The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice: Ensuring that everyone has a voice is easy to talk about but hard to accomplish. This is why many successful groups use simple mechanisms that encourage, spotlight, and value full-group contribution. For example, many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something.*2 Others hold regular reviews of recent work in which anybody can offer their two cents. (Pixar calls them Dailies, all-inclusive morning meetings where everybody gets the chance to offer input and feedback on recently created footage.) Others establish regular forums where anyone can bring an issue or question before the group’s leaders, no matter how controversial it might be. But no matter how strong the rule, the underlying key is to have leaders who seek out connection and make sure voices are heard.

  A good example is the method of Michael Abrashoff, a navy captain who took command of the destroyer USS Benfold in 1997. At the time, the Benfold ranked at the bottom of the navy’s performance scores. One of his first acts was to hold one-on-ones with each of the ship’s 310 sailors for thirty minutes. (Completing all the meetings took about six weeks.) Abrashoff asked each sailor three questions:

  1. What do you like most about the Benfold?

  2. What do you like least?

  3. What would you change if you were captain?

  Whenever Abrashoff received a suggestion he felt was immediately implementable, he announced the change over the ship’s intercom, giving credit to the idea’s originator. Over the next three years, on the strength of this and other measures (which are detailed in Abrashoff’s book It’s Your Ship), the Benfold rose to become one of the navy’s highest-ranked ships.

  Pick Up Trash: Back in the mid-1960s, UCLA’s men’s basketball team was in the midst of one of the most successful eras in sports history, winning ten titles in twelve years. Franklin Adler, the team’s student manager, saw something odd: John Wooden, the team’s legendary head coach, was picking up trash in the locker room. “Here was a man who had already won three national championships,” Adler said, “a man who was already enshrined in the Hall of Fame as a player, a man who had created and was in the middle of a dynasty—bending down and picking up scraps from the locker room floor.”

  Wooden was not alone. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, was famous for picking up trash. “Every night you’d see him coming down the street, walking close to the gutter, picking up every McDonald’s wrapper and cup along the way,” former McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner told author Alan Deutschman. “He’d come into the store with both hands full of cups and wrappers. I saw Ray spend one Saturday morning with a toothbrush cleaning out holes in the mop wringer. No one else really paid attention to the damned mop wringer, because everyone knew it was just a mop bucket. But Kroc saw all the crud building up in the holes, and he wanted to clean them so the wringer would work better.”

  I kept seeing that pattern. Coach Billy Donovan of the University of Florida (now with the Oklahoma City Thunder) cleaned up Gatorade that had spilled on the floor. Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Tom Coughlin of the New York Giants did the same. The leaders of the All-Blacks rugby team have formalized this habit into a team value called “sweeping the sheds.” Their leaders do the menial work, cleaning and tidying the locker rooms—and along the way vividly model the team’s ethic of togetherness and teamwork.

  This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group. Picking up trash is one example, but the same kinds of behaviors exist around allocating parking places (egalitarian, with no special spots reserved for leaders), picking up checks at meals (the leaders do it every time), and providing for equity in salaries, particularly for start-ups. These actions are powerful not just because they are moral or generous but also because they send a larger signal: We are all in this together.

  Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other. For example, suppose you are hired at Pixar, whether it’s as a director or as a barista in the company café. On your first day, you and a small group of fellow newbies are ushered into the theater where screenings are held. You are asked to sit in the fifth row—because that’s where the directors sit. Then you hear the following words: Whatever you were before, you are a filmmaker now. We need you to help us make our films better.*3 “It’s incredibly powerful,” said Mike Sundy, who works in data management. “You feel changed.”

  The Oklahoma City Thunder, a successful NBA team, makes similar use of their first day. Oklahoma City is an unlikely place for a professional sports franchise: It is relatively small and isolated, known more for tornadoes than for nightlife. When you are hired by the Thunder, either as a player or as an employee, the first thing that happens is that you are taken to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which honors the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. You walk around the reflecting pool. You see the sculpture of 168 chairs, one for each victim.

  The general manager, Sam Presti, often leads the tour. He doesn’t say much; he simply lets you walk around and feel the solemnity of the place. Then, toward the end, he reminds players to look into the stands during games and to remember that many of those people were personally affected by this tragedy. It’s a small moment. But it makes a big difference for the same reason the WIPRO experiment made a difference. It sends a powerful belonging cue at the precise moment when people are ripest to receive it.

  Of course, threshold moments don’t only happen on day one; they happen every day. But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.

  Avoid Giving Sandwich Feedback: In many organizations, leaders tend to deliver feedback using the traditional sandwich method: You talk about a positive, then address an area that needs improvement, then finish with a positive. This makes sense in theory, but in practice it often leads to confusion, as people tend to focus either entirely on the positive or entirely on the negative.

