The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  Those interactions sound casual, but in fact each involves an emotional exchange of unmistakable clarity. One side stops shooting, leaving itself exposed. The other side senses that exposure but does nothing. Each time it happens, both experience the relief and gratitude of safe connection—they saw me.

  The connections grew. In several sectors, certain areas were designated as “out of bounds” for sniper fire and designated with white flags. One English artillery unit spoke of its “pet sniper” on the German side who would send his “good night kiss” every night promptly at nine-fifteen P.M., then shoot no more until the following morning. In another sector, an English machine-gunner would shoot out the rhythm of a popular song called “Policeman’s Holiday,” and his German counterpart would provide an answering refrain. The trenches became a petri dish of belonging cues. Each cue, by itself, would not have had much of an impact. But together, repeated day after day, they combined to create conditions that set the stage for a deeper connection.

  In the soldiers’ accounts, it’s possible to see these connections strengthen. One morning after a violent battle at the end of November, Edward Hulse, a captain in the Second Scots Guard, wrote about an impromptu moment of empathy.

  The morning after the attack, there was an almost tacit understanding as to no firing, and about 6:15 A.M. I saw eight or nine German shoulders and heads appear, and then three crawled out a few feet in front of their parapet and began dragging in some of our fellows who were either dead or unconscious….I passed down the order that none of my men were to fire and this seems to have been done all down the line. I helped one of the men in myself, and was not fired on, at all.

  That incident seems to have affected Hulse. Several weeks later, from a post behind the lines, he hatched a plan. He wrote:

  We return to the trenches tomorrow, and shall be in them on Christmas Day. Germans or no Germans…we are going to have a ’ell of a bust, including plum puddings for the whole battalion. I have got a select little party together, who, led by my stentorian voice, are going to take up a position in our trenches where we are closest to the enemy, about 80 yards, and from 10 P.M. onwards we are going to give the enemy every conceivable form of song in harmony, from carols to Tipperary….My fellows are most amused with the idea, and will make a rare noise when we get at it. Our object will be to drown the now far too familiar strains of “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Wacht am Rhein” we hear from their trenches every evening.

  The Germans responded with their own barrage of songs. Some were similar, and the Latin songs were identical. From a psychological perspective, they conveyed a meaning that both sides understood, a shared burst of belief and identity.

  Hulse walked out and met his counterpart, a German major. The Germans helped the English bury their dead, and the German commander handed Hulse a medal and some letters belonging to an English captain who had died and fallen into the German trench a week earlier. Overcome with emotion, Hulse took off his silk scarf and handed it to the German. “It was absolutely astounding,” he later wrote, “and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked!”

  A few miles away, near Ploegsteert Wood, Corporal John Ferguson crouched in his trench, trying to figure out what was happening. He later wrote:

  We shouted back and forward until Old Fritz [the German officer] clambered out of the trench, and accompanied by three others of my section, we went out to meet him….“Make for the light,” he called and as we came nearer we saw he had his flash lamp in his hand, putting it in and out to guide us.

  We shook hands, wishing each other a Merry Xmas, and were soon conversing as if we had known each other for years. We were in front of their wire entanglements and surrounded by Germans—Fritz and I in the centre talking, and Fritz occasionally translating to his friends what I was saying. We stood inside the circle like street-corner orators….Where they couldn’t talk the language they were making themselves understood by signs, and everyone seemed to be getting along nicely. Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!

  Hulse and Ferguson, like so many others, were astounded. But it was not really astounding. At the point when the English and the Germans stepped out onto that field, they had already been in conversation for a long time, both sides sending volleys of belonging cues that lit up their amygdalas with a simple message: We are the same. We are safe. I’ll go halfway if you will. And so they did.*2

  The One-Hour Experiment

  If you had to pick an environment that is the opposite of the Flanders trenches, you might pick the WIPRO call center in Bangalore, India. WIPRO is the model of a successful call center. It is organized. It is highly efficient. The days consist of the same work that happens in call centers all over the world: A caller phones in with issues about a device or a service, and WIPRO’s agents attempt to remedy it. WIPRO (pronounced WHIP-row) is by almost every measure a nice place to work. It features competitive salaries and high-quality facilities. The company treats employees well, providing good food, transportation, and social activities. But in the late 2000s, WIPRO found itself facing a persistent problem: Its employees were leaving in droves, as many as 50 to 70 percent each year. They left for the usual reasons—they were young or taking a different job—and for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. At bottom, they lacked a strong connection to the group.

  WIPRO’s leaders initially tried to fix things by increasing incentives. They boosted salaries, added perks, and touted their company’s award as one of India’s best employers. All these moves made sense—but none of them helped. Employees kept leaving at precisely the same rate as before. And so in the fall of 2010, with the help of researchers Bradley Staats, Francesco Gino, and Daniel Cable, they decided to embark on a small experiment.

