The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

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

We all want strong culture in our organizations, communities, and families. We all know that it works. We just don’t know quite how it works.

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.

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

This idea—that belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment.

“A lot of coaches can yell or be nice, but what Pop does is different,” says assistant coach Chip Engelland. “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. 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. Larry Page created one of these moments when he posted his “These ads suck” note in the Google kitchen. Popovich delivers such feedback to his players every day, usually at high volume. But how do Popovich and other leaders manage to give tough, truthful feedback without causing side effects of dissent and disappointment? What is the best feedback made of?

“He looked as sad as I’ve ever seen a person look,” Marks recalls. “He’s sitting in his chair, not saying a word, still devastated. Then—I know this sounds weird—but you can just see him make the shift and get past it. He takes a sip of wine and a deep breath. You can see him get over his emotions and start focusing on what the team needs. Right then the bus pulls up.”

“He’s very smart, but the smartest thing about him is that he thinks sort of like an eight-year-old,” says Jeanne Markel, director of culture for the Downtown Project. “He keeps things really simple and positive when it comes to people.”

“I probably say the word collision a thousand times a day,” Hsieh says. “I’m doing this because the point isn’t just about counting them but about making a mindset shift that they’re what matters. When an idea becomes part of a language, it becomes part of the default way of thinking.”

One pattern was immediately apparent: 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. Allen dug into the data to find out where the people in these clusters got their knack. Had they written for the same journals? Did they possess the same levels of intelligence? Were they the same age? Had they attended the same undergraduate schools or achieved the same level of degrees? Did they possess the most experience or the best leadership skills? All these factors would seem to make sense, but Allen could find none that played a meaningful role in cohesion. Except for one. The distance between their desks. At first he didn’t believe it. Group chemistry is such a complex and mysterious process that he wanted the reason for it to be similarly complex and mysterious. But the more he explored the data, the clearer the answer became. 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.

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.)

The Allen Curve echoes another famous social metric, the Dunbar Number, which reflects the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom we can have a stable social relationship (around 150). They would seem to underline the same truth: Our social brains are built to

Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top. At the end of each basketball season, for example, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich takes each of his star players aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. Those are his exact words: Thank you for allowing me to coach you. It makes little logical sense—after all, both Popovich and the player are amply compensated, and it’s not like the player had a choice whether to be coached. But this kind of moment happens all the time in highly successful groups, because it has less to do with thanks than affirming the relationship.

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces: The groups I visited were uniformly obsessed with design as a lever for cohesion and interaction. I saw it in Pixar’s Steve Jobs–designed atrium, and in the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six’s expansive team rooms, which resemble hotel conference areas (albeit filled with extremely fit men with guns). I also saw it in smaller, simpler levers like coffee machines.

workers were highly stressed and that the best reliever of that stress was time spent together away from their desks.

Embrace Fun: This obvious one is still worth mentioning, because laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

One way to detect belonging levels is by examining the kinds of personal language used in emails. A study by Lynn Wu of Wharton looked at two years of communication by eight thousand workers and showed that talking about sports, lunch, and coffee predicted whether an employee would be retained better than the revenue they brought in. A study by Amir Goldberg at Stanford showed that it was possible to predict how

“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,” Polzer says. “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves.”

The mechanism of cooperation can be summed up as follows: Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built. This idea is useful because it gives us a glimpse inside

This is a surprising choice, because Dave Cooper does not possess any obvious talents that distinguish him from the rest of Team Six. Cooper, who retired in 2012, is neither the smartest nor the strongest team member, nor the best marksman. He is not the best swimmer nor the best at close quarters combat. But he happens to be the best at a skill that is at once hard to define and immensely valuable. He’s the best at creating great teams. “Coop is a very intelligent guy who stayed in the trenches for a long time,” says former Team Six operator Christopher Baldwin. “He wasn’t one of those people who moved up the leadership chain just to move up. He’s one of us. He understood the bigger picture, and you could always talk to him.” “There are some higher-ups who’ve had run-ins with him, and he doesn’t always follow the rules,” says another operator. “But if you’re on his team, you can see why he’s effective.” Another operator puts it more succinctly: “Cooper is the dude.”

the team’s potential.” Cooper uses the phrase “backbone of humility” to describe the tone of a good AAR. It’s a useful phrase because it captures the paradoxical nature of the task: a relentless willingness to see the truth and take ownership. With an AAR, as with Log PT or a Harold, group members have to combine discipline with openness. And as with a Log PT or a Harold, it’s not easy. But it does pay off.

