The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

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

Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition. Instead of focusing on the task, they are navigating their uncertainty about one another. They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure). As a result, their first efforts often collapse, and they run out of time.

The reason may be based in the way we think about culture. We tend to think about it as a group trait, like DNA.

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.

Felps injects him into the various groups the way a biologist might inject a virus into a body: to see how the system responds. Felps calls it the bad apple experiment. Nick is really good at being bad. In almost every group, his behavior reduces the quality of the group’s performance by 30 to 40 percent. The drop-off is consistent whether he plays the Jerk, the Slacker, or the Downer.

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.

The story of the good apples is surprising in two ways. First, we tend to think group performance depends on measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, and experience, not on a subtle pattern of small behaviors. Yet in this case those small behaviors made all the difference. The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.

• 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.)

Pentland says. “For hundreds of thousands of years, we needed ways to develop cohesion because we depended so much on each other. We used signals long before we used language, and our unconscious brains are incredibly attuned to certain types of behaviors.”

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. They seek to notify our ever-vigilant brains that they can stop worrying about dangers and shift into con...

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.

Their small building produced high levels of proximity and face-to-face interaction.

belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is

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. Of these, the commitment model consistently led to the highest rates of success.

What is unique about you that leads to your happiest times and best performances at work?

The group two trainees, on the other hand, received a steady stream of individualized, future-oriented, amygdala-activating belonging cues. All these signals were small—a personal question about their best times at work, an exercise that revealed their individual skills, a sweatshirt embroidered with their name. These signals didn’t take much time to deliver, but they made a huge difference because they created a foundation of psychological safety that built connection and identity.

Are we connected? Do we share a future? Are we safe?

“magical feedback.”

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them. That’s it. Just nineteen words. None of these words contain any information on how to improve. Yet they are powerful because they deliver a burst of belonging cues. Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 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.

“This place is like a greenhouse,” Hsieh says. “In some greenhouses, the leader plays the role of the plant that every other plant aspires to. But that’s not me. I’m not the plant that everyone aspires to be. My job is to architect the greenhouse.”

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.”

Studies show that digital communications also obey the Allen Curve; we’re far more likely to text, email, and interact virtually with people who are physically close. (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.)

Overcommunicate Your Listening:

Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You’re a Leader:

Embrace the Messenger:

“You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. 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.”

Preview Future Connection:

Overdo Thank-Yous:

Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process:

Eliminate Bad Apples:

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:

“We used to hire out our food service to a contractor,” said Ed Catmull, president and cofounder of Pixar (of whom we’ll hear more in Chapter 16). “We didn’t consider making food to be our core business. But when you hire it out, that food service company wants to make money, and the only way they can make money is to decrease the quality of the food or the service. They’re not bad or greedy people; it’s a structural problem. That’s why we decided to take it over ourselves and give our people high-quality food at a reasonable price. Now we have really good food and people stay here instead of leaving, and they have the kind of conversations and encounters that help our business. It’s pretty simple. We realized that food really is part of our core business.”

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice:

Pick Up Trash:

Capitalize on Threshold Moments:

Avoid Giving Sandwich Feedback:

Embrace Fun:

The term pilots use to 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.

Unlike commands, they carry unspoken questions: Do you agree? What else do you see?

The crew of Flight 232 succeeded not because of their individual skills but because they were able to combine those skills into a greater intelligence. 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.

At Gramercy Tavern, a New York restaurant whose staff ranks as the culinary world’s version of a SEAL team, I watched as Whitney Macdonald was minutes away from a moment she had long anticipated: her first-ever shift as a front waiter. The lunch crowd was lining up on the sidewalk, and she was excited and a bit nervous. Assistant general manager Scott Reinhardt approached her—for a pep talk, I presumed. I was wrong. “Okay,” Reinhardt said, fixing Whitney with a bright, penetrating gaze. “The one thing we know about today is that it’s not going to go perfectly. I mean, it could, but odds are really, really, really high that it won’t.” A flicker of surprise traveled across Whitney’s face. She had trained for six months for this day, learning every painstaking detail of the job, hoping to perform well. She had worked as a back server, taken notes, sat in on lineup meetings, and shadowed shift after shift. Now she was being told in no uncertain terms that she was destined to screw up. “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.

these awkward, painful interactions generate the highly cohesive, trusting behavior necessary for smooth cooperation.

While Set A allows you to stay in your comfort zone, Set B generates confession, discomfort, and authenticity that break down barriers between people and tip them into a deeper connection. While Set A generates information, Set B generates something more powerful: vulnerability.

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.

Each of these small signals took only a few seconds to deliver. But they were vital, because they shifted the dynamic, allowing two people who had been separate to function as one.

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.

“What are groups really for?” Polzer asks. “The idea is that we can combine our strengths and use our skills in a complementary way. Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating. It lets us work as one unit.”

When Del Close developed the Harold in the 1970s, he wrote down the following rules: 1. You are all supporting actors. 2. Always check your impulses. 3. Never enter a scene unless you are needed. 4. Save your fellow actor, don’t worry about the piece. 5. Your prime responsibility is to support. 6. Work at the top of your brains at all times. 7. Never underestimate or condescend to the audience. 8. No jokes. 9. Trust. Trust your fellow actors to support you; trust them to come through if you lay something heavy on them; trust yourself. 10. Avoid judging what is going down except in terms of whether it needs help, what can best follow, or how you can support it imaginatively if your support is called for. 11. LISTEN.