The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person: This was an informal rule that I encountered at several cultures. It goes like this: If you have negative news or feedback to give someone—even as small as a rejected item on an expense report—you are obligated to deliver that news face-to-face.

When Forming New Groups, Focus on Two Critical Moments:

1. The first vulnerability 2. The first disagreement

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

In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value:

“One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.’ ”

A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems.

it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate.

Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments.

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.

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.

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

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.

Meyer then attempted to name the specific behaviors and interactions he wanted to create at his restaurants.

You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.

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.

We should have made the hallways wider. We should have made the café bigger, to draw more people. We should have put the offices around the edges to create more shared space in the center.

FAST Agile - ideal layout

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.

ask Catmull how he knows when a team is succeeding. “Mostly you can feel it in the room,”

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.

“You have to go through some failures and some screw-ups, and survive them, and support each other through them. And then after that happens, you really begin to trust one another.”

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.

Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities.

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.

protect the team’s creative autonomy.

The trick to building effective catchphrases is to keep them simple, action-oriented, and forthright: “Create fun and a little weirdness” (Zappos),