The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

by Daniel Coyle

  One of the best methods for handling negative news is that of Joe Maddon, the coach of the Chicago Cubs and avowed oenophile. In his office, Maddon keeps a glass bowl filled with slips of paper, each inscribed with the name of an expensive wine. When a player violates a team rule, Maddon asks them to draw a slip of paper out of the bowl, purchase that wine, and uncork it with their manager. In other words, Maddon links the act of discipline to the act of reconnection.

  When Forming New Groups, Focus on Two Critical Moments: Jeff Polzer, the Harvard Business School professor who studies organizational behavior (see Chapter 8), traces any group’s cooperation norms to two critical moments that happen early in a group’s life. They are:

  1. The first vulnerability

  2. The first disagreement

  These small moments are doorways to two possible group paths: Are we about appearing strong or about exploring the landscape together? Are we about winning interactions, or about learning together? “At those moments, people either dig in and become defensive and start justifying, and a lot of tension gets created,” Polzer says. “Or they say something like, ‘Hey, that’s interesting. Why don’t you agree? I might be wrong, and I’m curious and want to talk about it some more.’ What happens in that moment helps set the pattern for everything that follows.”

  Listen Like a Trampoline: Good listening is about more than nodding attentively; it’s about adding insight and creating moments of mutual discovery. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, analyzed 3,492 participants in a manager development program and found that the most effective listeners do four things:

  1. They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported

  2. They take a helping, cooperative stance

  3. They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions

  4. They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths

  As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude.

  Also like trampolines, effective listeners gain amplitude through repetition. When asking questions, they rarely stop at the first response. Rather, they find different ways to explore an area of tension, in order to reveal the truths and connections that will enable cooperation.

  “I’ve found that whenever you ask a question, the first response you get is usually not the answer—it’s just the first response,” Roshi Givechi says. “So I try to find ways to slowly surface things, to bring out what ought to be shared so that people can build from it. You have to find a lot of ways to ask the same question, and approach the same question from a lot of different angles. Then you have to build questions from that response, to explore more.”

  In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.’ ”

  It’s not that suggestions are off limits; rather they should be made only after you establish what Givechi calls “a scaffold of thoughtfulness.” The scaffold underlies the conversation, supporting the risks and vulnerabilities. With the scaffold, people will be supported in taking the risks that cooperation requires. Without it, the conversation collapses.

  Use Candor-Generating Practices like AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teaming: While AARs were originally built for the military environment, the tool can be applied to other domains. One good AAR structure is to use five questions:

  1. What were our intended results?

  2. What were our actual results?

  3. What caused our results?

  4. What will we do the same next time?

  5. What will we do differently?

  Some teams also use a Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions:

  1. What are our intended results?

  2. What challenges can we anticipate?

  3. What have we or others learned from similar situations?

  4. What will make us successful this time?

  A couple of tips: It may be useful to follow the SEALs’ habit of running the AAR without leadership involvement, to boost openness and honesty. Likewise, it may be useful to write down the findings—particularly what will be done the same or differently next time—and share them across the group. After all, the goal of an AAR is not just to figure out what happened but also to build a shared mental model that helps the group navigate future problems.

  BrainTrusts, the project-based method pioneered by Pixar, involve assembling a team of experienced leaders who have no formal authority over the project and letting them critique its strengths and weaknesses in a frank and open manner. A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. This rule maintains the project leaders’ ownership of the task, and helps prevent them from assuming a passive, order-taking role.

  Red Teaming is a military-derived method for testing strategies; you create a “red team” to come up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan. The key is to select a red team that is not wedded to the existing plan in any way, and to give them freedom to think in new ways that the planners might not have anticipated.

  AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teams each generate the same underlying action: to build the habit of opening up vulnerabilities so that the group can better understand what works, what doesn’t work, and how to get better.

  Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty: Giving honest feedback is tricky, because it can easily result in people feeling hurt or demoralized. One useful distinction, made most clearly at Pixar, is to aim for candor and avoid brutal honesty. 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.

  Embrace the Discomfort: 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. Doing an AAR or a BrainTrust 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.

