The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

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.

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

“Basically, [Jonathan] makes it safe, then turns to the other people and asks, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ ” Felps says. “Sometimes he even asks Nick questions like, ‘How would you do that?’ 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.

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.

When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family. What’s more, they tend to describe the feeling of those relationships in the same way.*

“I can’t explain it, but things just feel right. I’ve actually tried to quit a couple times, but I keep coming back to it. There’s no feeling like it. These guys are my brothers.” (Christopher Baldwin, U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six) “It’s not rational. Nobody who’s purely rational about it does the kinds of things that happen here. There’s a teamwork that goes way beyond team and overlaps into the rest of people’s lives.” (Joe Negron, KIPP charter schools)

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

the content of the pitch didn’t matter as much as the set of cues with which the pitch was delivered and received. (When the angel investors viewed the plans on paper—looking only at informational content and ignoring social signals—they ranked them very differently.)

When we see people in our peer group play with an idea, our behavior changes. That’s how intelligence is created. That’s how culture is created.”

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

Page’s technique of igniting whole-group debates around solving tough problems sent a powerful signal of identity and connection, as did the no-holds-barred hockey games and wide-open Friday forums. (Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure.) They communicated in short, direct bursts. (Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.) Google was a hothouse of belonging cues; its people worked shoulder to shoulder and safely connected, immersed in their projects.

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

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. Of these, the commitment model consistently led to the highest rates of success. During the tech-bubble burst of 2000, the start-ups that used the commitment model survived at a vastly higher rate than the other two models, and achieved initial public offerings three times more often.

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. 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 group is, and where it ought to be.

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

My job is to architect the greenhouse. This is a useful insight into how Hsieh creates belonging because it implies a process.

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.

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.”

“We could look at how often people communicated and see where they were located in relation to each other,” he says. “We could see, just through the frequency, without knowing where they sat, who was on each floor. We were really surprised at how rapidly it decayed” when they moved to a different floor. “It turns out that vertical separation is a very serious thing. If you’re on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country.”

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.

“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.”

Overcommunicate Your Listening:

the top salespeople hardly ever interrupt people,

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.

Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback.

“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.”*1

Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top.

a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person.

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

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:

A few years back, Bank of America was struggling with burnout in its call center teams. They brought in Ben Waber to do a sociometric analysis, which found that workers were highly stressed and that the best reliever of that stress was time spent together away from their desks. Waber recommended aligning team members’ schedules so they shared the same fifteen-minute coffee break every day. He also had the company buy nicer coffee machines and install them in more convenient gathering places. The effect was immediate: a 20 percent increase in productivity, and a reduction in turnover from 40 percent to 12 percent. Waber has also overseen interventions in company cafeterias: Merely replacing four-person tables with ten-person tables has boosted productivity by 10 percent. The lesson of all these studies is the same: 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.

Pick Up Trash:

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.