The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

Creative sessions, for example, often contain bursts of interruptions. The key is to draw a distinction between interruptions born of mutual excitement and those rooted in lack of awareness and connection.

Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You’re a Leader: In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents.” “Of course, I could be wrong here.” “What am I missing?” “What do you think?”

This kind of signal is not just an admission of weakness; it’s also an invitation to create a deeper connection, because it sparks a response in the listener: How can I help?

“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says. “It’s really hard for people to raise their hand and say, ‘I have something tentative to say.’ And it’s equally hard for people not to answer a genuine question from a leader who asks for their opinion or their help.”

Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback. In these moments, it’s important not simply to tolerate the difficult news but to embrace it. “You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?”

You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”*1

Preview Future Connection: One habit I saw in successful groups was that of sneak-previewing future relationships, making small but telling connections between now and a vision of the future.

Overdo Thank-Yous:

At the end of each basketball season, for example, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich takes each of his star players aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. Those are his exact words: Thank you for allowing me to coach you.

But this kind of moment happens all the time in highly successful groups, because it has less to do with thanks than affirming the relationship.

While all this thanking seems over the top, there’s a strong scientific support that it ignites cooperative behavior. In a study by Adam Grant and Francesco Gino, subjects were asked to help a fictitious student named “Eric” write a cover letter for a job application. After helping him, half of the participants received a thankful response from Eric; half received a neutral response. The subjects then received a request for help from “Steve,” a different student. Those who had received thanks from Eric chose to help Steve more than twice as often as those who had received the neutral response. In other words, a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues

that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.

example, the chef Thomas Keller, who runs French Laundry, Per Se, and other world-class restaurants, has a habit of thanking the dishwasher at his restaurant openings, highlighting the fact that the performance of the restaurant depends on the person who performs the humblest task.

Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process: Deciding who’s in and who’s out is the most powerful signal any group sends, and successful groups approach their hiring accordingly.

Eliminate Bad Apples:

The groups I studied had extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors. The

leaders of the New Zealand All-Blacks, the rugby squad that ranks as one of the most successful teams on the planet, achieve this through a rule that simply states “No Dickhea...

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:

Create spaces that maximize collisions.

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice: Ensuring that everyone has a voice is easy to talk about but hard to accomplish. This is why many successful groups use simple mechanisms that encourage, spotlight, and value full-group contribution. For example, many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something.*2

Others hold regular reviews of recent work in which anybody can offer their two cents. (Pixar calls them Dailies, all-inclusive morning meetings where everybody gets the chance to offer input and feedback on recently created footage.)

the underlying key is to have leaders who seek out connection and make sure voices are heard.

What do you like most about the Benfold? 2. What do you like least? 3. What would you change if you were captain?

Story about a navy ship that was ranked at the lowest and by listening to the people on th boaf-- they became number one

Pick Up Trash: Back in the mid-1960s, UCLA’s men’s basketball team was in the midst of one of the most successful eras in sports history, winning ten titles in twelve years. Franklin Adler, the team’s student manager, saw something odd: John Wooden, the team’s legendary head coach, was picking up trash in the locker room.

kept seeing that pattern. Coach Billy Donovan of the University of Florida (now with the Oklahoma City Thunder) cleaned up Gatorade that had spilled on the floor. Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Tom Coughlin of the New York Giants did the same. The leaders of the All-Blacks rugby team have formalized this habit into a team value called “sweeping the sheds.” Their leaders do the menial work, cleaning and tidying the locker rooms—and along the way vividly model the team’s ethic of togetherness and teamwork.

This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group. Picking up trash is one example,

signal: We are all in this together.

Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other.

Of course, threshold moments don’t only happen on day one; they happen every day. But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.

Avoid Giving Sandwich Feedback: In many organizations, leaders tend to deliver feedback using the traditional sandwich method: You talk about a positive, then address an area that needs improvement, then finish with a positive. This makes sense in theory, but in practice it often leads to confusion, as people tend to focus either entirely on the positive or entirely on the negative.

They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise. The leaders I spent time with shared a capacity for radiating delight when they spotted behavior worth praising. These moments of warm, authentic happiness functioned as magnetic north, creating clarity, boosting belonging, and orienting future action.

Embrace Fun: This obvious one is still worth mentioning, because laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

My favorite method is Toyota’s use of the andon, a cord that any employee can use to stop the assembly line when they spot a problem. Like many organizational habits that ensure voice, this one seems inefficient at first, overturning the hierarchy by allowing a lowly assembly-line worker to stop the entire company. But a closer look shows that it creates belonging by placing power and trust in the hands of the people doing the work.

describe this type of short-burst communication is notifications. A notification is not an order or a command. It provides context, telling of something noticed, placing a spotlight on one discrete element of the world. Notifications are the humblest and most primitive form of communication, the equivalent of a child’s finger-point: I see this. Unlike commands, they carry unspoken questions: Do you agree? What else do you see? In a typical landing or takeoff,

They demonstrated that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform. The key, as we’re about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.

