Culture Code — A Top of the Page Review
April 2023
If you care about building a good culture for your people (and every business leader should!), you need to read this book.
Coyle, Daniel. 2018. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. New York: Bantam Books.
Quick Summary
The central argument of The Culture Code is that culture isn’t natural or inevitable; it is something that is built. Great culture is built purposefully and powerfully.
And constructing it follows a pretty straightforward method.
- Build safety — Safe places are honest, generous spaces of belonging.
- Share vulnerability — Vulnerability precedes trust and cooperation.
- Establish purpose — Constant, consistent signals focus attention on your mission and values.
Great culture transforms group of people into a team exponentially capable of greater intelligence and performance than everyone’s strengths would suggest. These teams succeed not because of how talented or experienced the individuals are, but because they work together in smarter ways.
The author provides many examples of diverse organizations known for their successful teamwork and strong cultures. He skillfully demonstrates the commonalities among these groups and offers practical tips for other organizations to improve their culture. Here are a few of my favorite tips:
- Overcommunicate your active listening
- Preview future connections
- Overdo the thank you’s
- Create safe collision rich spaces
- Embrace fun
- Aim for candor, avoid brutal honesty
- Align language with action
- Be ten times clearer than you think you need to be
- Measure what really matters
Key Takeaways
Process Design
One of my favorite anecdotes in the book centers onsetting expectations. In a speech to a newly promoted team member, the team leader declared, “The one thing we know about today is that it’s not going to go perfectly. I mean it could, but odds are really, really, really high that it won’t…So here’s how we’ll know if you had a good day…If you ask for help ten times, then we’ll know it was good.”
This team leader recognized the power of the evaluative process. He set expectations for what success looked like — not a perfect outcome on day one, but a willingness to recognize problems and ask for help. The process he designed for evaluating performance created a safe place to give effort.
Do your people feel safe giving effort in your organization? Giving effort can be scary because it comes with the potential for failure, the potential for embarrassment, the potential for disappointment, and the potential for disillusionment. Giving effort makes us vulnerable.
Good processes measure and manage based on what people can actually control. They align words to actions. They create faith that outcomes will be judged fairly and accurately.
People Management
There are so many examples of good people management practices in this book. I would recommend reading it for this aspect alone, but there is one practice that I would like to highlight in this book review.
Spotlight and celebrate the invisible work that makes team performance possible. In every organization, there is at least one “unheralded” person. A person who performs small or unrecognized tasks that make it possible for others to perform greater or more conspicuous tasks. By regularly drawing attention to the “least of these,” the importance of the team is elevated above the individual.
Healthy culture recognizes and elevates everyone, not just a handful of stars. Look for the ways in which the work you do is made possible by the quiet consistency of those performing the most overlooked, but often highly critical, support work. And then make sure they always matter.
Leadership
Without a doubt, leaders set the tone for culture. It is our behavior that creates the standards and expectations. Our behavior creates healthy people-centric culture or it builds toxic people-defeating culture. So how do you gauge your organization’s culture?
💡 Ask yourself:
- Do your people regularly talk to each other in meetings without prompting or permission?
- Do they regularly wait for your permission (spoken or unspoken) to address other attendees directly?
This simple test is a good indicator of how safe and connected your people feel. Many organizations discourage unguided conversations out of fear or distrust. They want managers to control the flow of information between employees.
The kind of back-channel side conversations that are common in healthy teams require high levels of trust. If you can’t trust your team members to act with professionalism and self-regulation, you will never unleash their potential. The culture you create will constantly act to sabotage the effective team dynamics you need to grow and innovate.
If you find yourself caught in this cycle, heed the author’s advice to be vulnerable first. And practice doing so often!
Memorable Quotes
1️⃣
“While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”
2️⃣
“[A] truth that many successful groups realize: Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. If they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.”
3️⃣
“One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.”
Final Thoughts
The Culture Code makes a compelling argument for business leaders to focus on community building within their organizations. We all know what it feels like to be in a safe, connected environment. We become better versions of ourselves, make better decisions, and produce better outcomes.
As business leaders, we have a responsibility to develop the culture that our people deserve. A culture that values and supports them. A culture driven by and built for sustaining relationships. A culture in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Ultimately, a leader’s most important role is to architect the greenhouse that grows and develops people so that the community thrives and prospers.
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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?
