The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
Skill 1 – Build Safety
Belonging cues have to do not with character or discipline but with building a safe environment that answers the basic questions: Are we connected? Do we share a future? Are we safe?
Lack of safety and belonging in their culture.
Building Belonging
Magical feedback
I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
This deliver a burst of belongings.
Gregg Popovich three types of belonging cues:
Personal connection (translates as I care about you)
Performance feedback (high standards)
Big-Picture perspective (life is bigger than basketball)
Alone each of these signals would have limited effect.
Create Safety
Creating safety is about dialing in to small, subtle moments and delivering targeted signals at key points.
Over communicate your listening
Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging
Spotlight your fallibility early on, especially if you are a leader
Embrace the messenger
Preview future connection
Overdo thank-yous
Overdoing ignites cooperative behavior
Be painstaking in the hiring process
Eliminate bad apples
Create safe, collision-rich spaces
Make sure everyone has a voice
Pick up trash
Capitalize on threshold moments
Avoid giving sandwich feedback
Embrace fun
Skill 2 – Share Vulnerability
Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I will help you. Sharing vulnerability
Vulnerability Loop
At some level we know that Vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust. It is especially powerful and reliable when it is group interactions.
It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have a weakness, that you could use help. If that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set aside insecurities and get to work, start trust each other and help each other. You need this vulnerable moment. Vulnerability is less about the sender than the receiver. Do they pick it up and reveal their own weakness or do they cover and pretend they don’t have any?
A shared exchange of openness, it’s the most basic building block of cooperation and trust.
Super-cooperators
“Playing pickup basketball” Like any good pickup team, they don’t need to talk too much or follow some predetermined plan, they just play the game.
Why aren’t you telling your guys what to do? The answer is because we don’t need to. The guys are going to solve the problems themselves.
Log PT apart is its ability to deliver two conditions: intense vulnerability along with deep interconnectedness.
Build closeness and cooperation.
The Power of Harold
It requires 8 people, contains nine interweaving scenes, and lasts around 40mins. You have to come up with interlinking scenes on the fly with seven other people, so all the A scenes connect, all the B scenes connect and so on. It requires you to pay deep attention to the game or the core comic of each scene and hold those threads in mind, calling back previous one as you build new ones.
Del Close rules:
1. You are all supporting actors.
2. Always check your impulses.
3. Never enter a scene unless you are needed.
4. Save your fellow actor, don’t worry about the piece.
5. Your prime responsibility is to support.
6. Work at the top of your brains at all times.
7. Never underestimate or condescend to the audience.
8. No jokes.
9. Trust. Trust your fellow actors to support you, trust them to come through if you lay something heavy on them, trust yourself.
10. Avoid judging what is going down except in terms of whether it needs help what can best follow, or how you can support it imaginatively if your support is called for.
11. Listen.
Every rule directs you either to tamp down selfish instincts that might make you the center of attention, or to serve your fellow actors (support, save, trust, listen).
This is why it is hard to follow and also why it is useful in building cooperation.
Each practice is followed by a feedback session. Some positive, but mostly critique bases.
They think with one brain
The Pink Panthers thieves story
Team was built around a set of well defined roles. They operated by one rule: we all depend on each other. They were like comedians doing Harold or SEALs doing Log PT, small teams solving problems in a constant state of vulnerability and interconnection.How to create cooperation in small groups
Dave Cooper’s Rule
The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions.
Combine discipline with openness.
The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other.
How to create cooperation with individuals
The Nyquist Method
Warmth and relentless curiosity
Asking questions that connects people and open possibilities
Every conversation is the same, because it’s about helping people walk away with a greater sense of awareness, excitement, and motivation to make an impact.
Find different ways to make if comfortable and engaging for people to share what they are really thinking about.
Givechi’s question is connecting to deeper emotions: fear, ambition, motivation.
Two-way emotional signalling.
Excellent listening.
Subtle is the key.
Concordances happen when one person can react in an authentic way to the emotion being projected in the room.
One person is talking and the other person is actively, intently listening.
Ideas for Action
Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.
Make sure the leader is vulnerable first ans often.
What is one thing that I currently do that you would like me to continue to do?
what is one thing that i don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often?
What can I do to make you more effective?
Overcommunicate Expectations
Deliver the negative stuff in person
When forming new groups, focus on two critical moments: the first vulnerability and the first disagreement.
Listen like a trampoline
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
In Conversation, resist the temptation to reflexively add value
Use Candir-generating practices like AARs, brain-trusts, and red teaming
AAR
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?
Before-Action Review
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?
Aim for Candor, avoid brutal honesty
Feedback that is smaller, more targeted, less personal, less judgemental, and equally Impactful.
Embrace the discomfort
Align language with Action
Build a wall between performance review and professional development
Use flash mentoring
Make the leader occasionally disappear
Skill 3 – Establish Purpose
Three hundred and eleven words
Credo story
What’s this all for? What are we working toward?
Pay focused attention to a small handful pf key markers.
High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal.
Here is where we are and here is where we want to go.
Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles. Mental contrasting.
This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.
The Hooligans and the surgeons
Stott Portugese football experiment
One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity – how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.
Five basic signal types:
1.Framing
Successful team:Conceptualized the surgery as a learning experience that would benefit patients and the hospital.
Unsuccessful team: conceptualized as and add-on to existing practices.
2.Roles
Successful team were explicitly told by the leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and it was important for them to perform as a team.
3.Rehearsal
Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication.
4.Explicit encouragement to speak up
Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up of they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process.
5.Active reflection
Between surgeries, Successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements.
High-proficiency environments help a group deliver a well-defined, reliable performance, while high-creativity environments help a group create something new. The distinction is important because it highlights the two basic challenges facing any group: consistency and innovation. Building purposes in these two areas requires different approaches.
How to Lead for Proficiency
Creating engagement around a clear, simple set of priorities can function as a lighthouse, orienting behaviour and providing a path toward a goal.
The slime mold shows us that it’s possible foe groups to solve extremely complex problems using a few rules of thumb.
The trick is not just to send the signal but to create engagement around it.
Many leaders of High-proficiency groups focus on creating priorities, naming keystone behaviours, and flooding the environment with heuristics that link the two.
How to Lead for Creativity
All-Blacks lighthouse method
They create purpose by generating a clear beam of signals that link A (where we are) to B (where we want to be). There is another dimension of leadership, however, where the goal isn’t to get from A to B, but to navigate to an unknown destination, X.
Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.
Building creative purpose is not 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.
Ideas for Action
Name and rank your priorities
Five or fewer; greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself
Be ten times as clear about your priorities as you think you should be
Repeat over and over until they become oxygen
Figure out where your group aims for proficiency and where it aims for creativity
Skills of proficiency and skills of creativity
Embrace the use of catchphrases
Keep them simple, action-oriented and forthright. They all reinforce the same signal: This is what matters.
Measure what really matters
Use artifacts
Focus on bar setting behaviours
Translate abstract ideas (values, mission) into concrete terms. One way to do is spotlighting a single task and using it to define their identity and set the bar for their expectations.