The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

three negative archetypes: the Jerk (an aggressive, defiant deviant), the Slacker (a withholder of effort), and the Downer (a depressive Eeyore type).

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.

Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.

Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built. The deeper questions are, Where does it come from? And how do you go about building it?

“We are all about being a familial group, because it allows you to take more risks, give each other permission, and have moments of vulnerability that you could never have in a more normal setting.”

I noticed a distinct pattern of interaction. The pattern was located not in the big things but in little moments of social connection. These interactions were consistent whether the group was a military unit or a movie studio or an inner-city school. I made a list: 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.)

The term we use to describe this kind of interaction is chemistry. When you encounter a group with good chemistry, you know it instantly. It’s a paradoxical, powerful sensation, a combination of excitement and deep comfort that sparks mysteriously with certain special groups and not with others.

“Human signaling looks like other animal signaling,”

“You can measure interest levels, who the alpha is, who’s cooperating, who’s mimicking, who’s in synchrony. We have these communication channels, and we do it without thinking about it. For instance, if I lean a few inches closer to you, we might begin mirroring.”

The sociometer captures the proto-language that humans use to form safe connection. This language is made up of belonging cues.

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?

“Modern society is an incredibly recent phenomenon,” Pentland says. “For hundreds of thousands of years, we needed ways to develop cohesion because we depended so much on each other. We used signals long before we used language, and our unconscious brains are incredibly attuned to certain types of behaviors.” 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

These cues add up to a message that can be described with a single phrase: You are safe here. They seek to notify our ever-vigilant brains that they can stop worrying about dangers and shift into con...

“As humans, we are very good at reading cues; we are incredibly attentive to i...

“We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations ha...

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 ov...

“Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpe...

Nick was able to disrupt the chemistry of the groups merely by sending a few cues of nonbelonging. His behavior was a powerful signal to the group—We are not safe—which immediately caused the group’s performance to fall apart. Jonathan, on the other hand, delivered a steady pulse of subtle behaviors that signaled safety. He connected individually, listened intently, and signaled the importance of the relationship. He was a wellspring of belonging cues, and the group responded accordingly.

It’s possible to predict performance by ignoring all the informational content in the exchange and focusing on a handful of belonging cues.

“This is a different way of thinking about human beings,”

“Individuals aren’t really individuals. They’re more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement the others in the group. You don’t look at the informational content of the messages; you look at patterns that show how the message is being sent. Those patterns contain many signals that tell us about the relationship and what’s really going on beneath the surface.”

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. Mem...

These factors ignore every individual skill and attribute we associate with high-performing groups, and replace them with behaviors we would normally consider so primitive as to be trivial. And yet when it comes to predicting team performance, Pen...

“Collective intelligence is not that different in some ways than apes in a forest,” Pentland says. “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 p...

They’re just words. This is not how we normally think. Normally, we think words matter; we think that group performance correlates with its members’ verbal intelligence and their ability to construct and communicate complex ideas. But that assumption is wrong. Words are noise. Group performance depends on be...

Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer.fn1

All the changes in motivation and behavior you experienced afterward were due to the signal that you were connected to someone who cared about you.

“These are little cues that signal a relationship, and they totally transform the way people relate, how they feel, and how they behave.”fn2

“A small signal can have a huge effect,”

“But the deeper thing to realize is that you can’t just give a cue once. This is all about establishing relationships, conveying the fact that I’m interested in you, and that all the work we do together is in the context of that relationship. It’s a narrative—you have to keep it going. It’s not unlike a romantic relationship. How often do you tell your partner that you love them? It may be true, but it’s still important to let them know, over and over.”

This idea—that 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 l...

This obsession originates in a structure deep in the core of the brain. It’s called the amygdala, and it’s our primeval vigilance device, constantly scanning the environment. When we sense a threat, the amygdala pulls our alarm cord, setting off the fight-or-flight response that floods our body with stimulating hormones, and...

Science has recently discovered, however, that the amygdala isn’t just about responding to danger—it also plays a vital role in building social connections. It works like this: When you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds. It tracks members of your group, tunes in to their interactions, and sets the stage for meaningful engagement. In a heartbeat, it transforms from a grow...

“The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It’s such a powerful switch—it’s a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.”

All this helps reveal a paradox about the way belonging works. Belonging feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in. 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.

Here, then, is a model for understanding how belonging works: as a flame that needs to be continually fed by signals of safe connection. When Larry Page and Jeff Dean participated in the whole-company challenges, the anything-goes meetings, and the raucous hockey games, they were feeding that flame. When Jonathan protected the bad apple group from Nick’s negative behavior, he was feeding that flame. When a stranger apologizes for the rain before asking to borrow your cellphone, she is feeding that fl...

This model helps us approach belonging less as a mystery of fate than as a process that can b...

Those interactions sound casual, but in fact each involves an emotional exchange of unmistakable clarity. One side stops shooting, leaving itself exposed. The other side senses that exposure but does nothing. Each time it happens, both experience the relief and gratitude of safe connection—they saw me.

From a psychological perspective, they conveyed a meaning that both sides understood, a shared burst of belief and identity.

they had already been in conversation for a long time, both sides sending volleys of belonging cues that lit up their amygdalas with a simple message: We are the same. We are safe. I’ll go halfway if you will. And so they did.fn2

But in the late 2000s, WIPRO found itself facing a persistent problem: Its employees were leaving in droves, as many as 50 to 70 percent each year. They left for the usual reasons—they were young or taking a different job—and for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. At bottom, they lacked a strong connection to the group.

WIPRO’s leaders initially tried to fix things by increasing incentives. They boosted salaries, added perks, and touted their company’s award as one of India’s best employers. All these moves made sense—but none of them helped. Employees kept leaving at precisely the same rate as before.

The group two trainees, on the other hand, received a steady stream of individualized, future-oriented, amygdala-activating belonging cues.

they made a huge difference because they created a foundation of psychological safety that built connection and identity.

The Opposite of Belonging

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?

It all adds up to a perfectly designed storm of antibelonging cues, where there is no connection, no future, and no safety.

consistently perform the thousand little unselfish behaviors—the extra pass, the alert defense, the tireless hustle—that puts the team’s interest above their own.fn1

“He delivers two things over and over: He’ll tell you the truth, with no bullshit, and then he’ll love you to death.”