The Culture Code Quotes

“The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“the number-one job is to take care of each other. I didn’t always know that, but I know it now.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“No shortcuts,” “Work hard, be nice,” “Don’t eat the marshmallow,” “Team and family,” “If there’s a problem, we look for the solution,” “Read, baby, read,” “All of us will learn,” “KIPPsters do the right thing when no one is watching,” “Everything is earned,” “Be the constant, not the variable,” “If a teammate needs help, we give; if we need help, we ask,” “No robots,” and “Prove the doubters wrong.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Thinking about your ancestors makes you smarter. A research team led by Peter Fischer found that spending a few minutes contemplating your family tree (as opposed to contemplating a friend, or a shopping list, or nothing at all) significantly boosted performance on tests of cognitive intelligence. Their hypothesis is that thinking about our connections to the group increases our feelings of autonomy and control.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“This is a different way of thinking about human beings," Pentland says. "Individuals aren't really individuals. They're more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement 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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“[Building purpose is...] not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite 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 it's problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development:”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“In other words, a small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. 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.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, analyzed 3,492 participants in a manager development program and found that the most effective listeners do four things: 1. They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2. They take a helping, cooperative stance 3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“When you ask people inside highly successful groups to describe their relationship with one another, they all tend to choose the same word. This word is not friends or team or tribe or any other equally plausible term. The word they use is family.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty: Giving honest feedback is tricky, because it can easily result in people feeling hurt or demoralized. One useful distinction, made most clearly at Pixar, is to aim for candor and avoid brutal honesty. By aiming for candor—feedback that is smaller, more targeted, less personal, less judgmental, and equally impactful—it’s easier to maintain a sense of safety and belonging in the group.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

“One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.’ ”
― Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups