These 3 traits distinguish great communities from average ones | Daniel Coyle

0:00 There were these places where people were coming together where 2 plus 2 was equaling 10. Where groups who were able to by combining in a certain way create these entities. And when you combine individuals who are growing into an entity that is growing and learning, that's where you get something really powerful and that's where we're talking about group culture. I'm Daniel Coyle. I write about the science of human potential. I'm the author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and my new book, Flourish.

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0:59 Culture in our modern conception of it often gets used as like it's the vibe of a group or it's the feeling of being with the group or it's the identity of the group. I'd like to offer a different theory which that culture is a set of living relationships in pursuit of a shared goal. It's more of a functional definition of culture rather than focusing on the vibe or the feel. that focuses on sort of the core behaviors that allow a group to come together to become greater than the sum of their parts. There's three relationships that every human being has. It's your relationship to yourself. It's your relationship to others and it's your relationship to the larger world. And in places where they have got this sense of thriving, this sense of connection, this sense of growth, those relationships are unique. The relationship to the self ends up being a relationship of growth. that you're not fixed. There's a belief that you can grow. There's a belief that you can change. There's a belief that you're not fixed. The relationship to others is really defined by curiosity and connection. They're not focused on the self. They're focused on connection. And connection creates energy. Connection creates possibility. And then their relationship with the world, they're their connection to the world tends to be one of contribution and creativity.

2:13 They're looking to find something to contribute to, something to add. And so when you look at all of those thing, if you were to x-ray all those places that I visited, these places where people are truly thriving, whether it's a business or a sports team or a nonprofit or a school, what you'd find with that X-ray is those same core qualities. Real interest in personal growth, real interest in connection and curiosity with others, and a deep connection to creativity and contribution. Those interactions have got to feel and it kind of adds up to this kind of bubbling sort of aliveness that I think we've all experienced at some point in our lives.

2:50 When we're around those kind of groups, we can feel it. That's not exactly an accident. You know, we evolved in community. We did not evolve as a set of rugged individuals rugging our way through time. We evolved connected to others in community and living communities, groups of people that can self-organize around problems and unlock hidden gifts and create something new that wasn't there before. So those feelings of personal growth, of curiosity and connection and of contributing to something better are deeply wired into us. That's the reason they feel so familiar. The thing that most people get wrong about culture is that they think it comes kind of from the inside out. They think that if you're in a certain group, like if you're in the Navy Seals, if you're in Pixar or if you're a Marine or something like that, that that culture is in your heart and your guts and in your DNA. It's their identity. And then when we think about that culture, all kind of words typically come to mind. Like we think about say cohesion and honesty and mission and purpose and values and integrity and trust and teamwork. And so when we talk about culture, it tends to be really mushy.

3:56 It tends to be this really mushy thing. But when we look at culture through this functional lens, I think it's more accurate to look through by looking at a great team in motion. And of all the teams that I visited, one of the best ones that you could conceive of would be a flock of starings connected, moving through obstacles like a flock of birds connected, moving as one through a forest. And what are they doing there? Well, there's there's sort of three main connections there. They're they're connected. That's number one. They're in the group. They're not out of the group. They're not going off and having a meeting. They're all in. The second thing they're doing is they're sharing information. They're moving together because they're seeing what others are doing and transparently responding with a shared awareness. And the third thing they're doing is they're handling direction. They're moving toward something. They're moving toward a north star. Not sort of this way or sort of that way, but moving all together.

4:48 That's what's like to watch Pixar make a movie or to watch the Navy Seals in action or to watch a great sports team. They're connected. They're sharing information to create a shared consciousness and they're moving toward a goal. And that's the functional definition of culture. And be beneath that are some core behaviors that will allow you to do that. Behavior number one, building safety. Building safety is the absolute foundation. Nothing happens without connection. We're trying to accomplish hard things. We're trying to operate in a fast and fragmented world.

5:21 And establishing that connection is not something you do third and fourth. It is absolutely the primal thing that needs to happen for any group to build a good culture. Safety is the greatest thing to study. And one of my favorite studies about safety comes from a guy named Peter Skilman. And Peter decided to study this through a contest. And the contest was super simple. Who can build the tallest tower with the following materials? 20 pieces of raw spaghetti, a yard of scotch tape, and a single standard size marshmallow. The only rule is marshmallow has to go on the top. And the interesting thing were the groups that Peter chose. He chose groups of CEOs, groups of lawyers, groups of MBA students, and groups of kindergarteners.

