The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups

Since I do most of my reading on a Kindle, my TBR pile is often misleading. I don’t usually have an order to what I read, and I frequently forget when or why I purchased a book. As I looked at the cover of The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle on my Kindle, I had no recollection of when or why I bought the book. I was pleasantly surprised. Coyle begins by talking about culture and what it meant in the early days of human history. He then explains how our brains are still wired to respond to culture in the same ways – emotional, physical, and psychological safety – even though we are now at work instead of in hunter-gatherer nomadic groups. The Culture Code shares interviews with several people who have built outstanding teams and cultures, from Google to Dave Cooper, the unofficial father of the SEALs. Several conversations with Cooper show how emotional, physical, and psychological safety in groups creates cohesion, action, and adaptability within those groups. “Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often: As we’ve seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.” Coyle shares Cooper’s program of AARs – After Action Reviews – with his team and how candor is the most crucial part of building a successful culture. It’s not about positivity, cheerleading, or a you-can-do-anything attitude. Creating a culture is about modeling the behavior you want to see and not punishing it when you see it. There are many helpful tips for leaders within these pages. It’s also worth noting that the subtext of Coyle’s The Culture Code shows that everyone and anyone can be a leader. Leadership isn’t about authority, titles, or deference to another person; it’s about honesty, vulnerability, and consistency. Having read a fair few books on companies, teams, and organizational culture, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I appreciate the punchiness of the book. Too many books on team culture highlight tired stories of achievement in the 1950s or focus on one particular success story that is unlikely to be repeatable at another company. Coyle shows real examples and the themes that tie Google and the Navy SEALs together in a flexible, repeatable way. I look forward to instilling some of the techniques where I work.

This book could really be life-changing if its ideas are put into practice. It is inspiring and exciting to contemplate. There are so many areas where it can be implemented, from our interactions with teenagers in our home to business meetings to church gatherings. Not to be dramatic, but it makes me want to be a better person.

There are a lot of books about culture and how to create a strong and healthy one. Daniel Coyle knew that a strong and effective culture is part of the secret sauce of successful organizations. He knew that “A strong culture increases net income 756 percent over 11 years, according to a Harvard study of more than 200 companies.” He thought he could look at strong cultures in a different way and write a book about it. Here’s how he puts it. “I spent the last four years visiting and researching eight of the world’s most successful groups, including a special-ops military unit, an inner-city school, a professional basketball team, a movie studio, a comedy troupe, a gang of jewel thieves, and others. I found that their cultures are created by a specific set of skills” Coyle started with a definition of culture that’s a little bit different than the norm. He says, “Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are, it’s something you do.” So, what is it that you do? What do people in organizations that create strong cultures do that their peers in other organizations don’t do? Coyle organizes the book into three sections, each one of which relates to a specific skillset. The three skills are: build safety; share vulnerability; and establish purpose. There are several chapters about each skill. There’s a good mix of stories and studies. Coyle chooses his examples carefully and tells their stories well. He doesn’t use bullet points or frequent summaries, so sometimes you will work to tease out his meaning. You can get a sense of this if you review my highlights from the Culture Code on Goodreads. Most business authors put summaries of key points or action steps at the end of every chapter. Coyle doesn’t. Instead, he includes a chapter at the end of every section, titled “Ideas for Action.” That chapter functions as a review of the other chapters in the section. I think that’s a good device, but I’d rather he also put his key points at the end of every chapter. Coyle’s a good storyteller and he makes it a point to try to tell stories you may have heard before from an angle where you haven’t seen them before. One of those stories is the story about Tylenol and its credo. Another is the story of the founding of Pixar. In telling those stories, Coyle leaves out some interesting and potentially helpful things. For example, he tells us about the meeting where Johnson & Johnson executives reviewed the company’s credo to see if it should be revised. We know there was a meeting. But Coyle never tells us whether they changed the credo or not at that meeting. He simply jumps ahead to the Tylenol crisis, where the credo became guiding principles for one of the most successful disaster recovery examples ever. Then, there’s the story of Ed Catmull and Pixar. Coyle says, “If you set out to design a life that represented the perfect merger of art and science, you might design one that looks like Catmull’s.” Then, just below, after mentioning a little bit about Catmull’s parents and his early interests, he says “After college, he landed a job with George Lucas…” Well yes, it was, technically, “after college,” but it was a full five years after Catmull got his PhD. And, after talking about the life as a model for the perfect merger of art and science, Coyle leaves out the fact that in his pre-Lucas and pre-Pixar days, Ed Catmull worked on projects for ARPA during the time he was working as a physicist. Those are important things to know if you want to learn how Ed Catmull developed into the manager he is today. You can learn more about them in his book, Creativity, Inc, about his life and Pixar. Special Note Chapters 15 and 16 are worth reading, even if you skip everything else. Chapter 15 is “How to Lead for Proficiency” while chapter 16 is “How to Lead for Creativity.” The two skills are different and which one you choose as a manager will determine what values you treasure and what kinds of performance you optimize. In A Nutshell This is a book that will help you create a strong and supportive culture where you are. There are problems with the book, but they’re not big enough or consistent enough to really detract from the value. If you want to learn about how to create and maintain a positive and strong culture in your team or organization, buy and read The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle.

