The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  Here’s a surprising fact about successful cultures: many were forged in moments of crisis. Pixar’s crisis occurred in 1998 when it set out to make a straight-to-video sequel to the highly acclaimed Toy Story. The studio embarked on the project presuming it would be a relatively simple process—after all, how hard could a sequel be? But early versions were awful. The story lacked emotion, the characters were flat, and the film lacked the sparkle and heart of the original. Catmull and Lasseter realized this was a question of Pixar’s core purpose. Was it a studio that did average work or one that aimed for greatness? At their urging, Pixar scrapped the early versions and started over at the eleventh hour, aiming for a full theatrical release instead of video. This successful last-minute push crystallized Pixar’s identity and resulted in the invention of many of its signature collaborative systems (including the BrainTrust).

  The SEALs experienced a similar moment in 1983, during the invasion of Grenada. The mission had been straightforward: One team would parachute into the sea, swim to shore, and capture Grenada’s only radio antenna. Unfortunately, a combination of weather, poor communication, and bad decisions led to the team being dropped at night in a storm, overloaded with gear. The result was the drowning deaths of four SEALs—and a subsequent rebuilding of the group’s decision-making and communications systems.

  Danny Meyer’s early days as a restaurateur, too, were punctuated by a string of near-disasters. “We nearly killed a customer when a light fixture fell out of a wall,” he says. “Another time I got into a fistfight with a customer who’d had too much to drink. And I’m not talking just a shoving match. It was a real fistfight in front of the whole restaurant. He punched me in the jaw and slammed my head in a door, and I kicked him in the nuts. Let’s just say that we’re lucky that the Internet didn’t exist in those days.”

  The difference with successful cultures seems to be that they use the crisis to crystallize their purpose. When leaders of those groups reflect on those failures now, they express gratitude (and sometimes even nostalgic desire) for those moments, as painful as they were, because they were the crucible that helped the group discover what it could be.

  This gives us insight into building purpose. It’s not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite from 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 its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.

  Here are a few ideas to help you do that.

  Name and Rank Your Priorities: In order to move toward a target, you must first have a target. Listing your priorities, which means wrestling with the choices that define your identity, is the first step. Most successful groups end up with a small handful of priorities (five or fewer), and many, not coincidentally, end up placing their in-group relationships—how they treat one another—at the top of the list. This reflects the truth that many successful groups realize: Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. 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: A while back Inc. magazine asked executives at six hundred companies to estimate the percentage of their workforce who could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives predicted that 64 percent would be able to name them. When Inc. then asked employees to name the priorities, only 2 percent could do so. This is not the exception but the rule. Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities. The leaders I visited with were not shy about this. Statements of priorities were painted on walls, stamped on emails, incanted in speeches, dropped into conversation, and repeated over and over until they became part of the oxygen.

  One way to create awareness is to make a habit of regularly testing the company’s values and purpose, as James Burke did with the Credo challenge. This involves creating conversations that encourage people to grapple with the big questions: What are we about? Where are we headed? Many of the leaders I met seemed to do this instinctively, cultivating what might be called a productive dissatisfaction. They were mildly suspicious of success. They presumed that there were other, better ways of doing things, and they were unafraid of change. They presumed they didn’t have all the answers and so constantly sought guidance and clarity.

  Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity.

  Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time. They are about delivering machine-like reliability, and they tend to apply in domains in which the goal behaviors are clearly defined, such as service. Building purpose to perform these skills is like building a vivid map: You want to spotlight the goal and provide crystal-clear directions to the checkpoints along the way. Ways to do that include:

  • Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence.

  • Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training.

  • Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y).

  • Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill.

  Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include:

  • Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics.

  • Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy.

  • Make it safe to fail and to give feedback.

  • Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative.

  Most groups, of course, consist of a combination of these skill types, as they aim for proficiency in certain areas and creativity in others. The key is to clearly identify these areas and tailor leadership accordingly.

  Embrace the Use of Catchphrases: When you look at successful groups, a lot of their internal language features catchphrases that often sound obvious, rah-rah, or corny. Many of us instinctively dismiss them as cultish jargon. But this is a mistake. Their occasionally cheesy obviousness is not a bug—it’s a feature. Their clarity, grating to the outsider’s ear, is precisely what helps them function.

  The trick to building effective catchphrases is to keep them simple, action-oriented, and forthright: “Create fun and a little weirdness” (Zappos), “Talk less, do more” (IDEO), “Work hard, be nice” (KIPP), “Pound the rock” (San Antonio Spurs), “Leave the jersey in a better place” (New Zealand All-Blacks), “Create raves for guests” (Danny Meyer’s restaurants). They’re hardly poetry, but they share an action-based clarity. They aren’t gentle suggestions so much as clear reminders, crisp nudges in the direction the group wants to go.

