The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

CULTURE: from the Latin cultus, which means care.

We focus on what we can see—individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

Group culture is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. We sense its presence inside successful businesses, championship teams, and thriving families, and we sense when it’s absent or toxic.

Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.

The three skills work together from the bottom up, first building group connection and then channeling it into action.

Along the way, we’ll see that being smart is overrated, that showing fallibility is crucial, and that being nice is not nearly as important as you might think. Above all, we’ll see how leaders of high-performing cultures navigate the challenges of achieving excellence in a fast-changing world. While

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.

Close physical proximity, often in circles • Profuse amounts of eye contact • Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) • Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) • High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone • Few interruptions • Lots of questions • Intensive, active listening • Humor, laughter

Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups.

Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: 1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring 2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued 3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue

These cues add up to a message that can be described with a single phrase: You are safe here.

The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The

possible to predict performance by ignoring all the informational content in the exchange and focusing on a handful of belonging cues.

Pentland and Curhan found that the first five minutes of sociometric data strongly predicted the outcomes of the negotiations. In other words, the belonging cues sent in the initial moments of the interaction mattered more than anything they said.

Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.

Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.

This idea—that belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment.

This obsession originates in a structure deep in the core of the brain. It’s called the amygdala, and it’s our primeval vigilance device, constantly scanning the environment. When we sense a threat, the amygdala pulls our alarm cord, setting off the fight-or-flight response that floods our body with stimulating hormones, and it shrinks our perceived world to a single question: What do I need to do to survive?

Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.

Google/Overture pattern is not unique to them. In the 1990s, sociologists James Baron and Michael Hannan analyzed the founding cultures of nearly two hundred technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. They found that most followed one of three basic models: the star model, the professional model, and the commitment model. The star model focused on finding and hiring the brightest people. The professional model focused on building the group around specific skill sets. The commitment model, on the other hand, focused on developing a group with shared values and strong emotional bonds.

a handy use of this effect: Thinking about your ancestors makes you smarter. A research team led by Peter Fischer found that spending a few minutes contemplating your family tree (as opposed to contemplating a friend, or a shopping list, or nothing at all) significantly boosted performance on tests of cognitive intelligence. Their hypothesis is that thinking about our connections to the group increases our feelings of autonomy and control.

while back a writer named Neil Paine set out to determine who was the best National Basketball Association coach of the modern era. He devised an algorithm that used player performance metrics to predict how many games a team should win. He crunched numbers for every NBA coach since 1979 in order to measure “wins above expectation”—that is, the number of times a coach’s team won a game that, measured by their players’ skills, they had no business winning. He then plotted the results on a graph.

“A lot of coaches can yell or be nice, but what Pop does is different,” says assistant coach Chip Engelland. “He delivers two things over and over: He’ll tell you the truth, with no bullshit, and then he’ll love you to death.”

But Popovich wanted to connect, to dig in and see if Duncan was the kind of person who was tough, unselfish, and humble enough to build a team around. Duncan and Popovich evolved into what amounts to a father-son relationship, a high-trust, no-bullshit connection that provides a vivid model for other players, especially when it comes to absorbing Popovich’s high-volume truth-telling. As more than one Spur put it, If Tim can take Pop’s coaching, how can I not take it?

They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around

solving hard problems together. This task involves many

moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the gro...

But how do Popovich and other leaders manage to give tough, truthful feedback without causing side effects of dissent and disappointment? What is the best feedback made of? A few years back a team of psychologists from Stanford, Yale, and Columbia had middle school students write an essay, after which teachers provided different kinds of feedback. Researchers discovered that one particular form of feedback boosted student effort and performance so immensely that they deemed it “magical feedback.” Students who received it chose to revise their papers far more often than students who did not, and their performance improved significantly. The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase.

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

This is how to lead the team

1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards.

Here is a safe place to give effort. They also give us insight into the reason Popovich’s methods are effective. His communications consist of three types of belonging cues. • Personal, up-close connection (body language, attention, and behavior that translates as I care about you) • Performance feedback (relentless coaching and criticism that translates as We have high standards here) • Big-picture perspective (larger conversations about politics, history, and food that translate as Life is bigger than basketball)

You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards. In other words, Popovich’s yelling works, in part, because it is not just yelling. It is delivered along with a suite of other cues that affirm and strengthen the fabric of the relationships.

This idea—that tough problems could be elegantly hacked—held enormous appeal. At an early age, he began to MacGyver his way through the world.

