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.

(A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over eleven years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.)

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.

This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term.

The word they use is family.

“We are all about being a familial group, because it allows you to take more risks, give each other permission, and have moments of vulnerability that you could never have in a more normal setting.” (Duane Bray, IDEO design)

These interactions were consistent whether the group was a military unit or a movie studio or an inner-city school. I made a list: • 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 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

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.

2014, the AdWords engine was producing $160 million per day, and advertising was providing 90 percent of Google’s revenues.

Overture, despite its head start and their billion-dollar war chest, was handicapped by bureaucracy. Decision making involved innumerable meetings and discussions about technical, tactical, and strategic matters; everything had to be approved by multiple committees. Overture’s belonging scores would likely have been low. “It was a clusterfuck,” one employee told Wired magazine. Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer. *1

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

“He delivers two things over and over: He’ll tell you the truth, with no bullshit, and then he’ll love you to death.”

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Failure Wall that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation built, a whiteboard where people could share moments where they’d fallen short.

Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.

I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.

Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: • What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? • What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? • What can I do to make you more effective?

the most effective listeners do four things: 1. They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2. They take a helping, cooperative stance 3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths

Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.’ ”

One good AAR structure is to use five questions: 1. What were our intended results? 2. What were our actual results? 3. What caused our results? 4. What will we do the same next time? 5. What will we

Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions: 1. What are our intended results? 2. What challenges can we anticipate? 3. What have we or others learned from similar situations? 4. What will make us successful this time?

A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. This rule maintains the project leaders’ ownership of the task, and helps prevent them from assuming a passive, order-taking role.

called mental contrasting,

Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles.

“The conjoint elaboration of the future and the present reality makes both simultaneously accessible and links them together in the sense that the reality stands in the way of realizing the desired future.”

proof is in brain scans: When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

He already had an assortment of catchphrases that he used informally in training—he had a knack for distilling ideas into handy maxims. But now he started paying deeper attention to these phrases, thinking about them as tools. Here are a few: Read the guest Athletic hospitality Writing a great final chapter Turning up the Home Dial Loving problems Finding the yes Collecting the dots and connecting the dots Creating raves for guests One size fits one Skunking Making the charitable assumption Planting like seeds in like gardens Put us out of business with your generosity Be aware of your emotional wake To get a hug, you have to give a hug The excellence reflex Are you an agent or a gatekeeper?

A simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers

He sees the disaster and the rescue not as improbable companions but as causally related. The fact that these projects start out as painful, frustrating disasters is not an accident but a necessity. This is because all creative projects are cognitive puzzles involving thousands of choices and thousands of potential ideas, and you almost never get the right answer right away.

Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.

“There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”

Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity.

The trick to building effective catchphrases is to keep them simple, action-oriented, and forthright: “Create fun and a little weirdness” (Zappos), “Talk less, do more” (IDEO), “Work hard, be nice” (KIPP), “Pound the rock” (San Antonio Spurs), “Leave the jersey in a better place” (New Zealand All-Blacks), “Create raves for guests” (Danny Meyer’s restaurants). They’re hardly poetry, but they share an action-based clarity. They aren’t gentle suggestions so much as clear reminders, crisp nudges in the direction the group wants to go.

“Power of the Problem,” which reminded them that most effective stories consist of characters struggling with huge problems, the bigger, the better.

Another was “Use Your Camera,” which reminded them to control the point of view. (Do you want to take the reader inside the character’s mind, or to observe them from above?)

I told them over and over: “Every story should have VOW: voice, obstacles, and wanting. The bigger the ...