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DownloadWhy do some teams deliver performances exponentially better than the sum of their counterparts, while other teams add up to be much less? How can one build teams that seamlessly collaborate and act like a single hive-mind? The answer lies in group culture.
New York Times bestselling author Danny Coyle unlocks the secrets of highly effective group cultures by studying the finest teams across various industries in the world, including the Navy SEAL's, Pixar Studios, and the San Antonio Spurs.
The Culture CodeWhen we think of culture we usually think of groups as the sum of individual skills. In reality, however, nothing could be more wrong. A cohesive group culture enables teams to create performance far beyond the sum of individual capabilities. Strong cultures are created by a specific set of skills that can be learnt and practiced. In this book, Danny Coyle boils it down to three specific skills: Build Safety, Share Vulnerability, and Establish Purpose.
Safety is the foundation on which cultures are built. Humans use a series of subtle gestures called belonging cues to create safe connection in groups. Examples of belonging cues include eye contact, body language, and vocal pitch. There are three basic qualities of belonging cues: 1) energy invested in the exchange, 2) treating individuals as unique and valuable, and 3) signaling that the relationship will sustain in the future
Switching from fear to belonging
Our unconscious brain is obsessed with sensing danger and craving social approval from superiors. Belonging cues, when repeated, create psychological safety and help the brain shift from fear to connection. On receiving belonging cues, it switches roles and focuses on creating deeper social bonds with the group. This means that belonging happens from outside in, when the brain receives constant signals that signal closeness, safety, and a shared future.
A surreal christmas on the battlefield
On Christmas Eve, something surreal happened at Flanders, one of the bloodiest battlefields in World War 1. Tens of thousands of soldiers across the battlefield spontaneously erupted into Christmas carols. Soldiers even began eating and drinking together. This seemingly magical incident becomes intelligible when we analyze the steady stream of belonging cues exchanged by both sides for weeks before Christmas Eve. The close physical proximity created belonging cues as soldiers could hear the conversations and songs from the others side. The British and the Germans would deliver rations to the trenches at the same time. During this time the firing would stop. Slowly these micro-truces expanded to include ceasefire during resupplying, latrines, and gathering of casualties. By the time the "spontaneous" ceasefire happened, thousands of belonging cues had been exchanged to create a sense of connection, safety, and trust.
Why cultures fail
To understand what makes cultures tick, it's important to see why cultures fail. The Minuteman missileers are nuclear missile launch officers who handle weapons that are twenty times more powerful than Hiroshima. In recent years, however, they have seen a high rate of failure and accidents including missiles lying unattended on a runway for hours. The Air Force treated this as a disciplinary problem and cracked down. Yet, the failures kept happening.
Questions and answers
It's easy to think of the missileers as lazy and selfish. But belonging cues give us a different picture. The missileers spend twenty-four hour shifts inside cramped missile silos with no scope for physical, social or emotional connections. After the Cold War, there is no real mission and few career options. They are expected to conform to near-impossible standards and small failures are severely punished. This creates a perfect cocktail of anti-belonging cues. The missileers fail because they see no safety, no connection, and no shared future.
Techniques to build safety
Building safety requires you to recognize small cues, respond quickly, and deliver a targeted signal. This comes with a learning curve and below are some techniques that help:
Teams succeed because they are able to combine the skills to form a collective intelligence. The key to doing this is sharing vulnerability. This creates the cohesion and trust necessary for fluid, organic cooperation.
Creating vulnerability loops
A vulnerability loop is established when a person responds positively to a group member's signal of vulnerability. This behavior becomes a model for others who leave their insecurities and begin to trust and collaborate with each other. Group cooperation is built by repeated patterns of sharing vulnerability together.
Creating cooperation in groups
Navy SEALs training gives teams the remarkable ability to navigate complex and uncertain landscapes in complete silence. The training philosophy can be seen in an exercise called Log PT where teams perform a series of maneuvers with a wooden log. Log PT delivers strong doses of pure agony for extended durations and demands highly coordinated maneuvers. This interplay of vulnerability and interconnectedness is seen throughout the training program generating thousands of microevents that build cooperation and trust.
Questions and answers
Dave Cooper carries a reputation for building SEAL teams that collaborate seamlessly. For Cooper the central challenge of creating a hive mind is to develop ways to challenge each other and ask the right questions. To do this, he continually gives signals that nudge them towards active cooperation, use his first name and question his authority. Over time, Cooper has developed tools to improve team cohesion. One of the most effective ones is the After Action Review(AAR) that follows every mission. Cooper creates a safe space for everyone to talk by having "Ranks switched off, humility switched on". The team puts their guns down and the start discussing the mission in excruciating detail, questioning every single decision. AAR's enable the team to have a shared mental model of what happened and model future behavior.
