The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle - Book Summary

I am a believer in building systems rather than goals. Quoting James Clear, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle is one of those system-building books which in itself is a good reason to pick it up for your weekend read. How do we build good working cultures to achieve far-reaching goals? Think Google, Pixar, and the Navy SEALs. 

The book opens up with how a kindergarten group trumps over a business school team in a spaghetti-tower building challenge. The author highlights a process psychologists call “status management”. 

During the challenge, the B-school team is figuring out who is in charge and if it’s okay to criticise someone. Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behaviour is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition.

However, the kindergartners appear disorganised on the surface, but they move quickly, focusing on the problem and offering help to one another. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions. 

So what makes a group successful? 

Daniel says successful groups are built on strong cultures, created by three skills: 

1. Build safety - Creating an environment where team members feel psychologically safe to take risks and speak their minds.
2. Share vulnerability - Leaders modelling vulnerability to encourage team members to do the same, which creates stronger bonds and fosters greater creativity and innovation.
3. Establish purpose - Creating a shared understanding of why the team exists and what it is trying to achieve, which gives team members a sense of belonging and direction.

Skill 1 - Build Safety

The first skill for creating a culture of safety is to communicate clear signals of belonging. Highlighting few action items to build safety:

• Investing in personal connections
• Treating everyone as unique and valued
• Signalling a long-term future
• Over-communicating active listening
• Highlighting fallibility
• Overdoing thank-yous
• Ensuring everyone has a voice
• Avoiding giving sandwich feedback - Giving a negative feedback sandwiched between two positive feedbacks
• Embracing fun and laughter

Skill 2 - Share Vulnerability

In this section, there were several real-world examples to illustrate how a group's ability to perform can be unlocked when they share their vulnerabilities and offer candid feedback. One quote by Dave Cooper, a Navy SEAL, captures the gist of this section.

"The most important words a leader can say is, ‘I screwed that up’."

I picked up four examples which I found to be interesting: 

1. Notifications in United Airlines: United Airlines pilots used a series of short-burst communications called “notifications” to navigate an engine explosion. A notification is not an order or a command; it is the equivalent of a child’s finger point: I see this. During this incident, the pilots communicated at a rate of more than 60 notifications per minute, and the combination of notifications and open-ended questions helped unlock the crew's ability to perform. Compare this to a corporate’s long drawn out meetings and email exchanges and you’ll get the significance of notifications. 
2. BrainTrust meetings in Pixar: The BrainTrust meeting is a space where directors receive candid feedback about their movies, and it is where those movies get better. This meeting contains pulses of profound tension, as people deal with hard feedback and struggle together to figure out what is going on. Akin to a “Sprint retro” meeting in the tech world?
3. Log PT by Navy SEALs: During a log PT exercise, a team of sailors work together to lift, carry, and maneuver a 250-pound log through a series of exercises, such as squats, lunges, and presses. The exercises are designed to build strength, endurance, and teamwork, as each team member must work in unison to lift and move the log. When Log PT is done poorly, the log bucks and rolls, the trainees fight each other, and emotions rise. When it is done well, almost-invisible exchanges occur, where team members adjust their efforts to keep the log level and steady. In a corporate setting, I could draw parallels to teams who silently and consistently do well v/s teams who are usually high on the noise radar. Unlike the U.S. Navy, in the corporate world, the squeaky wheels usually get the grease. 
4. Nyquists at Bell Labs: Bell Labs administrators studied their top ten scientists with the most patents and discovered that their regular interactions with a quiet Swedish engineer named Harry Nyquist were the common thread. Nyquist possessed warmth, curiosity, and the ability to ask questions that ignited motivation and ideas. The administrators identified Nyquist-like individuals as polite, reserved, skilled listeners with deep knowledge and the ability to radiate a safe, nurturing vibe. They are the spark plugs of successful cultures.

Skill 3 - Establish Purpose

The book highlights the importance of storytelling and how it creates mental models that drive behavior. It also identifies two fundamental challenges that any group faces: consistency and innovation. High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group to innovate.

The author presents the example of Danny Meyer, the owner of a restaurant chain, who used catchphrases to create a conceptual framework for his team that connected with the group’s identity and expressed its core purpose: “We take care of people.” He stressed upon the importance of language and its role in shaping behavior and started naming stuff. Some of his catchphrases include - Read the guest, write a great final chapter, put us out of business with your generosity, avoid skunking (spraying negative energy at workplace), one size fits one. 

Similarly, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, emphasises that building purpose in a creative group is about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas to unearth the right choices. Some action items towards building purpose are: 

• Naming and ranking priorities
• Productive dissatisfaction - the feeling of discomfort that arises when a person realizes that they or their team are not performing at their best 
• Figuring out where the group aims for proficiency and where it aims for creativity
• Using artifacts to denote where the team is heading towards
• Focusing on bar-setting behaviors. Quinnipiac’s hockey coach, Rand Pecknold, built a culture around a specific behavior he called “Forty for Forty,” where his team aimed to back-check forty times in a game, as the fortieth back-check could change the game.

All in all, the book provokes you to think critically about your own team dynamics and to take deliberate steps to create a positive and productive culture.