  Measure What Really Matters: The main challenge to building a clear sense of purpose is that the world is cluttered with noise, distractions, and endless alternative purposes. One solution is to create simple universal measures that place focus on what matters. A good example happened in the early days of Zappos, when Tony Hsieh noticed that call center workers were measured by the number of calls they handled per hour. He realized that this traditional measure was at odds with the group’s purpose and that it was driving unwanted behaviors (haste and brevity, for starters). So he banished that metric and replaced it with Personal Emotional Connections (PECs), or creating a bond outside the conversation about the product. It’s impossible, of course, to measure PECs precisely, but the goal here is not precision; it is to create awareness and alignment and to direct behavior toward the group’s miss
ion. So when a customer service agent spent a company-record 10 hours and 29 minutes on a call, Zappos celebrated and sent out a press release.*

  Use Artifacts: If you traveled from Mars to Earth to visit successful cultures, it would not take you long to figure out what they were about. Their environments are richly embedded with artifacts that embody their purpose and identity. These artifacts vary widely: the battle gear of soldiers killed in combat at the Navy SEAL headquarters; the Oscar trophies accompanied by hand-drawn sketches of the original concepts at Pixar; and the rock and sledgehammer behind glass at the San Antonio Spurs practice facility, embodying the team’s catchphrase “Pound the rock”—but they all reinforce the same signal: This is what matters.

  Focus on Bar-Setting Behaviors: One challenge of building purpose is to translate abstract ideas (values, mission) into concrete terms. One way successful groups do this is by spotlighting a single task and using it to define their identity and set the bar for their expectations.

  One good example is the men’s hockey team at Quinnipiac University, a small school in Hamden, Connecticut. The team fields few highly recruited players, yet it has spent the last half-decade as one of the nation’s top-ranked teams. Quinnipiac’s coach, Rand Pecknold, has built a culture around a specific behavior he calls “Forty for Forty.” The phrase refers to back-checking, which means rushing back to the defensive end in response to the other team’s attack—basically, chasing them down. Back-checking happens around forty times per game, and it is Pecknold’s goal that his players go all-out with 100 percent effort on each one—in other words, Forty for Forty. It is not easy to do. Back-checking is exhausting, requires keen attentiveness, and—here’s the key—rarely makes a difference in the game.

  “It almost never pays off,” Pecknold says. “You can back-check thirty-nine times in a row, and it doesn’t make any difference at all in the play. But the fortieth time, maybe something happens. You get a stick in, you steal the puck, you stop a goal, or you create a turnover that leads to a goal. That one back-check doesn’t show up anywhere in the stat books, but it can change a game. That’s why we are Forty for Forty. That’s who we are.”

  Quinnipiac team members talk about Forty for Forty all the time. They talk about it during practice, during games, and during Pecknold’s regular one-on-one meetings with players. And on those rare moments when a successful back-check happens in a game, Pecknold spotlights the moment.

  “The next day I get it on video, and I set it all up,” he says. “I’m not one to drop f-bombs a lot with the team—you gotta be really careful where you do that. But I do it here. I’ll cue up the tape of the back-check and set it up like it’s a movie. I’ll say, ‘Watch Shutty [forward Tommy Shutt] right here. Look at fucking Shutty go. Look at him take this guy out.’ And everybody goes nuts. Even if Shutty’s back-check leads to a goal, I never talk about the guy who scored the goal or the guy who had the assist—they don’t even exist. All I talk about is Shutty and this great back-check, and how it happened because we were Forty for Forty. You can see all the guys feeling it, and the next time we practice, everybody is on it, doing it, loving it.”

  Pecknold is not the only leader to build purpose around spotlighting a small, effortful behavior. At his restaurants, Danny Meyer is known for moving the salt shaker if it shifts even slightly from its spot at the table’s center. Teachers at KIPP Infinity in Harlem still talk about how founder Dave Levin would place each student’s water bottle in millimeter-accurate arrangement with their notebooks on the first day of school. Pixar puts hundreds of hours of effort into the technical and storytelling quality of the short, stand-alone animated films that run before each of its features. The shorts lose money, but they pay off in other ways. They invest in the studio’s young talent, create experimentation, and most important, showcase the attention and excellence they channel into every task. In other words, these small efforts are powerful because they transmit, amplify, and celebrate the purpose of the whole group.

  * * *

  * The call covered a wide variety of subjects, including movies, favorite foods, and what it’s like to live in Las Vegas. It resulted in the sale of one pair of Ugg boots.

