The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

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.

This idea is useful because it gives us a glimpse inside the machinery of teamwork. 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 ris...

Kauffman’s training program was used as the template for what became the SEAL teams, and it remains so to this day. All of which adds up to an unusual situation: The world’s most sophisticated and effective military teams are being built by an outdated, primitive, wholly unscientific program that hasn’t changed in its essentials since the 1940s.

Log PT apart is its ability to deliver two conditions: intense vulnerability along with deep interconnectedness. Let’s take them one by one.

These two conditions combine to deliver a highly particular sensation: the point where vulnerability meets interconnection. You are in immense pain, inches from your teammates, close enough to feel their breath on the back of your neck. When a teammate falters or makes a wrong move, you can feel it, and you know that they can feel it when you do the same. It adds up to a choice. You can focus on yourself, or you can focus on the team and the task.

conversation travels back and forth through the fibers of the log: A teammate falters. Others sense it, and respond by taking on more pain for the sake of the group. Balance is regained.

They cooperate well because Kauffman’s training program generates thousands of microevents that build closeness and cooperation. “It’s more than just teamwork,” Freeman says. “You’ve left yourself wide open. Everybody on your team knows who you are, because you left it all on the table. And if you did well, it builds a level of trust that’s exponentially higher than anything you can get anywhere else.”

So how do you create conditions where that doesn’t happen, where you develop a hive mind? How do you develop ways to challenge each other, ask the right questions, and never defer to authority? We’re trying to create leaders among leaders. And you can’t just tell people to do that. You have to create the conditions where they start to do it.”

he realized, wasn’t enough; he had to generate a series of unmistakable signals that tipped his men away from their natural tendencies and toward interdependence and cooperation. “Human nature is constantly working against us,” he says. “You have to get around those barriers, and they never go away.”

team member who called him by his title was quickly corrected: “You can call me Coop, Dave, or Fuckface, it’s your choice.” When Cooper gave his opinion, he was careful to attach phrases that provided a platform for someone to question him, like “Now let’s see if someone can poke holes in this” or “Tell me what’s wrong with this idea.” He steered away from giving orders and instead asked a lot of questions. Anybody have any ideas?

“It’s got to be safe to talk,” Cooper says. “Rank switched off, humility switched on. You’re looking for that moment where people can say, ‘I screwed that up.’ In fact, I’d say those might be the most important four words any leader can say: I screwed that up.”

“backbone of humility” to describe the tone of a good AAR. It’s a useful phrase because it captures the paradoxical nature of the task: a relentless willingness to see the truth and take ownership.

From afar, the Bin Laden raid looked like a demonstration of team strength, power, and control. But that strength was built of a willingness to spot and confront the truth and to come together to ask a simple question over and over: What’s really going on here? Cooper and his team did not have to go back again and again to work on downed-helicopter scenarios. But they succeeded because they understood that being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.

“When we talk about courage, we think it’s going against an enemy with a machine gun,” Cooper says. “The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other. People never want to be the person who says, ‘Wait a second, what’s really going on here?’ But inside the squadron, that is the culture, and that’s why we’re successful.”

Nyquist by all accounts possessed two important qualities. The first was warmth. He had a knack for making people feel cared for; every contemporary description paints him as “fatherly.” The second quality was a relentless curiosity. In a landscape made up of diverse scientific domains, he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections.

They were polite, reserved, and skilled listeners. They radiated a safe, nurturing vibe. They possessed deep knowledge that spanned domains and had a knack for asking questions that ignited motivation and ideas.

“Socially, I’m not the chattiest person,” Givechi says. “I love stories, but I’m not the person in the middle of the room telling the story. I’m the person on the side listening and asking questions. They’re usually questions that might seem obvious or simple or unnecessary. But I love asking them because I’m trying to understand what’s really going on.”

“Concordances happen when one person can react in an authentic way to the emotion being projected in the room,” Marci says. “It’s about understanding in an empathic way, then doing something in terms of gesture, comment, or expression that creates a connection.”

He is demonstrating that the most important moments in conversation happen when one person is actively, intently listening.

“It’s very hard to be empathic when you’re talking. Talking is really complicated, because you’re thinking and planning what you’re going to say, and you tend to get stuck in your own head. But not when you’re listening. When you’re really listening, you lose time. There’s no sense of yourself, because it’s not about you. It’s all about this task—to connect completely to that person.”

Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often:

Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? What can I do to make you more effective?

Overcommunicate Expectations:

Instead, they were explicit and persistent about sending big, clear signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles to maximize helping behavior.

Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person:

two critical moments that happen early in a group’s life. They are: The first vulnerability 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? “At those moments, people either dig in and become defensive and start justifying, and a lot of tension gets created,”

Listen Like a Trampoline:

the most effective listeners do four things: They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported They take a helping, cooperative stance They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths

They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude.

In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value:

Use Candor-Generating Practices like AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teaming:

One good AAR structure is to use five questions: What were our intended results? What were our actual results? What caused our results? What will we do the same next time? What will we do differently? Some teams also use a Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions: What are our intended results? What challenges can we anticipate? What have we or others learned from similar situations? What will make us successful this time?

A couple of tips: It may be useful to follow the SEALs’ habit of running the AAR without leadership involvement, to boost openness and honesty.

A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. This rule maintains the project leaders’ ownership of the task, and helps prevent them from assuming a passive, order-taking role.

Red Teaming is a military-derived method for testing strategies; you create a “red team” to come up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan. The key is to select a red team that is not wedded to the existing plan in any way, and to give them freedom to think in new ways that the planners might not have anticipated.

Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty:

Embrace the Discomfort:

Align Language with Action:

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development:

Use Flash Mentoring:

Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear:

On the surface, the story of the Tylenol crisis is about a large group responding to disaster with extraordinary cohesion and focus. But beneath that story lies a curious fact: The key to Johnson & Johnson’s extraordinary behavior can be located in a mundane one-page document. The 311 words of the Credo oriented the thinking and behavior of thousands of people as they navigated a complex landscape of choices.

In the first two sections of this book we’ve focused on safety and vulnerability. We’ve seen how small signals—You are safe, We share risk here—connect people and enable them to work together as a single entity. But now it’s time to ask: What’s this all for? What are we working toward?

These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.

This idea helps give us a window into how successful cultures create and sustain purpose. Successful groups are attuned to the same truth as the starlings: 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.

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. The surprising thing, from a scientific point of view, is how responsive we are to this pattern of signaling.

It’s called mental contrasting,

But in these experiments, motivation is not a possession but rather the result of a two-part process of channeling your attention: Here’s where you’re at and Here’s where you want to go.

What matters is establishing this link and consistently creating engagement around it. What matters is telling the story.

We tend to use the word story casually, as if stories and narratives were ephemeral decorations for some unchanging underlying reality. The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation. The proof is in brain scans: When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.