The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups - By Daniel Coyle

Date read: 2018-02-18
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
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Want to know the secret to building a great team? It might not be what you think. For example, the smartest teams don't always win. It's more about building trust and empathy to allow individuals to express their ideas and be open to conflicting schools of thought. Recommended for leaders who want to create high-performing teams.

My Notes

We focus on what we can see — individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

Why do certain groups add up to be greater than the sum of their parts, while others add up to be less?

Marshmallow Game - The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way.

Groups succeed not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.

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.

Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.

The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase. I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

Avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance

Open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents.” “Of course, I could be wrong here.” “What am I missing?” “What do you think?”

“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.”

Preview Future Connection: One habit I saw in successful groups was that of sneak-previewing future relationships, making small but telling connections between now and a vision of the future.

The groups I studied had extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors.

Create spaces that maximize collisions - Many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something. Others hold regular reviews of recent work in which anybody can offer their two cents.

One-on-ones - Questions to ask:

What do you like most about X?
What do you like least?
What would you change if you were captain?

Successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.

They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise.

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.

One of the most useful tools was the After-Action Review. AARs happen immediately after each mission and consist of a short meeting in which the team gathers to discuss and replay key decisions. AARs are led not by commanders but by enlisted men. There are no agendas, and no minutes are kept. The goal is to create a flat landscape without rank, where people can figure out what really happened and talk about mistakes—especially their own.

Modules of questions teams could ask themselves, then provided those modules to design teams as tools to help them improve. For example, here are a few:

The one thing that excites me about this particular opportunity is
I confess, the one thing I’m not so excited about with this particular opportunity is
On this project, I’d really like to get better at

Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions:

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

If you have negative news or feedback to give someone — even as small as a rejected item on an expense report — you are obligated to deliver that news face-to-face.

The most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude.

“I’ve found that whenever you ask a question, the first response you get is usually not the answer — it’s just the first response,” Roshi Givechi says. “So I try to find ways to slowly surface things, to bring out what ought to be shared so that people can build from it. You have to find a lot of ways to ask the same question, and approach the same question from a lot of different angles. Then you have to build questions from that response, to explore more.”

Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments.

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.

Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal.

Accordingly, Catmull has almost no direct involvement with creative decisions. This is because he realizes that (1) the teams are in a better position to solve problems, and (2) a suggestion from a powerful person tends to be followed. One of his frequently used phrases is “Now it’s up to you.” This is also why he tends to let a troubled project roll on “a bit too long,” as he puts it, before pulling the plug and/or restarting it with a different team. “If you do a restart before everyone is completely ready, you risk upsetting things,” he says. “You have to wait until it’s clear to everyone that it needs to be restarted.”

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.