The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea? What are the rules here?

They follow a pattern: Nick behaves like a jerk, and Jonathan reacts instantly with warmth, deflecting the negativity and making a potentially unstable situation feel solid and safe.

Most of all he radiates an idea that is something like, Hey, this is all really comfortable and engaging, and I’m curious about what everybody else has to say. It was amazing how such simple, small behaviors kept everybody engaged and on task.”

When you encounter a group with good chemistry, you know it instantly.

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.

All the changes in motivation and behavior you experienced afterward were due to the signal that you were connected to someone who cared about you.

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

The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.”

(One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)

Closeness helps create efficiencies

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

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.

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, but the same kinds of behaviors exist around allocating parking places (egalitarian, with no special spots reserved for leaders), picking up checks at meals (the leaders do it every time), and providing for equity in salaries, particularly for start-ups.

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.

When you watch highly cohesive groups in action, you will see many moments of fluid, trusting cooperation.

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.

“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.

At some level, we intuitively know that vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust.

“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.”

He explicitly put himself beneath Haynes and the crew, signaling his role as helper: Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you.

In other words, the feelings of trust and closeness sparked by the vulnerability loop were transferred in full strength to someone who simply happened to be in the room. The vulnerability loop, in other words, is contagious.

The SEALs call this combination of skills “playing pickup basketball.” Like any good pickup team, they don’t need to talk too much or follow some predetermined plan; they just play the game.

UCB was creating some of the most cohesive comic ensembles on the planet by spending a huge amount of time doing an activity that produced mostly pain and awkwardness.

Having one person tell other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions.

How do you develop ways to challenge each other, ask the right questions, and never defer to authority?

When Cooper gave his opinion, he was careful to attach phrases that provided a platform for someone to question him, like “Now let’s see if someone can poke holes in this” or “Tell me what’s wrong with this idea.”

“But if you keep getting together and digging out what happened, then after a while everybody can see what’s really happening, not just their small piece of it. People can share experiences and mistakes.

If you have negative news or feedback to give someone—even as small as a rejected item on an expense report—you are obligated to deliver that news face-to-face. This rule is not easy to follow (it’s far more comfortable for both the sender and receiver to communicate electronically), but it works because it deals with tension in an up-front, honest way that avoids misunderstandings and creates shared clarity and connection.

Giving honest feedback is tricky, because it can easily result in people feeling hurt or demoralized. One useful distinction, made most clearly at Pixar, is to aim for candor and avoid brutal honesty.