  Align Language with Action: Many highly cooperative groups use language to reinforce their interdependence. For example, navy pilots returning to aircraft carriers do not “land” but are “recovered.” IDEO doesn’t have “project managers”—it has “design community leaders.” Groups at Pixar do not offer “notes” on early versions of films; they “plus” them by offering solutions to problems. These might seem like small semantic differences, but they matter because they continually highlight the cooperative, interconnected nature of the work and reinforce the group’s shared identity.

  Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development: While it seems natural to hold these two conversations together, in fact it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate. Performance evaluation tends to be a high-risk, inevitably judgmental interaction, often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth. Linking them into one conversation muddies the waters. Relatedly, many groups have moved away from rank
ing workers and shifted to more of a coaching model, where people receive frequent feedback designed to provide them with both a vivid performance snapshot and a path for improvement.

  Use Flash Mentoring: One of the best techniques I’ve seen for creating cooperation in a group is flash mentoring. It is exactly like traditional mentoring—you pick someone you want to learn from and shadow them—except that instead of months or years, it lasts a few hours. Those brief interactions help break down barriers inside a group, build relationships, and facilitate the awareness that fuels helping behavior.

  Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments. One of the best at this is Gregg Popovich. Most NBA teams run time-outs according to a choreographed protocol: First the coaches huddle as a group for a few seconds to settle on a message, then they walk over to the bench to deliver that message to the players. However, during about one time-out a month, the Spurs coaches huddle for a time-out…and then never walk over to the players. The players sit on the bench, waiting for Popovich to show up. Then, as they belatedly realize he isn’t coming, they take charge, start talking among themselves, and figure out a plan.

  The New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team have made a habit of this, as players lead several practice sessions each week with little input from the coaches. When I asked Dave Cooper to name the single trait that his best-performing SEAL teams shared, he said, “The best teams tended to be the ones I wasn’t that involved with, especially when it came to training. They would disappear and not rely on me at all. They were better at figuring out what they needed to do themselves than I could ever be.”

  One day in 1975 James Burke, president of the health care company Johnson & Johnson, summoned thirty-five of the company’s senior managers for an unconventional meeting. They weren’t going to talk about strategy or marketing or planning—or anything to do with business, really. The goal was to discuss a thirty-two-year-old, one-page document called the Credo.

  The Credo had been written in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson, the company’s former chairman and a member of its founding family. Here’s how it begins:

  We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality. We must constantly strive to reduce our costs in order to maintain reasonable prices. Customers’ orders must be serviced promptly and accurately.

  It goes on like that for four paragraphs, describing the relationship to each group of stakeholders and prioritizing them as follows: (1) customers, (2) employees, (3) community, and (4) company stockholders. As value statements go, it’s a solid one: clear, forthright, and ringing with Old Testament gravitas. (The word must appears twenty-one times.) The Credo was prominently displayed at all Johnson & Johnson businesses and was carved into a granite wall at the company’s New Jersey headquarters.

  The problem, as Burke saw it, was that the Credo didn’t seem to matter much to many employees—and what was more, he wasn’t sure that it should matter. Times had changed. It wasn’t that there was an open revolt against the Credo; it was more that Burke picked up a subtle vibe as he traveled around the company and watched people work and interact. As he said later, “A lot of the young people that were coming into Johnson & Johnson really didn’t pay much attention to it. Many of them felt that it was kind of a public relations gimmick. It wasn’t a unifying document.”

  Burke’s idea was to hold a meeting to determine what role the Credo had in the company’s future. When he proposed his idea, many Johnson & Johnson leaders rejected it outright. To question such a foundational document seemed a waste of time. Dick Sellars, chairman of the board, called the notion “ridiculous.” He told Burke that challenging the Credo would be like a Catholic deciding to challenge the pope.

  Burke, a gravel-voiced Vermonter who’d commanded a landing craft during World War II, didn’t back down. “I challenge [the pope] every day when I wake up,” he said. “I think at times he’s crazy. I think at times my religion is nuts. Of course I challenge it. Everybody challenges their values, and that’s what we ought to do with the Credo.” He prevailed.