  The experiment went like this: Several hundred new hires were divided into two groups, plus the usual control group. Group one received standard training plus an additional hour that focused on WIPRO’s identity. These trainees heard about the company’s successes, met a “star performer,” and answered questions about their first impressions of WIPRO. At the end of the hour, they received a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with the company’s name.

  Group two also received the standard training, plus an additional hour focused not on the company but on the employee. These trainees were asked questions like What is unique about you that leads to your happiest times and best performances at work? In a brief exercise, they were asked to imagine they were lost at sea and to consider what special skills they might bring to the situation. At the end of the hour, they were given a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with their name alongside the company’s name.

  Staats didn’t expect the experiment to show much. High attrition is the norm in the call center world, and WIPRO’s attrition rates were firmly in line with industry averages. And besides, Staats wasn’t inclined to believe a one-hour intervention could make a long-term impact. A former engineer who spent the first years of his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, he isn’t some pie-in-the-sky academic. He knows how things work in the real world.

  “I was pretty sure that our experiment was going to show a small effect, if any at all,” Staats says. “I saw the onboarding process in rational, transactional, informational terms. You show up at a new job on the first day, and there’s a straightforward process where you learn how to act, how to behave, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Seven months later the numbers came in, and Staats was, as he puts it, “completely shocked.” Trainees from group two were 250 percent more likely than those from group one and 157 percent more likely than those from the control group to still be working at WIPRO. The hour of training had transformed group two’s relationship with the company. They went from being noncommittal to being engaged on a far deeper level. The question was why.

  The answer is belonging cues. The trainees in group one received zero signals that reduced the interpersonal distanc
e between themselves and WIPRO. They received lots of information about WIPRO and star performers, plus a nice company sweatshirt, but nothing that altered that fundamental distance.

  The group two trainees, on the other hand, received a steady stream of individualized, future-oriented, amygdala-activating belonging cues. All these signals were small—a personal question about their best times at work, an exercise that revealed their individual skills, a sweatshirt embroidered with their name. These signals didn’t take much time to deliver, but they made a huge difference because they created a foundation of psychological safety that built connection and identity.

  “My old way of thinking about this issue was wrong,” Staats says. “It turns out that there are a whole bunch of effects that take place when we are pleased to be a part of a group, when we are part of creating an authentic structure for us to be more ourselves. All sorts of beneficial things play out from those first interactions.”

  I talked with Dilip Kumar, one of the original WIPRO trainees who had taken part in the experiment. I expected him to share vivid memories of the session, but talking to him about his orientation was a lot like talking to Jeff Dean about fixing the AdWords engine: His sense of belonging was so strong that he’d basically forgotten that the experiment had ever happened. “To be honest, I don’t remember much about that day, but I remember it felt motivating,” said Kumar. He laughed. “I guess it must have worked, because I am still here, and I definitely like it.”

  The Opposite of Belonging

  While it’s useful to spend time with successful cultures, it’s equally useful to travel to the other end of the spectrum, to examine cultures that fail. The most instructive may be those where the group fails with such consistency that it approaches a kind of perfection. This is where we find the story of the Minuteman missileers.

  The Minuteman missileers are the 750 or so men and women who work as nuclear missile launch officers. They are stationed at remote air force bases in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, and their job, for which they are extensively trained, is to control some of the most powerful weapons on earth, 450 Minuteman III missiles. The missiles are sixty feet tall, weigh 80,000 pounds, and can travel 15,000 miles per hour to any spot on the globe within thirty minutes, each delivering twenty times more explosive energy than the Hiroshima bomb.

  The missileers are part of a system designed in the late 1940s by General Curtis LeMay, a larger-than-life figure whose mission was to make the American nuclear force a perfectly functioning machine. “Every man a coupling or tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers,” LeMay wrote. “All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.” LeMay was called “The Toughest Cop of the Western World” by Life magazine, and his confidence was unbounded. One time he stepped into a bomber with a lit cigar. When a crew member warned him that the bomber might explode, LeMay replied, “It wouldn’t dare.”

  LeMay’s system worked well enough for several decades. But in recent years failures began to occur with increasing regularity:

  • August 2007: Crews at Minot Air Force Base mistakenly loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles onto a B-52 bomber, flew them to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and allowed them to sit unattended on a runway for several hours.

  • December 2007: Minot’s missile launch crews failed the subsequent inspection. Inspectors noted that at the time of the visit some of Minot’s security personnel were playing video games on their cellphones.

  • 2008: A Pentagon report noted “a dramatic and unacceptable decline” in the air force’s commitment to the nuclear mission. One Pentagon official was quoted as saying, “It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

  • 2009: Thirty tons of solid rocket boosters ended up in a ditch near Minot when the tractor-trailer carrying them drove off the road.

