The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.

This idea helps give us a window into how successful cultures create and sustain purpose. Successful groups are attuned to the same truth as the starlings: Purpose isn’t about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we’ll call high-purpose environments.

High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go. The surprising thing, from a scientific point of view, is how responsive we are to this pattern of signaling.

Here’s where you’re at and Here’s where you want to go.

That shared future could be a goal or a behavior. (We put customer safety first. We shoot, move, and communicate.) It doesn’t matter. What matters is establishing this link and consistently creating engagement around it. What matters is telling the story.

Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

In other words, Burke and his team felt a bit like starlings in a flock feel. They moved as one because they were attuned to the same clear signal of the Credo resonating through the group. We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. The difficult choices they made weren’t really all that difficult. They were closer to a reflex.

Stories are like air: everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How do you measure the effect of a narrative?

This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors. Rosenthal classified the changes into four categories. 1. Warmth (the teachers were kinder, more attentive, and more connective) 2. Input (the teachers provided more material for learning) 3. Response-opportunity (the teachers called on the students more often, and listened more carefully) 4. Feedback (the teachers provided more, especially when the student made a mistake)

Over the next month, time spent calling increased 142 percent, and weekly revenues increased 172 percent. The incentives hadn’t changed. The task hadn’t changed. All that had changed was the fact that the workers had received a clear beacon of purpose, and it made all the difference.

This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.

In the ensuing years, Stott’s approach has become the model for controlling sport-related violence in Europe and around the globe. One of the reasons it works is that it creates a high-purpose environment by delivering an unbroken array of consistent little signals. Every time an officer banters with a fan, every time a fan notices the lack of protective armor, a signal is sent: We are here to get along. Every time the police allow fans to keep kicking the ball, they reinforce that signal. By themselves, none of the signals matter. Together they build a new story.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the fans shouted out to one of the blue-vested liaison officers. “The fans called over to the liaison and said, ‘Hey, can you come and sort this policeman out for us?’ ” Stott says. “The roles had reversed, and the fans were policing the police. They had socially bonded with the liaisons. They saw them as their advocate.”

One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

The answer, Edmondson discovered, lay in the patterns of real-time signals through which the team members were connected (or not) with the purpose of the work. These signals consisted of five basic types: 1. Framing: Successful teams conceptualized MICS as a learning experience that would benefit patients and the hospital. Unsuccessful teams conceptualized MICS as an add-on to existing practices. 2. Roles: Successful teams were explicitly told by the team leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and why it was important for them to perform as a team. Unsuccessful teams were not. 3. Rehearsal: Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication. Unsuccessful teams took minimal steps to prepare. 4. Explicit encouragement to speak up: Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up if they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process. The leaders of unsuccessful teams did little coaching, and as a result team members were hesitant to speak up. 5. Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements. For example, the team leader at Mountain Medical wore a head-mounted camera during surgery to help facilitate discussion and feedback. Unsuccessful teams tended not to do this.

But they all performed the same vital function: to flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.

This is the way high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal. They are less about being inspiring than about being consistent. They are found not within big speeches so much as within everyday moments when people can sense the message: This is why we work; this is what we are aiming for.

priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”

“The results indicate that Union Square Cafe achieves its differentiation strategy of ‘enlightened hospitality’ through a synergistic set of human resource management practices involving three key practices: selection of employees based on emotional capabilities, respectful treatment of employees, and management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers.”

Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal.

“We assume that because we’re complex, that the way we make decisions is also complex,” says Madeleine Beekman, who studies slime molds at the University of Sydney. “But in reality, we’re using very simple rules of thumb. The slime mold shows us that it’s possible for groups to solve extremely complex problems using a few rules of thumb.” In the case of slime molds, these rules of thumb are as follows: If there’s no food, connect with one another. If connected, stay connected and move toward the light. If you reach the light, stay connected and climb. “Honeybees work the same way,” Beekman says. “So do ants and many other species. They all use decision-making heuristics. There’s no reason we wouldn’t use it too. If you look at these species, you can feel the connection. Like us, they all seek a collective goal.”

Beekman and the slime molds give us a new way to think about why Danny Meyer’s catchphrases work so well. They are not merely catchphrases; they are heuristics that provide guidance by creating if/then scenarios in a vivid, memorable way. Structurally, there is no difference between If someone is rude, make a charitable assumption and If there’s no food, connect with one another. Both function as a conceptual beacon, creating situational awareness and providing clarity in times of potential confusion. This is why so many of Meyer’s catchphrases focus on how to respond to mistakes. You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously. If it ain’t broke, fix it. Mistakes are like waves; servers are really surfers. The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.

We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with. There’s glory in making a mistake. Stone after stone to form a bridge.

On a fundamental level, Danny Meyer, KIPP, and the All-Blacks are using the same purpose-building technique. We might call it the lighthouse method: They create purpose by generating a clear beam of signals that link A (where we are) to B (where we want to be). There’s another dimension of leadership, however, where the goal isn’t to get from A to B but to navigate to an unknown destination, X. This is the dimension of creativity and innovation.

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.

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.”

Nonetheless a handful of “Ed-isms” are heard in Pixar’s corridors. Here are a few: Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.

If Danny Meyer is a lighthouse, beaming signals of purpose, then Catmull is more like the engineer of a ship. Catmull doesn’t steer the ship—he roves around belowdecks, checking the hull for leaks, changing out a piston, adding a little oil here and there. “For me, managing is a creative act,” he says. “It’s problem solving, and I love doing that.”

The difference with successful cultures seems to be that they use the crisis to crystallize their purpose. When leaders of those groups reflect on those failures now, they express gratitude (and sometimes even nostalgic desire) for those moments, as painful as they were, because they were the crucible that helped the group discover what it could be.

It’s a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting, and above all, learning. High-purpose environments don’t descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.

Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity. Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time. They are about delivering machine-like reliability, and they tend to apply in domains in which the goal behaviors are clearly defined, such as service. Building purpose to perform these skills is like building a vivid map: You want to spotlight the goal and provide crystal-clear directions to the checkpoints along the way. Ways to do that include: • Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. • Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. • Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). • Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill. Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include: • Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. • Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. • Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. • Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative. Most groups, of course, consist of a combination of these skil...