The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

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.

AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teams each generate the same underlying action: to build the habit of opening up vulnerabilities so that the group can better understand what works, what doesn’t work, and how to get better.

“The best teams tended to be the ones I wasn’t that involved with, especially when it came to training. They would disappear and not rely on me at all. They were better at figuring out what they needed to do themselves than I could ever be.”

When I visited the successful groups, I noticed that whenever they communicated anything about their purpose or their values, they were as subtle as a punch in the nose. It started with the surroundings. One expects most groups to fill their surroundings with a few reminders of their mission. These groups, however, did more than that—a lot more.

Here’s where I came from. Here’s what the money raised by your work means to me. Over the next month, time spent calling increased 142 percent, and weekly revenues increased 172 percent. The incentives hadn’t changed. The task hadn’t changed. All that had changed was the fact that the workers had received a clear beacon of purpose, and it made all the difference.

His idea was that it was possible to stop crowd violence by changing the signals the police were transmitting. In his view, riot gear and armored cars were cues that activated hooligan behavior in fans who might otherwise behave normally. (Ninety-five percent of the people arrested for soccer violence, his research showed, had no prior history of disorderly conduct.) Stott believed that the key to policing riots was to essentially stop policing riots.

Every time an officer banters with a fan, every time a fan notices the lack of protective armor, a signal is sent: We are here to get along. Every time the police allow fans to keep kicking the ball, they reinforce that signal. By themselves, none of the signals matter. Together they build a new story.

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.

These voices sound like they are coming from different universes. Ironically, both were doing the exact same procedure with the exact same training. 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.

High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new. This distinction is important because it highlights the two basic challenges facing any group: consistency and innovation. And as we’re about to see, building purpose in these two areas requires different approaches.

I ask Meyer what a bad interaction looks like. “It’s one of two things,” he says. “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.”

You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously. If it ain’t broke, fix it. Mistakes are like waves; servers are really surfers. The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.

Creative leadership appears to be mysterious, because we tend to regard creativity as a gift, as a quasi-magical ability to see things that do not yet exist and to invent them. Accordingly, we tend to think of creative leaders as artists, able to tap into wellsprings of inspiration and genius that are inaccessible to the rest of us. And to be sure, some leaders fit this description.

We made some mistakes with this building, and now we know that, and we are slightly better because we know that.

“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.”

“Now it’s up to you.”

Meyer needs people to know and feel exactly what to do, while Catmull needs people to discover that for themselves.

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.

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.