  • 2012: A federally funded study revealed high levels of burnout, frustration, aggravation, and spousal abuse in the missileer force, and it showed that court-martial rates in the nuclear missile force were more than twice as high as in the rest of the air force. As one missileer told researchers, “We don’t care if things go properly. We just don’t want to get into trouble.”

  • 2013: Missile officers at Minot Air Force Base received a “marginal” rating—the equivalent of a D grade—when three of the eleven crews were rated “unqualified.” Nineteen officers were removed from launch duty and forced to retake proficiency tests. Lieutenant General James Kowalski, commander of the nuclear forces, says that the greatest nuclear threat to America “is an accident. The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid.”

  • 2014: Minuteman maintenance crews caused an accident involving a nuclear-armed missile in its silo.

  Every time a failure occurred, commanders responded by cracking down. As General Kowalski put it, “This is not a training problem. This is some people out there having a problem with discipline.” After the string of incidents in the spring of 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Jay Folds wrote to the combat crew at Minot that they had “fallen…and it’s time to stand ourselves back up.” He described “rot in the crew force” and the need to “crush any rules violators.” “We need to hit the reset button and restructure the crew force to take you out of your comfort zones (which are rotten comfort zones) and rebuild from the ground up,” Folds wrote. “Turn the TVs off and work hard on your proficiency….You better bring your A-game every day. You must be ready, on a moment’s notice, for any eval, any test, any field visit, any certification, etc. Gone is the academic environment of the past (or the environment where we handed things to you on a silver platter because we thought that’s the way you take care of the crew force)….Bring to my attention immediately any officer who badmouths a senior officer, or badmouths the new culture we’re trying to reconstruct. There will be consequences!”

  From afar, it looked like an impressive, all-hands-on-deck, get-tough response. The problem was, none of it worked. The mistakes kept happening. A few months after the Folds manifesto, Major General Michael Carey, who was responsible for overseeing the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, was fired for misconduct during an official trip to Moscow.*3 Soon afterward an air force investigation at Malmstrom Air Force Base implicated two missileers on charges of illegal possession, use, and distribution of cocaine, ecstasy, and bath salts. When investigators examined the cellphones of the accused officers, they uncovered an elaborate system for cheating on proficiency tests, sparking another investigation that ended up implicating thirty-four of Malmstrom’s missileers, plus sixty more who knew about the cheating and failed to report it.

  Everyone agrees that missileer culture is broken. The deeper question is why. If you think about culture as an extension of a group’s character—its DNA—you tend to see the missileers as lazy, selfish, and lacking in character. This leads to the type of get-tough remedies the air force leadership attempted, and their failure leaves you only to confirm the original assumption: The missileers are lazy, immature, and selfish.

  However, if we look at missileer culture through the lens of belonging cues, the picture shifts. Belonging cues have to do not with character or discipline but with building an environment that answers basic questions: Are we connected? Do we share a future? Are we safe? Let’s take them one by one.

  Are we connected? It is hard to conceive of a situation of less physical, social, and emotional connection than that of the missileers. They spend twenty-four-hour rotations paired up in chilly, cramped missile silos with Eisenhower-era technology. “These things have been lived in continuously for forty years,” one missileer told me. “They get cleaned but not really. Sewage lines are corroding. Asbestos is everywhere. People hate being there.”

  Do we share a future? When the silos were built, the missileers were as crucial a part of America’s defense as their pilot brethren; receiving a launch order from the president was a real possibility. Serving as a missileer functioned as a stepping-stone for a career in space command, air combat
command, and other areas. But the end of the Cold War changed the missileers’ future. They are training for a mission that no longer exists. Not surprisingly, career paths out of missiles have dwindled or vanished entirely.

  “The writing’s on the wall,” says Bruce Blair, a former missileer who is now a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton. “No one wants to stay in missiles. There’s no chance of promotion. You’re not going to make general coming through missiles. What’s more, the command has shut down some of the options of cross-training out of nuclear into other commands, which has delivered the message that you guys are stuck on the island of misfit toys.”

  “For the first couple months it’s kind of exciting,” another former missileer told me. “But the shine starts to come off pretty quickly. You do it over and over again. You realize, this is not going to change, this is never going to change.”

  Are we safe? The biggest risk in the missileer’s world is not the missiles but the constant barrage of proficiency, certification, and nuclear-readiness tests, each of which requires near-perfection and each of which might scuttle their career. These tests often involve memorizing a five-inch-thick binder filled with two-sided sheets of launch codes. Missileers must score 100 percent on certain portions of the tests, or else they fail.

  “The checklists are impossibly long and detailed, bizarrely rigid and strict. It’s basically inhuman,” Blair says. “You’re either perfect or you’re a bum. The result is that when you get out of the spotlight of the authority and travel to a remote underground launch control center with one other person, you close that eight-ton blast door behind you. All the standards get dropped, and you start taking shortcuts.”