  In the cultures I visited, I didn’t see many feedback sandwiches. Instead, I saw them separate the two into different processes. They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise. The leaders I spent time with shared a capacity for radiating delight when they spotted behavior worth praising. These moments of warm, authentic happiness functioned as magnetic north, creating clarity, boosting belonging, and orienting future action.

  Embrace Fun: This obvious one is still worth mentioning, because laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

  * * *

  *1 One way to detect belonging levels is by examining the kinds of personal language used in emails. A study by Lynn Wu of Wharton looked at two years of communication by eight thousand workers and showed that talking about sports, lunch, and coffee predicted whether an employee would be retained better than the revenue they brought in. A study by Amir Goldberg at Stanford showed that it was possible to predict how long employees stayed by how frequently their emails contained family references and swear words.

  *2 My favorite method is Toyota’s use of the andon, a cord that any employee can use to stop the assembly line when they spot a problem. Like many organizational habits that ensure voice, this one seems inefficient at first, overturning the hierarchy by allowing a lowly assembly-line worker to stop the entire company. But a closer look shows that it creates belonging by placing power and trust in the hands of the people doing the work.

  *3 Samantha Wilson, who was originally hired by Pixar as a barista for the company café, is now a story manager for the studio, having worked on Inside Out, Up, and Cars 2.

  On July 10, 1989, United Airlines flight 232 left Denver and headed for Chic
ago with 285 passengers on board. The weather was sunny and mild, with light winds out of the west at thirteen miles per hour. For the first hour and ten minutes of the trip, everything went perfectly. Over Iowa, the crew, consisting of Captain Al Haynes, first officer Bill Records, and flight engineer Dudley Dvorak, put the plane on autopilot, ate lunch, and shot the breeze. Haynes, fifty-seven, was good at shooting the breeze. A low-key Texan and a former Marine, he had an amiable manner appreciated by his crews. Two years from retirement, he was planning for the next stage of life, when he would pilot an RV around the country with his wife, Darlene.

  Then, at 3:16, came a loud explosion from the tail. The plane shook fiercely, then started climbing and tilting hard to the right. Records grabbed one of the two control wheels, known as yokes, and said, “I have the airplane.” Checking the gauges, the crew realized the plane’s tail engine—one of the DC-10’s three engines—was gone. Meanwhile the plane kept tilting farther to the right despite Records’s efforts to correct it.

  “Al,” Records said, trying to keep his voice calm, “I can’t control the airplane.”

  Haynes seized his yoke. “I got it,” he said, but he didn’t have it. He pulled with all his strength, but the controls barely budged. The plane kept tilting to the right, until it felt like it was nearly standing on the wing.

  Later investigators would trace the explosion to a microscopic crack in a six-foot-diameter fan inside the tail engine. The consequences of the explosion, however, went beyond the loss of the engine, which could normally be overcome. Shrapnel had sliced the main and backup hydraulic control lines through which the pilots operated the rudder, ailerons, and wing flaps—in short, the explosion removed the pilots’ ability to control the plane.

  The term the National Transportation Safety Board uses for this type of event is catastrophic failure. Airlines didn’t bother training pilots for catastrophic failure for two reasons. First, such failures are extremely rare—the odds of losing hydraulics and backups had been calculated at one in a billion. Second, they are invariably fatal.

  Haynes managed to stop the roll by using the throttles to increase power to the right-wing engine and decrease power to the left-wing engine. The asymmetric thrust helped the plane to slowly tilt back to a rough semblance of level flight. But it did nothing to fix the bigger problem: The controls wouldn’t budge. The plane was now wobbling through the Iowa sky like a poorly made paper airplane, porpoising up and down thousands of feet each minute. Haynes and Records continued to wrestle with the yokes. The flight stewards moved through the cabin, trying to restore calm. One family took out a Bible and began to pray.

  In an aisle seat of first class, a forty-six-year-old man named Denny Fitch was cleaning up the coffee that had spilled on his lap when the explosion happened. Fitch worked for United as a pilot trainer. He spent his days in a flight simulator, teaching pilots how to handle emergencies. Now he spoke with a flight attendant and asked her to inform the captain of his willingness to help. The word came back: Send him up. Fitch walked up the aisle, opened the cockpit door, and his heart dropped.

  “The scene to me as a pilot was unbelievable,” Fitch later told a reporter. “Both the pilots were in short-sleeved shirts, the tendons being raised on their forearms, their knuckles were white….The first thing that strikes your mind is, ‘Dear God, I’m going to die this afternoon.’ The only question that remains is, ‘How long is it going to take Iowa to hit me?’ ”

  Fitch scanned the gauges, trying to make sense of them. He had never seen a complete hydraulic failure before, and like the pilots, he was having trouble comprehending what was going on. Flight engineer Dvorak was on the radio to United’s maintenance seeking advice. It was a moment of peak confusion.

  “Tell me,” Fitch said to Haynes. “Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you.”