  The meeting was held in a large banquet room. After the managers took their seats, Burke outlined their task. “You guys are in a position of being able to challenge this document, which is the soul of the corporation,” he said. “And if you can’t live by its principles, we ought to tear it off the walls, because it’s an act of pretension to leave it there. And if you want to change it, tell us how it ought to be changed.”

  With that, the conversation began. “I think [the Credo] should be an absolute,” said one manager.

  “You can’t kid yourself,” interrupted another. “The purpose of the business is to make a profit.”

  Another manager spoke up. “Should we not therefore do what is best for the business, not only what is morally and ethically correct, but what is best for the business by following the Credo so that we do meet [the] needs of society and therefore are able to do things better and decent and human?”

  “Charlie, that’s motherhood and apple pie, and we’re all in agreement with that,” said a sharp-voiced man with a comb-over. “The question is, which of these are legitimate demands of society, and how many of these can we fulfill and stay in business.”

  You get the idea. This wasn’t a business meeting; it was closer to a college philosophy seminar. For the entire day, the thirty-six people in that room attempted to locate the company’s place in the moral universe; that night some stayed up late putting thoughts to paper. By the end of the process, they reached a consensus to recommit to the existing Credo.

  Over the next several years, Burke kept re-creating this conversation, holding Credo challenges at all levels of the company. And the challenges seemed to work; he and others sensed that employees seemed to have a fresh awareness of the Credo. But of course, these kinds of things are mostly intangible, difficult to measure in the course of normal life.

  Seven years later, on September 30, 1982, normal life came to an abrupt halt. Burke received a phone call that six people were dead in Chicago because they had ingested his company’s product: Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide. In Chicago, panic ensued. Police roamed the streets using bullhorns to warn people. Boy Scout troops went door to door to alert elderly people who might have missed the warnings. The following day a seventh victim was found, and worries continued to spread. Officials in San Francisco warned residents not to flush their Tylenol down the toilet lest they risk contaminating the sewage system with poison. One news service calculated that the Tylenol poisonings generated the widest U.S. news coverage since the assassination of President Kennedy.

  In a few hours, Johnson & Johnson went from being a provider of medicine to being a provider of poison. The atmosphere at headquarters was a mix of shock and disbelief. The larger problem, from Johnson & Johnson’s perspective, was that the company was not equipped to deal with this crisis. It didn’t have a public affairs division or a system for recalling pills, and its media relations system consisted of a spiral notebook. “It looked like the plague,” said David Collins, chairman of McNeil Products, the Johnson subsidiary that made Tylenol. “We had no idea where it would end. And the only information we had was that we didn’t know what was going on.”

  An office at company headquarters was converted into a makeshift war room. Someone located drawing paper and an easel. As information came in—victims, locations, lot numbers of the pills, location of purchase—it was scrawled on sheets of paper, which were then taped to the walls. Before long the walls were draped with urgent questions to which there were no answers. The only certainty was that Tylenol was finished as a business. “I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name,” Jerry Della Femina, a legendary advertising guru, told The New York Times.

  Burke formed a seven
-member committee, who started working their way through the cascade of tough decisions. How should they work with law enforcement? What should they tell the public? Most crucially, what should they do with other Tylenol products that were on shelves around the nation?

  Four days after the poisonings, Burke and other members of the committee flew to Washington, D.C., to discuss strategy with the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FBI and the FDA strongly encouraged Burke to limit the recall to Chicago, since no poison had yet been located outside Chicago. A national recall, they said, would needlessly frighten the public, embolden the poisoner, and encourage copycats. And as the FBI didn’t need to point out, a larger recall would cost Johnson & Johnson millions of dollars.

  Burke and his group thought about it for a while. Then they ignored the advice of the FBI and the FDA and ordered an immediate national recall of every Tylenol product on the market—31 million pills in all—at a cost of $100 million. When Burke was asked for his reasoning behind the decision, the answer came quickly: We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.

  Over the next days and weeks, Johnson & Johnson essentially transformed itself from a pharmaceutical company into a public safety organization. It designed and manufactured innovative tamper-proof packaging; developed exchange, disposal, and refund programs; and built relationships with government, law enforcement, and media. Four weeks after the attacks, it mobilized more than two thousand salespeople to visit doctors and pharmacists to listen to their concerns and inform them of the upcoming changes.