The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups – Daniel Coyle
The Culture Code analyses the mechanism behind a successful team and what makes people genuinely engage in organizational goal
The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.
How to Establish a Purpose For Your Group
- Rank your priorities. What are the primary things that are most important to your group or team?
- Be clearer than you think you need to be. Ask group members what your vision is.
- Decide on where you will aim for proficiency and where you will aim for creativity. This means defining the areas where the team and team members need to be proficient in specific skills
- Embrace catchphrases. Cultures that have a sense of belonging often have a shared vocabulary.
- Measure what matters.
- Focus on bar-setting behaviors.
Name and Rank Your Priorities
In order to move toward a target, you must first have a target. Listing your priorities is the first step.
Most successful groups end up with a small handful of priorities and many end up placing their in-group relationships—how they treat one another—at the top of the list. Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. If they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.
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 or 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.
Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.
Sharing Vulnerability
Being vulnerable does not mean indiscriminately sharing fears and shortcomings. Instead, it means specifically being honest about your concerns about a project. Sharing vulnerability can also mean taking an honest look at how things went.
Sharing our own vulnerability about what we are concerned about or what we think could be improved creates an environment where others feel free to share their concerns as well.
We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.
Leaders Should Seek Honest Feedback
Leaders should ask their group members for specific feedback in 3 areas:
- Name one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do?
- Is there one thing I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?
- What can I do to make you more effective?
Avoid Brutal Honesty. Aim for Candor
Giving honest feedback is risky because it can easily result in people feeling hurt or demoralized.
By aiming for candor—feedback that is smaller, more targeted, less personal, less judgmental, and equally impactful—it’s easier to maintain a sense of safety and belonging in the group.
Many highly cooperative groups use language to reinforce their interdependence.
A Sense of Belonging
Neuropsychological studies have shown that we are strongly wired to sense and value belonging.
There are 3 primary ways that members of a group send and receive belonging cues to each other.
- Energy: Individuals are engaged with the group. They invest in the exchange that is occurring
- Individualization: Each person is valued and his or her opinion is listened to.
- Future orientation: There is a sense that the relationship has a future.
Team Performance
You might think the success of a team depends on the individual team members’ skills. However, to a great extent, it depends on five specific factors that can be predicted with accuracy as to how well a team will perform:
- Everyone in the group talks and listens in equal measure, keeping contributions short.
- Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
- Members communicate directly with one another.
- Members carry on side conversations within the team.
- Members periodically take a break, go exploring outside the team, and bring back information to share with the others.