  Haynes gestured to the engine throttles that were located on the console between the two pilots. As Haynes and Records had their hands full wrestling with the yokes, someone needed to run the throttles to try to maintain level flight. Fitch moved forward, knelt between the seats, and grasped the throttles with both hands.

  Shoulder to shoulder, the three men began to do something that no pilots had ever done: fly a DC-10 without any controls. They began to communicate in a particular way, through short, urgent bursts.

  HAYNES: Okay, let’s start this sucker down a little more.

  FITCH: Okay, set your power a little bit.

  HAYNES: Anybody have any ideas about [what to do about the landing gear]? He [Dvorak] is talking to [maintenance].

  FITCH: [Dvorak] is talking to [maintenance]. I’m gonna alternate-gear you. Maybe that will even help you. If there is no fluid, I don’t know how outboard ailerons are going to help you.

  HAYNES: How do you, we get gear down?

  FITCH: Well, they can free-fall. The only thing is, we alternate the gear. We got the [landing gear] doors down?

  HAYNES: Yep.

  RECORDS: We’re gonna have trouble stopping too.

  HAYNES: Oh yeah. We don’t have any brakes.

  RECORDS: No brakes?

  HAYNES: Well, we have some brakes [but not much].

  FITCH: [Braking will be a] one-shot deal. Just mash it, mash it once. That’s all you get. I’m gonna turn you. [I’m gonna] give you a left turn back to the airport. Is that okay?

  HAYNES: I got it.

  [A few minutes later.]

  HAYNES: A little left bank. Back, back.

  FITCH: Hold this thing level if you can.

  HAYNES: Level, baby, level, level…

  DVORAK: We’re turning now.

  FITCH: More power, more power, give ’em more power.

  RECORDS: More power, full power.

  FITCH: Power picks ’em up.

  UNKNOWN VOICE: Right turn, throttle back.

  HAYNES: Can we turn left?

  DVORAK (speaking to Fitch): Do you want this seat?

  FITCH: Yes, do you mind?

  DVORAK: I don’t mind. I think that you know what you’re doing there….

  The term pilots use to describe this type of short-burst communication is notifications. A notification is not an order or a command. It provides context, telling of something noticed, placing a spotlight on one discrete element of the world. Notifications are the humblest and most primitive form of communication, the equivalent of a child’s finger-point: I see this. Unlike commands, they carry unspoken questions: Do you agree? What else do you see? In a typical landing or takeoff, a proficient crew averages twenty notifications per minute.

  During their interactions after the explosion, the makeshift crew of Flight 232 communicated at a rate of more than sixty notifications per minute. Some of the interactions consisted of big, open-ended questions, mostly asked by Haynes. How do we get the [landing] gear down?…Anybody have any ideas? These are not the kinds of questions one would normally expect a captain to ask. In fact, they’re the opposite. Normally, a captain’s job in an emergency is to be in command and to project capability and coolness. Yet over and over Haynes notified his crew of a very different truth: Your captain has no idea what is going on or how to fix it. Can you help?

  This combination of notifications and open-ended questions added up to a pattern of interaction that was neither smooth nor graceful. It was clunky, unconfident, and full of repetitions. Conceptually, it resembled a person feeling his way through a dark room, sensing obstacles and navigating fitfully around them. We’re gonna have trouble stopping too….Oh yeah. We don’t have any brakes….No brakes?…Well, we have some brakes….Just mash it, mash it once.

  Interacting in this stilted, unconfident fashion, the crew of Flight 232 solved a complex series of problems while flying at four hundred miles per hour. They figured out how to optimally distribute power between the two engines and how to try to anticipate the porpoising movements the plane was making. They communicated with the cabin, attendants, passengers, flight control, maintenance, and emergency crews on the ground. They ch
ose routes, calculated descent rates, prepared for evacuation, and even cracked jokes. As they got closer to Sioux City, the air traffic controller cleared them to land on any of the airport’s runways. Haynes chuckled and asked, “You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?” Everyone laughed.

  A few minutes later, flying at twice the normal landing speed and descending at six times the normal rate, Flight 232 attempted to land. A wingtip dipped and dug into the runway, sending the plane into a fiery cartwheel. The crash was terrible, but 185 people survived, including the entire crew. Some walked out of the wreckage into a cornfield. The survival of so many passengers was termed a miracle.

  In the weeks afterward, as part of its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board placed experienced crews in simulators and re-created the conditions faced by Flight 232 at the moment it lost all hydraulics. The simulation was run twenty-eight times. All twenty-eight times, the planes crashed, spiraling to the ground without getting close to Sioux City.

  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. They demonstrated 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. The key, as we’re about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.

  —

  So far we’ve spent this book in what you might call the glue department, exploring how successful groups create belonging. Now we’ll turn our attention to the muscle, to see how successful groups translate connection into trusting cooperation.