Pixar, those uncomfortable moments happen in what they call BrainTrust meetings. The BrainTrust is Pixar’s method of assessing and improving its movies during their development. (Each film is BrainTrusted about half a dozen times, at regular intervals.) The meeting brings the film’s director together with a handful of the studio’s veteran directors and producers, all of whom watch the latest version of the movie and offer their candid opinion. From a distance, the BrainTrust appears to be a routine huddle. Up close, it’s more like a painful medical procedure—specifically, a dissection that spotlights, names, and analyzes the film’s flaws in breathtaking detail.

BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” said Pixar president Ed Catmull. “It depends on completely candid feedback.”

At the Navy SEALs, such uncomfortable, candor-filled moments happen in the After-Action Review, or AAR. The AAR is a gathering that takes place immediately after each mission or training session: Team members put down their weapons, grab a snack and water, and start talking. As in BrainTrusts, the team members name and analyze problems and face uncomfortable questions head-on: Where did we fail? What did each of us do, and why did we do it? What will we do differently next time? AARs can be raw, painful, and filled with pulses of emotion and uncertainty.

“They can get tense at times. I’ve never seen people fistfight, but it can get close. Still, it’s probably the most crucial thing we do together, aside from the missions themselves, because that’s where we figure out what really happened and how to get better.”

“So here’s how we’ll know if you had a good day,” Reinhardt continued. “If you ask for help ten times, then we’ll know it was good. If you try to do it all alone…” His voice trailed off, the implication clear—It will be a catastrophe.

On the face of it, these awkward moments at Pixar, the SEALs, and Gramercy Tavern don’t make sense. These groups seem to intentionally create awkward, painful interactions that look like the opposite of smooth cooperation. The fascinating thing is, however, these awkward, painful interactions generate the highly cohesive, trusting behavior necessary for smooth cooperation.

spark cooperation and trust. But we may not realize how powerfully and reliably this process works, particularly when it comes to group interactions. So it’s useful to meet Dr. Jeff Polzer, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard who has spent a large chunk of his career examining how small, seemingly insignificant social exchanges can create cascade effects in groups.

“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,” Polzer says. “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves.”

Polzer points out that vulnerability is less about the sender than the receiver. “The second person is the key,” he says. “Do they pick it up and reveal their own weaknesses, or do they cover up and pretend they don’t have any? It makes a huge difference in the outcome.”

The interaction he describes can be called a vulnerability loop. A shared exchange of openness, it’s the most basic building block of cooperation and trust. Vulnerability loops seem swift and spontaneous from a distance, but when you look closely, they all follow the same discrete steps: 1. Person A sends a signal of vulnerability. 2. Person B detects this signal. 3. Person B responds by signaling their own vulnerability. 4. Person A detects this signal. 5. A norm is established; closeness and trust increase.

presentation to a roomful of people who had been instructed by experimenters to remain stone-faced and silent. They played the Give-Some Game afterward. You might imagine that the subjects who endured this difficult experience would respond by becoming less cooperative, but the opposite turned out to be true: the speakers’ cooperation levels increased by 50 percent. That moment of vulnerability did not reduce willingness to cooperate but boosted it. The inverse was also true: Increasing people’s sense of power—that is, tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable—dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.

“We feel like trust is stable, but every single moment your brain is tracking your environment, and running a calculation whether you can trust the people around you and bond with them,” says DeSteno. “Trust comes down to context. And what drives it is the sense that you’re vulnerable, that you need others and can’t do it on your own.”

Normally, we think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown: first we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

The MIT team, on the other hand, signaled its own vulnerability by promising that everyone connected to finding a red balloon would share in the reward. Then it provided people with the opportunity to create networks of vulnerability by reaching out to their friends, then asking them to reach out to their friends. The team did not dictate what participants should do or how they should do it, or give them specific tasks to complete or technology to use. It simply gave out the link and let people do with it what they pleased. And what they pleased, it turned out, was to connect with lots of other people. Each invitation created another vulnerability loop that drove cooperation—Hey, I’m doing this crazy balloon-hunting project and I need your help.

was rather about how effectively people created relationships of mutual risk. The Red Balloon Challenge wasn’t even really a technology contest. It was, like all endeavors that seek to create cooperation, a vulnerability-sharing contest.