The Culture Code | Daniel Coyle

Honestly, "The Culture Code" is not one of those books that I will recommend someone to read but it has well chosed quotes that I wanted to carry to my blog. Anyway, I respect to the authoe Daniel Coyle's effort. So here you may find them: 

Individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

They are not competing for status. They stand shoulder to shoulder and work energetically together. They move quickly, spotting problems and offering help. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions.

They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

This book is the story of how that method works.

Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity.

Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation.

Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.

The three skills work together from the bottom up, first building group connection and then channeling it into action. Each part of the book is structured like a tour: We’ll first explore how each skill works, and then we’ll go into the field to spend time with groups and leaders who use these methods every day.

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.

Amy Edmondson, who studies psychological safety at Harvard. “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.”

Words are noise. Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.

It’s not hard to figure out why Popovich’s teams win, because the evidence is in plain view on the court. The Spurs consistently perform the thousand little unselfish behaviors—the extra pass, the alert defense, the tireless hustle—that puts the team’s interest above their own. “Selfless,” LeBron James said. “Guys move, cut, pass, you’ve got a shot, you take it. But it’s all for the team and it’s never about the individual.” Playing against them, said Marcin Gortat of the Washington Wizards, “was like listening to Mozart.” What’s hard to figure out is how Popovich does it.

When Popovich wants to connect with a player, he moves in tight enough that their noses nearly touch; it’s almost like a challenge—an intimacy contest. As warm-ups continue, Popovich’s relationship with longtime Spurs star Tim Duncan is a case in point. Before selecting Duncan with the first overall pick in the 1997 draft, Popovich flew to Duncan’s home in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, to meet the college star. They didn’t just meet—they spent four days together traveling the island, visiting Duncan’s family and friends, swimming in the ocean, and talking about everything under the sun except basketball. This is not a normal thing for coaches players to do; most coaches and players interact in short, highly calculated bursts. But Popovich wanted to connect, to dig in and see if Duncan was the kind of person who was tough, unselfish, and humble enough to build a team around. Duncan and Popovich evolved into what amounts to a father-son relationship, a high-trust, no-bullshit connection that provides a vivid model for other players, especially when it comes to absorbing Popovich’s high-volume truth-telling. As more than one Spur put it, If Tim can take Pop’s coaching, how can I not take it?

A few minutes earlier the Spurs had gathered in the video room to review the Oklahoma City game. They had sat down with trepidation, expecting Popovich to detail the sins of the previous night, to show them what they did wrong and what they could do better. But when Popovich clicked on the video, the screen flickered with a CNN documentary on the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. The team watched in silence as the story unfolded: Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon Johnson, and the Selma marches. When it was over, Popovich asked questions. He always asks questions, and those questions are always the same: personal, direct, focused on the big picture. What did you think of it? What would you have done in that situation?

The players thought, answered, nodded. The room shifted and became something of a seminar, a conversation. They talked. They were not surprised because on the Spurs this kind of thing happens all the time. Popovich would create similar conversations on the war in Syria, or a change of government in Argentina, gay marriage, institutional racism, terrorism—it doesn’t really matter, as long as it delivers the message he wants it to deliver: There are bigger things than basketball to which we are all connected.

Popovich’s methods are effective. His communications consist of three types of belonging cues.

 • Personal, up-close connection (body language, attention, and behavior that translates as I care about you)

Performance feedback (relentless coaching and criticism that translates as We have high standards here)

 • Big-picture perspective (larger conversations about politics, history, and food that translate as Life is bigger than basketball)

 Popovich toggles among the three signals to connect his team the way a skilled director uses a camera. First he zooms in close, creating an individualized connection. Then

he operates in the middle distance, showing players the truth about their performance. Then he pans out to show the larger context in which their interaction is taking place. Alone, each of these signals would have a limited effect. But together they create a steady stream of magical feedback. Every dinner, every elbow touch, every impromptu seminar on politics and history adds up to build a relational narrative: You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards. In other words, Popovich’s yelling works, in part, because it is not just yelling. It is delivered along with a suite of other cues that affirm and strengthen the fabric of the relationships.

My job is to architect the greenhouse. This is a useful insight into how Hsieh creates belonging because it implies a process. “I probably say the word collision a thousand times a day,” Hsieh says. “I’m doing this because the point isn’t just about counting them but about making a mindset shift that they’re what matters. When an idea becomes part of a language, it becomes part of the default way of thinking.”