Questions and answers
Cooper's methods were tested when his team was asked to fly into Pakistan on stealth helicopters to take down Osama Bin Laden. For the next few weeks, Cooper repeatedly simulated crashed-helicopter scenarios where teams would scramble to figure out how to crash-land and storm the mock compound. This was followed by AAR's. On May 1, when the actual mission took place, both helicopters faced difficulties and one crash landed. Despite this the mission was over in just 38 minutes. The teams knew exactly what to do.
Creating cooperation with individuals
At the award-winning design firm IDEO, Roshi Givechi plays a crucial role making things flow when teams are stuck and opening new possibilities. Roshi is not the center of the room. She quietly listens to understand the design and team-dynamics issues that the team is facing. Then she asks questions that bring out the tensions and help teams gain clarity on both project goals and team dynamics. She calls this surfacing. This isn't always pleasing. Sometimes it's a nudge to work harder or try a different approach. Moments of concordance happen when a person responds authentically to the emotion projected in the room. This empathetic response establishes a connection. The key moments of concordance happen when a person is actively listening.
Techniques to share vulnerability
Building group vulnerability takes time and systematic, repeated effort. These are some techniques that successful teams follow.
Purpose does not stem from a mystical inspiration but from creating simple ways to focus attention on the shared goal. High-purpose environments provide clear signals that connect the present moment to a meaningful future goal. Stories are the most powerful tool to deliver mental models that drive behavior and remind the group about the organization's purpose.
Creating beacons of meaning
In 1998, Harvard researchers studied the learning velocity of 16 hospitals who went through a three-day training program to learn a new heart surgery technique. At the outset it looked like the team from Chelsea Hospital, an elite institution with a strong organizational commitment to the procedure would win the race. However, the team from Mountain Medical Centre, a small institution with an inexperienced team, overtook Chelsea by the fifth surgery.
Questions and answers
The difference lay in a set of small, repeated signals that focused attention on the shared goal. The Mountain Medical Centre team were constantly reminded that the technique is an important learning opportunity that would benefit patients. This created a narrative that linked the current action with the larger goal.
These beacon signals depend on the nature of the tasks the groups perform. High Proficiency Environments have clear tasks that require consistent and effective performance. High Creativity Environments on the other hand focus on innovation. These require different approaches to building purposes.
Lead for high proficiency: the lighthouse method
Four out of five restaurants in New York vanish within five years. Against these seemingly impossible odds Danny Meyer has successfully built twenty-four unique restaurants ranging from an Italian Cafe to a Barbeque Joint. Every restaurant creates an ambience of warmth and connection.
When Meyer started his first restaurant, he trained the staff himself and created a language that radiated warmth. How the team treated each other became top priority Meyer created catchphrases for favorable behaviors and interactions. For example, Making the Charitable Assumption meant giving the benefit of the doubt when someone behaves poorly.
Questions and answers
Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of behaviors can function as a lighthouse aligning behaviors with the core organizational purpose. As the author puts it: Leaders of high proficiency groups focus on creating priorities, naming keystone behaviors and flooding the environment with heuristics that link the two.
Lead for high creativity
Ed Catmull, President and cofounder of Pixar, is one of the most successful creative leaders of all time. For Catmull, every creative project necessarily starts as a disaster. Teams never get the right set of ideas right away. Building purpose has more to do with building systems that consistently churning out ideas. Creative leadership is getting the team working together, helping them navigate hard choices and see what they are doing right and where they make mistakes.
Questions and answers
To do this Catmull created a set of organizational habits. Every movie is put through at least six BrainTrust meetings during development. These meetings are frank and candid, harnessing the ideas of the entire team while maintaining the creative team's project ownership. As Catmull puts it "All our movies suck at first. The BrainTrust is where we figure out why they suck, and it's also where they start not to suck."
These methods are not limited to Pixar alone. When Catmull was asked to lead Walt Disney Animation, a studio several times bigger than Pixar, he was able to recreate the magic. With zero staff turnover, the studio began to generate a string of hits.
Techniques to establish purpose
High-purpose teams are built through navigating challenges together and reaffirming their common purpose.
Building a cohesive organizational culture focused on core purpose is like building a muscle. It takes time and repeated, focused effort. Ultimately, "Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It's not something you are. It's something you do."
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