When you talk to Givechi’s colleagues, they point out a paradox: She is at once soft and hard, empathetic but also persistent. “There’s an underlying toughness to Roshi,” says Lawrence Abrahamson, an IDEO design director. “She doesn’t present an agenda, but of course there is an agenda behind that, and it’s gentle guiding. And one of the biggest tools in her toolbox is time. She’ll spend so much time, being patient and continuing to have conversations and making sure the conversations are progressing in a good direction.”

isn’t trying to drag you somewhere, ever. She’s truly seeing you from your position, and that’s her power.”

The successful groups I visited did not presume that cooperation would happen on its own.

These small moments are doorways to two possible group paths: Are we about appearing strong or about exploring the landscape together? Are we about winning interactions, or about learning together?

Listen Like a Trampoline: Good listening is about more than nodding attentively; it’s about adding insight and creating moments of mutual discovery.

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 As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude. Also like trampolines, effective listeners gain amplitude through repetition. When asking questions, they rarely stop at the first response. Rather, they find different ways to explore an area of tension, in order to reveal the truths and connections that will enable cooperation. “I’ve found that whenever you ask a question, the first response you get is usually not the answer—it’s just the first response,” Roshi Givechi says. “So I try to find ways to slowly surface things, to bring out what ought to be shared so that people can build from it.

In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say.

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 do differently?

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. Why?

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.

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.

“Mostly you can feel it in the room,” he says. “When a team isn’t working, you see defensive body language, or you see people close down. Or there’s just silence. The ideas stop coming, or they can’t see the problems. We used to use Steve [Jobs] as a kind of a two-by-four to whack people in the head so they could see the problems in the movie—Steve was good at

Catmull is a passionate admirer of the Japanese concept of kaizen, or continual improvement.) Most of these meetings access the brainpower of the entire group while maintaining the creative team’s ownership over the project.*

“For me, managing is a creative act,” he says. “It’s problem solving, and I love doing that.”

Name and Rank Your Priorities: In order to move toward a target, you must first have a target. Listing your priorities, which means wrestling with the choices that define your identity, is the first step. Most successful groups end up with a small handful of priorities (five or fewer), and many, not coincidentally, end up placing their in-group relationships—how they treat one another—at the top of the list. This reflects the truth that many successful groups realize: Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. If they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.

What are we about? Where are we headed? Many of the leaders I met seemed to do this instinctively, cultivating what might be called a productive dissatisfaction. They were mildly suspicious of success. They presumed that there were other, better ways of doing things, and they were unafraid of change. They presumed they didn’t have all the answers and so constantly sought guidance and clarity.

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.

Embrace the Use of Catchphrases: When you look at successful groups, a lot of their internal language features catchphrases that often sound obvious, rah-rah, or corny. Many of us instinctively dismiss them as cultish jargon. But this is a mistake. Their occasionally cheesy obviousness is not a bug—it’s a feature. Their clarity, grating to the outsider’s ear, is precisely what helps them function.

Use Artifacts: If you traveled from Mars to Earth to visit successful cultures, it would not take you long to figure out what they were about. Their environments are richly embedded with artifacts that embody their purpose and identity. These artifacts vary widely: the battle gear of soldiers killed in combat at the Navy SEAL headquarters; the Oscar trophies accompanied by hand-drawn sketches of the original concepts at Pixar; and the rock and sledgehammer behind glass at the San Antonio Spurs practice facility, embodying the team’s catchphrase “Pound the rock”—but they all reinforce the same signal: This is what matters.