiving here in the US, I’ll end with a little gratitude. I’m thankful for every team that laughed with me, and for the ones that laughed at me, which I probably earned. Some of my favorite work memories are a single line somebody said in a meeting, saved by someone who thought it was worth keeping.

If your team doesn’t have a place for those lines yet, go first. Somebody has to.