He found it in an online retailer called ShoeSite.com. On the surface, it did not seem like a particularly smart investment—after all, these were the unpromising early days of e-commerce, the bubble-burst era of failures like Pets.com. But Hsieh saw these failures as an opportunity to rewire a system. He thought about attempting a venture that would reinvent online retailing through a strong and distinctive company culture. He wanted to build an atmosphere of “fun and weirdness.” The site would deliver not just shoes but what Hsieh called “personal emotional connections,” both inside the company and

Story of Zappos

Things did not go well for Zappos at first. The business had trouble in the ways young businesses usually have trouble—supply, logistics, execution. At one point several staffers were living in Hsieh’s San Francisco apartment. But in the early 2000s, things started to improve slowly, then with astonishing speed. In 2002, revenues were $32 million; in 2003, $70 million; in 2004, $184 million. The company relocated to Las Vegas and kept growing, reaching $1.1 billion in revenues in 2009. Zappos, which was sold to Amazon, now has fifteen hundred employees and $2 billion in revenue. It is consistently ranked among the country’s top employee-friendly companies and attracts hundreds of applications for each available opening. It is easier to get into Harvard than to get a job at Zappos.

Beneath Hsieh’s unconventional approach lies a mathematical structure based on what he calls collisions. Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion. He has set a goal of having one thousand “collisionable hours” per year for himself and a hundred thousand collisionable hours per acre for the Downtown Project.

My job is to architect the greenhouse. This is a useful insight into how Hsieh creates belonging because it implies a process. “I probably say the word collision a thousand times a day,” Hsieh says.

We don’t normally think about belonging to big groups in this way. Normally, when we think about belonging to big groups, we think about great communicators who create a vivid and compelling vision for others to follow. But that is not what’s happening here. In fact, Hsieh is anticharismatic, he does not communicate particularly well, and his tools are grade school simple—Meet people, you’ll figure it out. So why does it work so well?

One pattern was immediately apparent: The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.” The chemistry and cohesion within these clusters resembled that between Larry Page and Jeff Dean at Google. They had a knack for navigating complex problems with dazzling speed.

Group chemistry is such a complex and mysterious process that he wanted the reason for it to be similarly complex and mysterious. But the more he explored the data, the clearer the answer became. What mattered most in creating a successful team had less to do with intelligence and experience and more to do with where the desks happened to be located.

“Something as simple as visual contact is very, very important, more important than you might think,” Allen says. “If you can see the other person or even the area where they work, you’re reminded of them, and that brings a whole bunch of effects.”

When Allen plotted the frequency of interaction against distance, he ended up with a line that resembled a steep hill. It was nearly vertical at the top and flat at the bottom. It became known as the Allen Curve.*1 The key characteristic of the Allen Curve is the sudden steepness that happens at the eight-meter mark. At distances of less than eight meters, communication frequency rises off the charts. If our brains operated logically, we might expect the frequency and distance to change at a constant rate, producing a straight line. But as Allen shows, our brains do not operate logically. Certain proximities trigger huge changes in frequency of communication. Increase the distance to 50 meters, and communication ceases, as if a tap has been shut off. Decrease distance to 6 meters, and communication frequency skyrockets. In other words, proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.

For the vast majority of human history, sustained proximity has been an indicator of belonging—after all, we don’t get consistently close to someone unless it’s mutually safe.

His projects tend to succeed for the same reason the creative cluster projects succeeded: Closeness helps create efficiencies of connection. The people in his orbit behave as if they were under the influence of some kind of drug because, in fact, they are.

How Hsieh of Zappos leverages the Allan curve

*1 The Allen Curve echoes another famous social metric, the Dunbar Number, which reflects the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom we can have a stable social relationship (around 150). They would seem to underline the same truth: Our social brains are built to focus and respond to a relatively small number of people located within a finite distance of us. One hundred and fifty feet also happens to be the rough distance at which we can no longer recognize a face with the naked eye.

Amy Edmondson (whom we also met in Chapter 1) has studied psychological safety in a wide variety of workplaces. “I used to not think about whether I was making people safe at all,” she says. “Now I think about it all the time, especially at the beginning of any interaction, and then I constantly check, especially if there’s any change or tension. I bend over backward to make sure people are safe.”

Creating safety is about dialing in to small, subtle moments and delivering targeted signals at key points.

Overcommunicate Your Listening: When I visited the successful cultures, I kept seeing the same expression on the faces of listeners. It looked like this: head tilted slightly forward, eyes unblinking, and eyebrows arched up. Their bodies were still, and they leaned toward the speaker with intent. The only sound they made was a steady stream of affirmations—yes, uh-huh, gotcha—that encouraged the speaker to keep going, to give them more.