The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

being smart is overrated,

fallibility is crucial,

Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built.

The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over.

a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build.

He did not ask permission or tell anyone; he simply dove in.

Google personnel were interacting exactly as the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge interacted. They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge. Their small building produced high levels of proximity and face-to-face interaction.

FAST Agile!

Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.

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

The Spurs eat together approximately as often as they play basketball together.

When you ask the Spurs about their greatest moment of team cohesion, many of them give the same strange answer. They mention a night not when the Spurs won but when they suffered their most painful loss.

“I try to help things happen organically,” he says. “If you set things up right, the connection happens.”

Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion.

The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.”

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.

Certain proximities trigger huge changes in frequency of communication. Increase the distance to 50 meters, and communication ceases, as if a tap has been shut off. Decrease distance to 6 meters, and communication frequency skyrockets. In other words, proximity functions as a kind of connective drug.

colocation...

Building safety isn’t the kind of skill you can learn in a robotic, paint-by-numbers sort of way. It’s a fluid, improvisational skill—sort of like learning to pass a soccer ball to a teammate during a game. It requires you to recognize patterns, react quickly, and deliver the right signal at the right time.

Amy Edmondson (whom we also met in Chapter 1) has studied psychological safety in a wide variety of workplaces. “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.” Felps and Edmondson are speaking to the same truth: Creating safety is about dialing in to small, subtle moments and delivering targeted signals at key points.

Overcommunicate Your Listening: When I visited the successful cultures, I 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 smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance.

not all interruptions are negative: Creative sessions, for example, often contain bursts of interruptions. The key is to draw a distinction between interruptions born of mutual excitement and those rooted in lack of awareness and connection.

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. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input

“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says.

“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.

Eliminate Bad Apples: 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: 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.

colocation...

the best reliever of that stress was time spent together away from their desks.

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.*2

the underlying key is to have leaders who seek out connection and make sure voices are heard.

Their leaders do the menial work, cleaning and tidying the locker rooms—and along the way vividly model the team’s ethic of togetherness and teamwork. This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group.

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.

laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

we intuitively know that vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust. But we may not realize how powerfully and reliably this process works, particularly when it comes to group interactions.

Polzer points out that vulnerability is less about the sender than the receiver. “The second person is the key,” he says. “Do they pick it up and reveal their own weaknesses, or do they cover up and pretend they don’t have any? It makes a huge difference in the outcome.”

a vulnerability loop. A shared exchange of openness, it’s the most basic building block of cooperation and trust.

The vulnerability loop, in other words, is contagious. “We feel like trust is stable, but every single moment your brain is tracking your environment, and running a calculation whether you can trust the people around you and bond with them,” says DeSteno. “Trust comes down to context. And what drives it is the sense that you’re vulnerable, that you need others and can’t do it on your own.”

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.

science shows that when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.

“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.”

“That’s why good teams tend to do a lot of extreme stuff together,” DeSteno says. “A constant stream of vulnerability gives them a much richer, more reliable estimate on what their trustworthiness is, and brings them closer,

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.

Cooperation, as we’ll see, does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: a circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally ...

a physically weaker team that’s working in sync can succeed in Log PT, while a bigger, stronger group can fall apart, physically and mentally.

His approach to nurturing cooperation could be described as an insurgent campaign against authority bias.

being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.

Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often: As we’ve seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability.

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

Overcommunicate Expectations: