The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

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

The answer, Edmondson discovered, lay in 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: 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. 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. 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. 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. Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements. For example, the team leader at Mountain Medical wore a head-mounted camera during surgery to help facilitate discussion and feedback. Unsuccessful teams tended not to do this.

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.

But they all performed the same vital function: to flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.

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.

“I’m watching for what happens right afterward, and I’m looking for their energy level to go up,” he says. “They connect to clean up the problem, and the energy level goes either up or down, and if we’re doing our job right, their energy level will go up.” He puts his fists together, and then makes an explosion gesture with his fingers. “They are creating uplifting energy that has nothing to do with the task and everything to do with each other and what comes next. It’s not really that different from an ant colony or a beehive. Every action adds on to the others.”

“Either they’re disinterested—‘I’m just doing my job’ kind of thing. Or they’re angry at the other person or the situation. And if I were to see that, I would know that there’s a deeper problem here, because the number-one job is to take care of each other. I didn’t always know that, but I know it now.”

“I didn’t know how to read a balance sheet,” he says. “I didn’t know how to manage flow or run a kitchen. I didn’t know anything. But I did know how I wanted to make people feel. I wanted them to feel like they couldn’t tell if they had stayed home or gone out.”

That’s when I knew that I had to find a way to build a language, to teach behavior. I could no longer just model the behavior and trust that people would understand and do it. I had to start naming stuff.”

At the retreat, Meyer and the staff ranked their priorities: Colleagues Guests Community Suppliers Investors

“Naming these things felt incredibly good,” he says. “Getting all this out in the open. The manager who’d caused the salmon problem ended up leaving, and that’s when things started to take off, and I realized that how we treat each other is everything. If we do that well, everything else will fall into place.”

In a similar way, Meyer then attempted to name the specific behaviors and interactions he wanted to create at his restaurants. He already had an assortment of catchphrases that he used informally in training—he had a knack for distilling ideas into handy maxims. But now he started paying deeper attention to these phrases, thinking about them as tools. Here are a few: Read the guest Athletic hospitality Writing a great final chapter Turning up the Home Dial Loving problems Finding the yes Collecting the dots and connecting the dots Creating raves for guests One size fits one Skunking Making the charitable assumption Planting like seeds in like gardens Put us out of business with your generosity Be aware of your emotional wake To get a hug, you have to give a hug The excellence reflex Are you an agent or a gatekeeper?

By themselves, these phrases are unremarkable. But together, endlessly repeated and modeled through behavior, they create a larger conceptual framework that connects with the group’s identity and expresses its core purpose: We take care of people.

He began to treat his role as that of a culture broadcaster. And it worked.

“You have priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”

“The results indicate that Union Square Cafe 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.”

A simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors benefiting customers.

In the case of slime molds, these rules of thumb are as follows: If there’s no food, connect with one another. If connected, stay connected and move toward the light. If you reach the light, stay connected and climb.

“Honeybees work the same way,” Beekman says. “So do ants and many other species. They all use decision-making heuristics. There’s no reason we wouldn’t use it too. If you look at these species, you can feel the connection. Like us, they all seek a collective goal.”

Beekman and the slime molds give us a new way to think about why Danny Meyer’s catchphrases work so well. They are not merely catchphrases; they are heuristics that provide guidance by creating if/then scenarios in a vivid, memorable way. Structurally, there is no difference between If someone is rude, make a charitable assumption and If there’s no food, connect with one another. Both function as a conceptual beacon, creating situational awareness and providing clarity in times of potential confusion. This is why so many of Meyer’s catchphrases focus on how to respond to mistakes.

You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve pro...

“There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”

“Mostly you can feel it in the room,” he says. “When a team isn’t working, you see defensive body language, or you see people close down. Or there’s just silence. The ideas stop coming, or they can’t see the problems. We used to use Steve [Jobs] as a kind of a two-by-four to whack people in the head so they could see the problems in the movie—Steve was good at that. “But it becomes harder and harder as time goes on, because as directors get more experience, they sometimes have a harder time hearing other points of view that might help them. There are so many parts you have to get right, and it’s so easy to get lost in this swirling mass. Your first conclusions are always wrong, and so are your second and your third. So you have to create mechanisms where teams of people can keep working together to see what’s really happening and then work together to solve the problems.”

Each gathering brings team members together in a safe, flat, high-candor environment and lets them point out problems and generate ideas that move the team, stepwise, toward a better solution.

You’ll notice that, in contrast to Danny Meyer’s vivid, specific language, these are defiantly un-catchy, almost zen-like in their plainness and universality. This reflects the fundamental difference between leading for proficiency and leading for creativity: Meyer needs people to know and feel exactly what to do, while Catmull needs people to discover that for themselves.

If Danny Meyer is a lighthouse, beaming signals of purpose, then Catmull is more like the engineer of a ship. Catmull doesn’t steer the ship—he roves around belowdecks, checking the hull for leaks, changing out a piston, adding a little oil here and there. “For me, managing is a creative act,” he says. “It’s problem solving, and I love doing that.”

“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.”

“The people who made these films are the same people who were there when they were failing,” he says. “We put in some new systems, they learned new ways of interacting, and they changed their behavior, and now they are a completely different group of people when they work together.”

Here’s a surprising fact about successful cultures: many were forged in moments of crisis.

Catmull and Lasseter realized this was a question of Pixar’s core purpose. Was it a studio that did average work or one that aimed for greatness?

This gives us insight into building purpose. It’s not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite from a hymnal of catchphrases. It’s a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting, and above all, learning. High-purpose environments don’t descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.

Name and Rank Your Priorities:

Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be:

Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity:

You want to spotlight the goal and provide crystal-clear directions to the checkpoints along the way. Ways to do that include: Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill.

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. Some ways to do that include: Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative.

Embrace the Use of Catchphrases:

Measure What Really Matters:

Use Artifacts:

Focus on Bar-Setting Behaviors: