The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle

CULTURE: from the Latin word  cultus, which means care.

Coyle has spent 4 years researching 8 of the world’s most successful groups, including a special-ops military, an inner-city school, a professional basketball team, a movie studio, a comedy troupe, and a gang of jewel thieves. They must have performed at the top 1% of their domain for at least a decade, must have succeeded with a range of different personnel, and must have a culture admired by knowledgeable people across their industry and beyond. 

Introduction

• In dozens of trials (with spaghetti, tape, string and marshmallow), unsophisticated kindergarteners build taller structures (of 26 inches) than business students and lawyers (10 inches). The kindergarteners just try a bunch of stuff together whereas the adults divide up tasks professionally and start building. Though the business students seem to be collaborating, they are actually engaged in a process called status management where they figure out where they fit into the larger picture, leading their underlying behaviour to be riddled with inefficiency, hesitation and subtle competition. They then fail to grasp the essence of the problem that the marshmallow is heavy and the spaghetti hard to secure.
• Skill 1 - Build Safely (explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity)
• Skill 2 - Share Vulnerability (how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation)
• Skill 3 - Establish Purpose (how narratives create shared goals and values)
• Being smart is overrated, showing fallibility is crucial, and being nice is not as important. 
• Culture is not something you are. It’s something you do - a set of living relationships working towards a shared goal. 

Skill 1: Build Safely

How groups create belonging

• Building safely is a fluid, improvisational skill - can’t be taught in a robotic paint-by-numbers manner.
• Overcommunicate Your Listening: E.g. tilt head forward towards speaker, eyes unblinking, eyebrows arched up, and with no interruptions except for a steady stream of affirmations to encourage communication
• Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On, Especially If You’re A Leader: Invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents,” “Of course, I could be wrong here,” and “What am I missing?”
• Embrace The Messenger: Don’t just avoid “shooting the messenger” but actually incentivize them to keep giving feedback.
• Preview Future Connection: Saying something like this could be very powerful: “You know that guy?” (point to successful person)...”Three years ago he was sitting right in that seat where you are.”
• Overdo Thank-Yous: Even when you are the one doing the good deed (e.g. coaching someone), say “Thank you for allowing me to coach you”. Thanking ignites cooperative behavior. Spotlight the humblest and most unheralded people who make your success possible.
• Be Painstaking In The Hiring Process: Must be rigorous.
• Eliminate Bad Apples: Must have extremely low tolerance for bad apple behaviour. 
• Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces: When Bank of America’s call centre teams were struggling with burnout, they found time away from the desk to be most stress relieving and scheduled and created spaces for a 15-min coffee break (i.e. nicer coffee machines at more convenient gathering places). Merely replacing 4-person tables with 10-person tables boosted productivity by 10%. Pixar used to outsource its food services to food service companies but decided to in-source this when it realized it couldn’t get the same kind of quality when it outsources - now its employees get excellent quality food at reasonable prices and hence don’t leave often. 
• Make Sure Everyone Has A Voice: Use simple mechanisms to encourage, spotlight and value full-group contributions (e.g. no meeting can end without everyone sharing something, inclusive daily morning meetings, regular forums to air controversial issues, Best example is Toyota’s andon cord method which places power and trust in the hands of the assembly line worker to voice out problems and stop the line when needed). When navy captain Michael Abrashoff took command of the lowest ranking ship, he had one-on-one meetings with the ship’s 310 sailors, over 6-weeks, where he asked them what they liked most, what they liked least, and how would they change it if they were captain. Whenever he received an implementable suggestion, he would announce it over the intercom, giving credit to the idea’s originator.
• Pick Up Trash: Leaders of successful teams do the menial work (cleaning / tidying etc). Mindset of muscular humility sends the signal that we’re all in this together - simple ways to serve the group (includes paying for meals, and providing equity in salaries).
• Capitalize On Threshold Moments: Pixar ushers in all newbies into their screening theatre (whether barista or director), makes them sit on the first row where directors sit, and let’s them hear a powerful message: “Whatever you were before, you are a filmmaker now. We need you to help make our films better.” 
• Avoid Giving Sandwich Feedback (i.e. positive, followed by negative, and ending with a positive): Such feedback creates confusion because people either entirely focus on the positive or negative. Instead, separate the 2 in different processes. Handle the negatives through dialogue, by first asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused 2-way convo about the needed growth. Handle positives through ultra clear bursts of recognition and praise.
• Embrace Fun: Laughter is the fundamental sign of safety and connection.

Skill 2: Share Vulnerability 

How groups translate connection into trusting cooperation

• Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle - takes time and repetition.
• Make Sure The Leader Is Vulnerable First And Often: To get answers, the key is to just ask for one thing, not 5-10 things. Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask people 3 questions:

1. What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do?
2. What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?
3. What can I do to make you more effective? 

• Overcommunicate Expectations: successful groups don’t presume cooperation but instead send big clear signals that establish expectations. The more complex the problem, the more help you need. IDEO’s internal bulletin is filled with requests for help, even on personal matters like finding a yoga class or baby sitter.
• Deliver The Negative Stuff In Person: allows tension to be dealt with upfront, in an honest way that avoids misunderstanding and creates shared clarity and connection. When a player violates a team rule, Joe Maddon gets them to draw a slip of paper out of his bowl, purchase the expensive wine stated there, and uncork it with their manager - this way, discipline is linked to reconnection.
• When Forming New Groups, Focus On Two Critical Moments: (1) the first vulnerability, and (2) first disagreement. This is when people figure out whether they are (1) just appearing strong or discovering the landscape together and (2) winning interaction or learning together? What happens in that moment helps set the pattern for everything that follows.
• Listen Like A Trampoline: the most effective listeners do 4 things (1) they interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported (actively respond to add energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude), (2) they take a helping, cooperative stance (ask questions to explore tensions in different ways, rarely stopping at the first response), (3) they occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions, (4) they make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths.
• In Conversation, Resist The Temptation To Reflexively Add Value: Instead, ask the other person to “say more about that.” Don’t interrupt with ideas or recount something that worked for you, not until you’ve established “a scaffold of thoughtfulness” that supports the risks and vulnerabilities.
• Use Candor-Generating Practices Like AARs, BrainTrusts, And Red Teaming: A good AAR (After Action Review) structure is to use 5 questions- (1) what were our intended results, (2) what were our actual results, (3) what caused our results, (4) what will we do the same next time, (5) what will we do differently? Some teams also use Before-Action reviews like this (1) What are our intended results? (2) What challenges can we anticipate? (3) What have we or others learned from similar situations? (4) What will make us successful this time? Could also adopt the SEALs’ practice of running the AAR without leadership involvement, to boost openness and honesty. Pixar’s BrainTrusts involve assembling together a team of experienced leaders who have no formal authority over the project, to critique strengths and weaknesses. They aren’t allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. Red Teaming is a military-derived method for coming up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan.
• Aim For Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty: This refers to targeted feedback that is smaller, more personal, less judgmental but equally impactful
• Embrace The Discomfort: Requires a group to endure emotional pain and inefficiency.
• Align Language With Action: Give people exciting job titles that describe what they do. Might seem like a small semantic difference but it reinforces shared identity.
• Build A Wall Between Performance Review And Professional Development: Performance evaluation tends to be high-risk, inevitably judgmental and often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth. Many groups move away from ranking workers to coaching, where people receive frequent feedback. 
• Use Flash Mentoring: You pick someone you want to learn from and shadow them - lasts a few hours. Those brief interactions break down barriers and build relationships.
• Make The Leader Occasionally Disappear: The best teams figure out what they need to do without relying on the leader at all.

Skill 3: Establish Purpose

• Successful cultures were often forged in moments of crisis. For Pixar, it was in 1998 when it set out to make a sequel to Toy Story - early versions was awful. When leaders of those groups reflect on those failures, they express gratitude (sometimes even nostalgia).
• Name and Rank your Priorities: Greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself - successful groups realise that if they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.
• Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be: Overcommunicate priorities because leaders often assume they know when they actually don’t. Make a habit of regularly testing the company’s values and purpose by asking “What are we about? Where are we headed?”
• Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Proficiency is about doing a task the same way every single time (purpose is built with high-repetition & high-feedback training and vivid memorable rules of thumb), whereas creativity is about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before (purpose is built by providing support, fuel and tools for the expedition - attend to team composition and dynamics, relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy, make it safe to fail and give feedback, and celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative). 
• Embrace the Use of Catchphrases: These often share an action-based clarity - “talk less, do moe”, “work hard, be nice”, “create raves for guests”.
• Measure What Really Matters: Goal is not to get a precise measurement, but to create awareness and alignment to direct behaviour toward the group’s mission.
• Use Artefacts: Display items that reinforce the same signal, as to what matters.
• Focus on Bar-Setting Behaviours: Build purpose around a small, effortful behaviour. Pixar puts hundreds of hours of effort into the technical and storytelling quality of shorts (standalone animated films that run before its features) - these lose money but pay off in other ways (allow the studio’s young talent to experiment and showcase the attention and excellence they channel into every task).

Epilogue

• Daniel Coyle coached middle school students from a struggling school on a one-day writing tournament where they compete against Goliaths:

1. He changed the seating arrangement from a loose scattering of tables to shoving 4 tables together to form 1 big table that fit 10. 
2. He then asked, “What’s your favourite book right now?” and encouraged participation from students by fist bumping them. 
3. He went on to ask them, “What do you not like about writing?” 
4. After they answered, he took out sheets of paper from his bag that showed them his own writing that was riddled with edits, line-outs and fixes scribbled at margins with entire pages crossed out. 
5. He revealed to them that nothing he ever wrote was perfect - that he often got stuck and had to struggle through the process fo build a story, and that he made lots of mistakes and fixing those mistakes was where his writing improved. 
6. After they had written for 15 minutes, he asked them to put their pens down and explained that everyone was encouraged to read their story aloud and give feedback. Some students were hesitant to read aloud and lacked the language to critique, but they eventually started to share more openly as the weeks passed. 
7. Feedback took a “What Worked Well/Even Better If” format.
8. He flooded them with catchphrases like “Power of the Problem”, which reminded them that effective stories consist of characters struggling with huge problems, the bigger, the better. Another was “Use Your Camera,” which reminded them to control their point of view (whether the reader goes into the character’s mind or observes from above) and “Every story should have a VOW: voice, obstacles and wanting”. 
9. Coyle’s highlight was not the team eventually winning first-place or the students being awarded for being talented young writers, but that the above methods could transform a quiet 8th grader who hadn’t done much writing into a terrific comic story writer of a titanically confident high schooler who though he could take on the world alone.