The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.

The story of the good apples is surprising in two ways. First, we tend to think group performance depends on measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, and experience, not on a subtle pattern of small behaviors. Yet in this case those small behaviors made all the difference. The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.

Close

physical proximity, often in circles Profuse amounts of eye contact Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone Few interruptions Lots of questions Intensive, active listening Humor, laughter Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.

Their function is to answer the ancient, ever-present questions glowing in our brains: Are we safe here? What’s our future with these people? Are there dangers lurking?

Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue

He connected individually, listened intently, and signaled the importance of the relationship.

the first five minutes of sociometric data strongly predicted the outcomes of the negotiations. In other words, the belonging cues sent in the initial moments of the interaction mattered more than anything they said.

You don’t look at the informational content of the messages; you look at patterns that show how the message is being sent.

Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.

“One [ape] is enthusiastic, and that signal recruits others, and they jump in and start doing stuff together. That’s the way group intelligence works, and this is what people don’t get. Just hearing something said rarely results in a change in behavior. They’re just words. When we see people in our peer group play with an idea, our behavior changes. That’s how intelligence is created. That’s how culture is created.”

Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.

Let’s take a closer look at how belonging cues function in your brain. Say I give you a moderately tricky puzzle where the goal is to arrange colors and shapes on a map. You can work on it as long as you like. After explaining the task, I leave you to your work. Two minutes later I pop back in and hand you a slip of paper with a handwritten note. I tell you that the note is from a fellow participant named Steve, whom you’ve never met. “Steve did the puzzle earlier and wanted to share a tip with you,” I say. You read the tip and get back to work. And that’s when everything changes. Without trying, you start working harder on the puzzle. Areas deep in your brain begin to light up. You are more motivated—twice as much. You work more than 50 percent longer, with significantly more energy and enjoyment. What’s more, the glow endures. Two weeks later, you are inclined to take on similar challenges. In essence, that slip of paper changes you into a smarter, more attuned version of yourself.

When Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School performed the experiment, she discovered that the second scenario caused the response rate to jump 422 percent. Those six words—I’m so sorry about the rain—transformed people’s behavior. They functioned exactly the way Steve’s tip did in the puzzle experiment. They were an unmistakable signal: This is a safe place to connect. You hand over your cellphone—and create a connection—without thinking.

belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment. If our brains processed safety logically, we would not need this steady reminding. But our brains did not emerge from millions of years of natural selection because they process safety logically. They emerged because they are obsessively on the lookout for danger.

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

The trainees in group one received zero signals that reduced the interpersonal distance between themselves and WIPRO. They received lots of information about WIPRO and star performers, plus a nice company sweatshirt, but nothing that altered that fundamental distance. The group two trainees, on the other hand, received a steady stream of individualized, future-oriented, amygdala-activating belonging cues. All these signals were small—a personal question about their best times at work, an exercise that revealed their individual skills, a sweatshirt embroidered with their name. These signals didn’t take much time to deliver, but they made a huge difference because they created a foundation of psychological safety that built connection and identity.

Belonging cues have to do not with character or discipline but with building an environment that answers basic questions: Are we connected? Do we share a future? Are we safe?

missileer culture is not a result of an internal lack of discipline and character but of an environment custom-built to destroy cohesion.

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.

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

You are part of this group. This group is special; we have high standards here. I believe you can reach those standards.

First he zooms in close, creating an individualized connection. Then he operates in the middle distance, showing players the truth about their performance. Then he pans out to show the larger context in which their interaction is taking place. Alone, each of these signals would have a limited effect.

But together they create a steady stream of magical feedback.

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

The distance between their desks.

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.

“It turns out that vertical separation is a very serious thing. If you’re on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country.”

Allen Curve.

Closeness helps create efficiencies of connection.

“I used to like to try to make a lot of small clever remarks in conversation, trying to be funny, sometimes in a cutting way,” he says. “Now I see how negatively those signals can impact the group. So I try to show that I’m listening. When they’re talking, I’m looking at their

face, nodding, saying ‘What do you mean by that,’ ‘Could you tell me more about this,’ or asking their opinions about what we should do, drawing people out.”

important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance.

The key is to draw a distinction between interruptions born of mutual excitement and those rooted in lack of awareness and connection.

a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.

extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors.

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice:

many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something.

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

muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group.

We are all in this together.

Avoid Giving Sandwich Feedback:

They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise. The leaders I spent time with shared a capacity for radiating delight when they spotted behavior worth praising.

Embrace Fun:

“All our movies suck at first,” Catmull says. “The BrainTrust is where we figure out why they suck, and it’s also where they start to not suck.”

in BrainTrusts, the team members name and analyze problems and face uncomfortable questions head-on: Where did we fail? What did each of us do, and why did we do it? What will we do differently next time? AARs can be raw, painful, and filled with pulses of emotion and uncertainty.

subjects were asked to deliver a short presentation to a roomful of people who had been instructed by experimenters to remain stone-faced and silent. They played the Give-Some Game afterward. You might imagine that the subjects who endured this difficult experience would respond by becoming less cooperative, but the opposite turned out to be true: the speakers’ cooperation levels increased by 50 percent. That moment of vulnerability did not reduce willingness to cooperate but boosted it. The inverse was also true: Increasing people’s sense of power—that is, tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable—dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.