The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development: While it seems natural to hold these two conversations together, in fact 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. Linking them into one conversation muddies the waters. Relatedly, many groups have moved away from ranking workers and shifted to more of a coaching model, where people receive frequent feedback designed to provide them with both a vivid performance snapshot and a path for improvement.

In other words, the reason starling flocks can behave so intelligently has nothing to do with telepathy or magic and everything to do with a simpler ability: to pay focused attention to a small handful of key markers.

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.

Step 1: Think about a realistic goal that you’d like to achieve. It could be anything: Become skilled at a sport, rededicate yourself to a relationship, lose a few pounds, get a new job. Spend a few seconds reflecting on that goal and imagining that it’s come true. Picture a future where you’ve achieved it. Got it? Step 2: Take a few seconds and picture the obstacles between you and that goal as vividly as possible. Don’t gloss over the negatives, but try to see them as they truly are. For example, if you were trying to lose weight, you might picture those moments of weakness when you smell warm cookies, and you decide to eat one (or three). That’s it. It’s called mental contrasting, and it seems less like science than the kind of advice you might come across on a late-night infomercial: Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles. The thing is, as Oettingen discovered, this method works, triggering significant changes in behavior and motivation.

The difficult choices they made weren’t really all that difficult. They were closer to a reflex.

They created a high-purpose environment, flooded the zone with signals that linked the present effort to a meaningful future, and used a single story to orient motivation the way that a magnetic field orients a compass needle to true north: This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.

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.

The value of those signals is not in their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation.

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.

Now that we’ve established the basic mechanism of high-purpose environments, let’s explore the next question: How do you create one? The answer, it turns out, depends on the type of skills you want your group to perform. 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.

behind me, a tray accidentally slips from a waiter’s hand, and several water glasses smash on the floor. For a microsecond, all the action stops. Meyer raises a finger, pressing pause on our conversation so he can watch what happens. The waiter who dropped the glasses starts picking up the pieces, and another waiter arrives with a broom and a dustpan. The cleanup happens swiftly, and everyone turns back to their food. Then I ask Meyer why he was watching so closely. “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.”

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.”

heuristic-dense

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.

“For me, managing is a creative act,” he says. “It’s problem solving, and I love doing that.”

building creative purpose isn’t really about creativity. It’s about building ownership, providing support, and aligning group energy toward the arduous, error-filled, ultimately fulfilling journey of making something new.

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.

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.