The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

status management.

(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.

Safety is not mere emotional weather but rather the foundation on which strong culture is built.

“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.”

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. 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.

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 logically. They emerged because they are obsessively on the lookout for danger. 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 it shrinks our perceived world to a single question: What do I need to do to survive?

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.

Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion. He has set a goal of having one thousand “collisionable hours” per year for himself and a hundred thousand collisionable hours per acre

“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?’

any group’s cooperation norms to 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?

it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate. Performance evaluation tends to be a high-risk, inevitably judgmental interaction, often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth.

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.

He paid particular attention to language. He hated waiter-speak like “Are you still working on that?” (it’s not work!) or “Is everything to your liking?” (so impersonal!). Instead, he sought to create language that gave guests the feeling that the staff was on their side. For instance, when a reservation was unavailable, he would say, “Can you give me a range of times that work for you, so I can root for a cancellation?”

Everybody at Gramercy thought they were doing a good job. The manager thought they were doing a good job. The waiter thought they were doing a good job. Everybody stood there and watched this happen, and nobody stopped it.

Collecting the dots and connecting the dots

Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.

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.

Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.

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.

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.

When you look at successful groups, a lot of their internal language features catchphrases that often sound obvious, rah-rah, or corny. Many of us instinctively dismiss them as cultish jargon. But this is a mistake. Their occasionally cheesy obviousness is not a bug—it’s a feature. Their clarity, grating to the outsider’s ear, is precisely what helps them function.

in the early days of Zappos, when Tony Hsieh noticed that call center workers were measured by the number of calls they handled per hour. He realized that this traditional measure was at odds with the group’s purpose