A must read book for all those who seek to understand the dynamics within groups. Presents real stories which confirms the importance of understanding how to elevate group cultures to another level.

Coyle is an interesting write. His book is packed with stories that are compelling and highly varied. Having heard him speak, I realize that the book reads like he sounds. With that said, The Culture Code appeals to me for two reasons: First Coyle tackles a broad and difficult subject and offers an insight that is powerful and seems to me true. There is a lot written about culture that is dense, unreadable and not insightful at all. Coyle is none of those things. As a leader in different kinds of organizations for decades, Coyle's model for small group effectiveness put into words a model that has worked in a lot of settings for a long time. Second, Coyle's model is actionable. Again, most writing about culture is not actionable. This book is a road map. A couple of weeks ago, we used the Culture Code to plan a retreat for a small group of men. Doing our best to follow Coyle's ideas we developed and executed the retreat agenda and it worked perfectly. I am a believer!

The book led me to think about leadership in very different way and opened my eyes and mind to how I could have done a better job of leading hundreds of employees to work in similar fashions described in the book.

I read this book years ago along with dozens and dozens of other books. This one is the leadership style I lean into most often. As a leader you have to be flexible to deal with different personality types, different education levels, different strengths, etc. As such I find value in Strengths Finder, DiSC assessment, Good to Great, Flexible Leadership, and many others. But this book covers a set of topics that I've found most effective at delivering a fully functioning, highly functioning team where trust is complete and everybody buys in. I doubt I'll ever stop using the ideas in this book because I know my teams benefit from them and my organization benefits from incredible productivity they achieve. Turnover decreased to the point folks only leave for internal promotions and I feel like Popovich with all my old employees filling up the leadership positions throughout the organization since I started teaching them these principles. I highly recommend using everything this book suggests. I even buy a copy for each of my mentees so they can begin to establish their skills before the next promotional opportunity comes up. It's a must-have in my opinion. Along with this add "Start with why" by Simon Sinek. Two easy reads that work extremely easily together.

Overall - the book makes great points and tells the story through real life examples. The overall meat of the content is compelling and I appreciated the real life application section of each chapter. I would recommend this book to people interested in expanding their leadership potential. However, my only critique is that many of the examples feel shoehorned into a section to prove a point. Or, over-attribute an aspect of the books impact on the success of the organization. A few examples: - Google became what it is because they had street hockey games and open forums - The navy seals killed Osama bin laden because a navy seal had to be vulnerable by telling his team to practice for a potential crash - Saying that sharing a social media post about trying to find a balloon is people being 'vulnerable' - The spurs built safety by going to dinner even after they lost an important game (which they then also lost the subsequent game, losing the NBA finals that year) As long as you can see past the exaggerated evidence of the impact of the books philosophies then you'll enjoy the book.