Book Review: The Culture Code
Review of the book Coyle, Daniel. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. Random House.
Theoretical Framework
The book proposes as a tool for analysis (and design) of team performance the following theoretical framework:
Psychological Safety
Share Vulnerability
Establish Purpose
Psychological Safety
In 'The Culture Code' the author notes that in a high-performance team all its members feel part of the team and are comfortable to report any problem without suffering consequences from their superiors.
The format of feedback received takes the form:
I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues:
You are part of this group.
This group is special; we have high standards here.
I believe you can reach those standards.
Leadership delivers two things over and over: tell you the truth, with no bullshit, and then they’ll love you to death.
One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energised and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together.
Creating safety is about dialing in to small, subtle moments and delivering targeted signals at key points.
Share Vulnerability
On July 10, 1989, United Airlines flight 232 left Denver and headed for Chicago with 285 passengers on board. Then, at 3:16, came a loud explosion from the tail. The plane shook fiercely, then started climbing and tilting hard to the right.
Through the description of the crew performance on the incident on Flight 232, the author demonstrates that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform.
All of which underlines a strange truth. The crew of Flight 232 succeeded not because of their individual skills but because they were able to combine those skills into a greater intelligence.
The Vulnerability Loop
Person A sends a signal of vulnerability.
Person B detects this signal.
Person B responds by signaling their own vulnerability.
Person A detects this signal.
A norm is established; closeness and trust increase.
As the author points out, vulnerability is less about the sender than the receiver. “The second person is the key,” he says. “Do they pick it up and reveal their own weaknesses, or do they cover up and pretend they don’t have any? It makes a huge difference in the outcome.
How to Create Cooperation in Small Groups
From the three hundred Navy SEALs who make up Team Six, if you were to ask a variety of current and retired Team Six operators which leaders they admire most, you would hear the same handful of names over and over. But the name you would hear most often is Dave Cooper.
How do you develop ways to challenge each other, ask the right questions, and never defer to authority? We’re trying to create leaders among leaders. And you can’t just tell people to do that. You have to create the conditions where they start to do it.”
Dave generates a series of unmistakable signals that tipped his men away from their natural tendencies and toward interdependence and cooperation. “Human nature is constantly working against us,” he says. “You have to get around those barriers, and they never go away.”
“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.”
One of the most difficult things about creating habits of vulnerability is that it requires a group to endure two discomforts: emotional pain and a sense of inefficiency.
It combines the repetition of digging into something that already happened (shouldn’t we be moving forward?) with the burning awkwardness inherent in confronting unpleasant truths. But as with any workout, the key is to understand that the pain is not a problem but the path to building a stronger group.
Establish Purpose
Purpose isn’t about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal.
High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new. This distinction is important because it highlights the two basic challenges facing any group: consistency and innovation.
It’s strange to think that a wave of creativity and innovation can be unleashed by something as mundane as changing systems and learning new ways of interacting. But it’s true, because building creative purpose isn’t really about creativity. It’s about building ownership, providing support, and aligning group energy toward the arduous, error-filled, ultimately fulfilling journey of making something new.
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
Thank you for reading my notes - please let me know in the comments what other books or topics you’d like me to write about or even comment just to say Hello, I’d appreciate that!
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