The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

But this illusion, like every illusion, happens because our instincts have led us to focus on the wrong details. We focus on what we can see—individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem (the marshmallow is relatively heavy, and the spaghetti is hard to secure).

(A strong culture increases net income 765 percent over ten years, according to a Harvard study of more than two hundred companies.)

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

“When Nick is the Downer, everybody comes into the meeting really energized. He acts quiet and tired and at some point puts his head down on his desk,” Felps says. “And then as the time goes by, they all start to behave that way, tired and quiet and low energy. By the end, there are three others with their heads down on their desks like him, all with their arms folded.”

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.)

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. There’s no way to predict it or control it. Or is there?

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.

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

“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 have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.”

“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.”

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.

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

Dean had no immediate motive to care about the AdWords problem. He worked in Search, which was a different area of the company, and he was more than busy navigating his own urgent problems. But at some point that Friday afternoon, Dean walked over to the kitchen to make a cappuccino and spotted Page’s note. He flipped through the attached pages—and as he did, a thought flickered through his mind, a hazy memory of a similar problem he’d encountered a while back.

It was normal. Google personnel were interacting exactly as the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge interacted. They did not manage their status or worry about who was in charge. Their small building produced high levels of proximity and face-to-face interaction. Page’s technique of igniting whole-group debates around solving tough problems sent a powerful signal of identity and connection, as did the no-holds-barred hockey games and wide-open Friday forums.

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

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

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.

Personal, up-close connection (body language, attention, and behavior that translates as I care about you) Performance feedback (relentless coaching and criticism that translates as We have high standards here) Big-picture perspective (larger conversations about politics, history, and food that translate as Life is bigger than basketball)

the larger context in which their interaction is taking

“This place is like a greenhouse,” Hsieh says. “In some greenhouses, the leader plays the role of the plant that every other plant aspires to. But that’s not me. I’m not the plant that everyone aspires to be. My job is to architect the greenhouse.”

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.”

“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says. “It’s really hard for people to raise their hand and say, ‘I have something tentative to say.’ And it’s equally hard for people not to answer a genuine question from a leader who asks for their opinion or their help.”

Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback. In these moments, it’s important not simply to tolerate the difficult news but to embrace it. “You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”fn1

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.

The lesson of all these studies is the same: Create spaces that maximize collisions.

It’s pretty simple. We realized that food really is part of our core business.”

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice: Ensuring that everyone has a voice is easy to talk about but hard to accomplish. This is why many successful groups use simple mechanisms that encourage, spotlight, and value full-group contribution. For example, many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something.fn2 Others hold regular reviews of recent work in which anybody can offer their two cents. (Pixar calls them Dailies, all-inclusive morning meetings where everybody gets the chance to offer input and feedback on recently created footage.) Others establish regular forums where anyone can bring an issue or question before the group’s leaders, no matter how controversial it might be. But no matter how strong the rule, the underlying key is to have leaders who seek out connection and make sure voices are heard.

Pick Up Trash:

Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, was famous for picking up trash. “Every night you’d see him coming down the street, walking close to the gutter, picking up every McDonald’s wrapper and cup along the way,”

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.

Embrace Fun: This obvious one is still worth mentioning, because laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

They demonstrated that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform. The key, as we’re about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.

If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know? Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it? What is the greatest accomplishment of your life? When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

The story of the Red Balloon Challenge strikes us as surprising, because most of us instinctively see vulnerability as a condition to be hidden. But science shows that when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement.

acting like a coach on the sidelines yelling plays. At some point this commander notices I’m not saying a word, and he gives me this look, almost in disbelief. Like, why aren’t you telling your guys what to do? It was pretty striking. Our guys and their guys, doing the same mission. He’s talking the whole time, and we aren’t saying a thing. And the answer is, because we don’t need to. I know my guys are going to solve the problems themselves.”

Wherever they came from, there seemed no

The problem here is that, as humans, we have an authority bias that’s incredibly strong and unconscious—if a superior tells you to do something, by God we tend to follow it, even when it’s wrong. Having one person tell other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions. 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 steered away from giving orders and instead asked a lot of questions. Anybody have any ideas?

But they succeeded because they understood that being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.

When I visited groups for this book, I met a lot of people who possessed traits of warmth and curiosity—so many, in fact, that I began to think of them as Nyquists. 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. (The best way to find the Nyquist is usually to ask people: If I could get a sense of the way your culture works by meeting just one person, who would that person be?) If we think of successful cultures as engines of human cooperation, then the Nyquists are the spark plugs. The person I met who best embodied this process was named Roshi Givechi.

“She’s really listening, hearing what you said and asking what it means, digging deeper,” says Nili Metuki, design researcher. “She doesn’t let things stay unclear, even when they’re uncomfortable. Especially when they’re uncomfortable.”

“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 safe to tell the truth here. His vulnerability isn’t weakness; it’s his strength.

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?

Among the refrains: Collaborate and Make Others Successful: Going Out of Your Way to Help Others Is the Secret Sauce.

As Zenger and Folkman put it, 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.