“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says. “It’s really hard for people to raise their hand and say, ‘I have something tentative to say.’ And it’s equally hard for people not to answer a genuine question from a leader who asks for their opinion or their help.”

 Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback. In these moments, it’s important not simply to tolerate the difficult news but to embrace it.

“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.”*1

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 St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, for example, is renowned for their culture and their ability to develop young players into big-league talent. The Johnson City (Tennessee) Cardinals are St. Louis’s lowest-level minor-league club. One day on a bus belonging to the Tennessee team, one of the Cardinals coaches, sitting in the front row, gestured up toward the television on which the big-league team was playing.

 “You know that pitcher?”

 Players looked up. On the screen, wearing a perfect white uniform, stood the heroic figure of Trevor Rosenthal, a young star who had become a dominant relief pitcher for the Cardinals; he had pitched in the previous year’s World Series.

 “Three years ago,” the coach said, “he was sitting right in that seat where you are.” That’s all he said. It wasn’t much—it took about five seconds to deliver. But it was powerful, because it connected the dots between where the players were and where they were headed. Three years ago he was sitting right in that seat where you are.

Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top. At the end of each basketball season, for example, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich takes each of his star players aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. Those are his exact words: Thank you for allowing me to coach you. It makes little logical sense—after all, both Popovich and the player are amply compensated, and it’s not like the player had a choice whether to be coached. But this kind of moment happens all the time in highly successful groups, because it has less to do with thanks than affirming the relationship.

A few years back, Bank of America was struggling with burnout in its call center teams. They brought in Ben Waber to do a sociometric analysis, which found that workers were highly stressed and that the best reliever of that stress was time spent together away from their desks. Waber recommended aligning team members’ schedules so they shared the same fifteen-minute coffee break every day. He also had the company buy nicer coffee machines and install them in more convenient gathering places. The effect was immediate: a 20 percent increase in productivity, and a reduction in turnover from 40 percent to 12 percent. Waber has also overseen interventions in company cafeterias: Merely replacing four-person tables with ten-person tables has boosted productivity by 10 percent. The lesson of all these studies is the same: Create spaces that maximize collisions.

 “We used to hire out our food service to a contractor,” said Ed Catmull, president and cofounder of Pixar (of whom we’ll hear more in Chapter 16). “We didn’t consider making food to be our core business. But when you hire it out, that food service company wants to make money, and the only way they can make money is to decrease the quality of the food or the service. They’re not bad or greedy people; it’s a structural problem. That’s why we decided to take it over ourselves and give our people high-quality food at a reasonable price. Now we have really good food and people stay here instead of leaving, and they have the kind of conversations and encounters that help our business. It’s pretty simple. We realized that food really is part of our core business.”

The mechanism of cooperation can be summed up as follows: Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built. This idea is useful because it gives us a glimpse inside the machinery of teamwork.

Cooperation, as we’ll see, does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: a circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.

Being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.

 “When we talk about courage, we think it’s going against an enemy with a machine gun,” Cooper says. “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?’ But inside the squadron, that is the culture, and that’s why we’re successful.

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. This rule is not easy to follow (it’s far more comfortable for both the sender and receiver to communicate electronically), but it works because it deals with tension in an up front, honest way that avoids misunderstandings and creates shared clarity and connection.

One of the best methods for handling negative news is that of Joe Maddon, the coach of the Chicago Cubs and avowed oenophile. In his office, Maddon keeps a glass bowl filled with slips of paper, each inscribed with the name of an expensive wine. When a player violates a team rule, Maddon asks them to draw a slip of paper out of the bowl, purchase that wine, and uncork it with their manager. In other words, Maddon links the act of discipline to the act of reconnection.

 When 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.

Also like trampolines, effective listeners gain amplitude through repetition. When asking questions, they rarely stop at the first response. Rather, they find different ways to explore an area of tension, in order to reveal the truths and connections that will enable cooperation.

“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.”

What happened in Rosenthal’s and Grant’s experiments is no different from what happened when Johnson & Johnson gathered to challenge the Credo. 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.

Nonetheless a handful of “Ed-isms” are heard in Pixar’s corridors. Here are a few:

 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.