  Writing a book, like every journey, leaves a person changed. As I worked on this project over the past four years, I found myself noticing subtle moments of connection that I had previously missed. I appreciated how certain places—the local bakery, my children’s school, the gas station—used small interactions to build a cohesive culture. I found myself admiring leaders who opened up about their shortcomings to create honest conversations. At home, I parented a little differently: I talked less and focused more on seeking ways to create belonging. (Card games are the absolute best.) It wasn’t as if I were suddenly graced with X-ray vision; it was more like learning a sport. First you are clumsy; then after a while, you get better.

  One place I used these skills most was in coaching a team. It wasn’t a sports team but a team of writers at the Ruffing Montessori middle school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which my two youngest daughters attended. The writing team competed in Power of the Pen, a statewide competition. Students practice all year for a one-day tournament at which they are given three short prompts (“Keeping the Secret,” say, or “Buried Treasure”) to produce three stories, which judges then score and rank. It’s a fun and inspiring event, because it combines the creativity of writing with the scoreboard adrenaline of sports.

  It’s also an event at which Ruffing had historically struggled. In the previous decade (I’d been coaching for two years), its students had occasionally advanced past the first-round tournament but rarely got much further. This result made sense—after all, Ruffing is tiny, consisting of only forty students, competing against Goliath-size schools from around the state. But it made me wonder if our team could do better. So in 2014, as an experiment, I decided to apply some ideas from the research for this book.

  Our first weekly practice session in October drew nine students. Catherine, Carson, Ellie, Vala, Caroline, Natsumi, David, Nathan, and Zoe were an energetic group with a range of skill levels and motivations. Vala and Ellie were confident and experienced writers, while Carson and Caroline were more hesitant, just starting to stretch their creative muscles. I was hesitant, too. In years past, I’d taken a traditional (i.e., authoritative) approach to coaching the team: I did a lot of speaking, gave lecture-like talks, then provided feedback on their practice stories. In teaching parlance, I was “the sage on the stage,” and it was a comfortable place to stand. This year, however, would be different.

  First, I changed the seating arrangement. In years past we had sat in loose proximity at a scattering of small tables. Now I shoved four small tables together to form one table just big enough to fit the ten of us, elbow to elbow. Then, rather than launching into a lecture about good writing, I asked the team, “What’s your favorite book right now?” We went around the circle. (Harry Potter made more than one appearance, as did Hunger Games.)

  Then I asked why those books were so good.

  “Because he’s an orphan,” Ellie said. “Pretty much every good story has orphans.”

  “Because there’s an intense war happening,” Nathan said. “All these people are dying, and it’s brutal and you don’t want them to die.”

  “Because it’s just really, really good,” Carson said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Carson swallowed. He was a tall, slender kid, with large dark eyes and a formal manner. He chose his words carefully. “Because the story makes you worry about them,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. I gave him a fist bump, and he smiled.

  I asked the team another question: “What do you not like about writing?”

  Answers came fast: They didn’t like coming up with ideas to write about. Sometimes stories came easily, but often they didn’t, and they were left staring at a blank page, wondering what to write about.

  “I just get stuck sometimes,” Catherine said, speaking for the gr
oup. “I get partway, and then I can’t think of anything.”

  I told the team I had something to share with them. I reached into my backpack and, with a shamelessly dramatic flourish, produced a stack of paper—early drafts of this book. They took the sheets eagerly. They knew I was a writer, and they were expecting to find examples of faultless prose.

  But as they read, they saw that the pages weren’t perfect. To the contrary, they were riddled with handwritten edits, line-outs, and fixes scribbled in the margins. Entire pages had been crossed out. It didn’t look like the work of a published writer. It looked like a school assignment that had earned a resounding F.

  “This is yours?” Nathan asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are there this many changes every time?” Vala asked.

  “Every time,” I said.

  I told them that nothing I ever wrote was perfect; that I often got stuck and struggled through the process of building a story. I told them I tended to make lots of mistakes and that noticing and fixing those mistakes was where the writing improved.

  Then I gave the team a prompt. After they’d written for fifteen minutes, I asked them to put their pens down and explained a simple rule: Everyone was encouraged to read their story aloud, and everyone was encouraged to give feedback. Some of the students were hesitant about reading their stories aloud, and they lacked the language to critique other stories. But slowly, as weeks passed, we got better. Caroline, who hadn’t wanted to read her stories at first, started to share more openly, bringing us into the sci-fi worlds she liked to create. Natsumi, initially hesitant about offering criticism to her teammates, started weighing in with warm, pointed guidance.

  We adopted a “What Worked Well/Even Better If” format for the feedback sessions: first celebrating the story’s positives, then offering ideas for improvement. Over time the exchanges strengthened into habits; the group stopped behaving like a typical class and started behaving like the kindergartners in the spaghetti-marshmallow challenge: working shoulder to shoulder, fixing problems, thinking as one.