The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

1. The first vulnerability 2. The first disagreement 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:

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

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.

whenever you ask a question, the first response you get is usually not the answer—it’s just the first response,”

You have to find a lot of ways to ask the same question, and approach the same question from a lot of different angles. Then you have to build questions from that response, to explore more.”

Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value:

most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. 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.

Use Candor-Generating Practices

understand what works, what doesn’t work, and how to get better.

Aim for Candor;

aim for candor and avoid brutal honesty.

Embrace the Discomfort:

two discomforts: emotional pain and a sense of inefficiency.

as with any workout, the key is to understand that the pain is not a problem but the path to building a stronger group.

Align Language with Action:

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development:

Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear:

The Credo had been written in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson,

challenging the Credo would be like a Catholic deciding to challenge the pope.

“I challenge [the pope] every day when I wake up,” he said. “I think at times he’s crazy. I think at times my religion is nuts. Of course I challenge it. Everybody challenges their values, and that’s what we ought to do with the Credo.”

murmuration,

mental contrasting,

Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles.

How do you measure the effect of a narrative?

1965, a Harvard psychologist named Robert Rosenthal found a way.

random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students. What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future.

Rosenthal classified the changes into four categories.

Warmth

Input

Response-opportunity

Feedback

Every time the teacher interacted with the student, a connection lit up in the teacher’s brain between the present and the future.

Clifford Stott. Stott is a plainspoken, crew-cut man who specializes in crowd violence.

Stott believed that the key to policing riots was to essentially stop policing riots.

banter.

gab,”

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.

Note what factors are not on this list: experience, surgeon status, and organizational support. These qualities mattered far less than the simple, steady pulse of real-time signals that channeled attention toward the larger goal.

The value of those signals is not in their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation. Those signals added up in a way that you can hear in team members’ voices.

These voices sound like they are coming from different universes. Ironically, both were doing the exact same procedure with the exact same training. The only difference was that one group received clear beacons of meaning throughout the process, and the other didn’t. The difference wasn’t in who they were but in the set of small, attentive, consistent links between where they are now and where they are headed.

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

High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new. This distinction is important because it highlights the two basic challenges facing any group: consistency and innovation. And as we’re about to see, building purpose in these two areas requires different approaches.

how we treat each other is everything. If we do that well, everything else will fall into place.”

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.”

Slime molds

so many of Meyer’s catchphrases focus on how to respond to mistakes.

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

The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.