6:05 And he gave them 15 minutes. Ready, set, go. And all the adult groups started the same way. They talked. They talked. They had someone would have an idea like, "Oh, I have an idea of how we could build it." And then they would improve on that idea. And then they would divide up into roles and they'd start to build according to their plan. And it looked awesome. It looked smart. It looked collaborative. It looked beautiful, right? Kindergarteners didn't do that. Kindergarteners, they ate every marshmallow except for one. And then they just started jamming pieces together like hand overhand. No plan, total chaos. And if you had to bet your annual salary on which team would win, most of us would bet on one of the adult teams because that's our model of group performance. We focus on what we can see. And when we see like smooth, planned, elegant, cooperative behavior, we assume it's going to add up into good performance. And when we see chaos, we assume it's bad. But when we run the experiment, the kindergarteners win like every single time. Their their towers average 28 inches in height, the MBA are seven, the lawyers are 14, and the CEOs are 21. They beat them over and over again. And it seems like an optical illusion. You think, "But do it again. Do it again." But it's not an optical illusion because it's not about how smart you are. It's about how safe you are. The adult groups are doing what humans can't help but do. Managing status. We manage our status. In every social group, we manage our status. It manifests as a whisper in our subconscious mind saying, "Is it okay to say that?" Like, "Who's in charge here? Are we being graded on this?"

7:46 And that whisper slows down iteration, slows down creativity. It self- silences us, right? Kindergarteners are safer. Nobody's trying to be CEO of Spaghetti Incorporated. They're doing a complicated problem. And what better way to do it than to try stuff and see what happens and then fix that and then see what happens and then fix that. They don't win because they're smart. They win because they're safe. And so every great culture that I visited, I saw that same pattern where they weren't trying to be smart. They weren't trying to be like the adults. They were trying to be like the kindergarteners. They were trying to create situations where people could try stuff, fail and learn and try stuff and get hand overhand, shouldertoshoulder, making mistakes together and adding up to more performance, to more experiments, to more learning. And the way safety gets delivered in human groups if you're not a kindergartener is through belonging cues.

8:44 Belonging cues are simple clear behaviors, not just words. Behaviors that send a signal, I care. I see you. We share a future. We are connected. Tell you a story about how those work. There was a there's a company named Whipro. They were a call center. And like many call centers, they struggled with retention. It's a hard job. People would leave. And so Whipro responded by improving benefits, by improving the campus, the call center environment, by boosting salary.

9:17 None of it worked. People kept leaving until they did a one-hour experiment, and the experiment was really simple. They took two groups of new hires, group A and group B. Group A received a 1-hour session where they learned the history of Whipro. They met a star performer and at the end they got a fleece shirt with whipro written on it. Group B, similar one hour except they flipped it. In group B, the session wasn't about whipro. The session was about the trainee. They asked the trainee, "Hey, tell us what happens on your best day." Like on your best day, what's it like? Now describe your worst day. Like tell me what your worst day is like. And then they said, "All right, thought experiment. We're on a desert island. We're marooned for a month. What skills do you bring to our survival? And at the end, group B got a sweatshirt, but instead of saying whipro, it had the trainee name on it. Then they let the clock spin 6 months. Retention in group B went up 300%.

10:16 Not because of some magic chemistry, not because they had something happen from the inside out, but because they had received a crystal clear set of belonging cues. Simple signals that say, "Hey, I see you. we're connected. We share a future. I care. And those signals are what allow you to relax and what allow you to connect and what allow you to bring your full self to the situation. One of the places you can learn most is by going to places that are the opposite of safe environment that is exactly the opposite of what the kindergarteners are producing or what's happening in whipro. And one such example is the minute missileers. the nuclear officers that are spread across the upper Midwest and their job is to take care of the Minutemen missiles that are ready for launch to have the possibility of launch always over their head to always be perfectly disciplined and drilled to execute their performance. But for years those crews were some of the worst performing in the Air Force. There was cheating on the test. There were all kinds of drug scandals. It was one of the worst performing crews. They were losing missiles. In fact, they lost track of one nuclear missile. And each time they would have a mistake, they would make the classic mistake of trying to control people more, trying to put more controls in, more carrots, more sticks, force compliance. And they're making the classic leadership mistake is the more you control, the worse you lead. That's a a pattern that we've seen throughout the history of command and control. And when they got a new set of leaders leaders in, they sort of flipped it similar to the whipro example where instead of being pushing pushing pushing and transmitting, they actually set about building community, building a culture from the ground up, creating psychological safety, creating methods of feedback that brought problems to the surface rather than pushing them out of sight. We're tempted to think, oh, those are some bad apples that that are the problem. But in fact, it's a bad environment. And the more you try to control, the worse you lead.

12:24 The cool thing about building safety is that like many of these changes to flip an environment, you know, they're very subtle and small. It's a small signal. And a couple of my favorites. There's the two-line email. It's an email you send to people you work with, and it has two lines. This is an idea from Llo Bach, who ran HR at Google for some time. You ask him, "What's one thing you'd like me to keep doing? And what's one thing you'd like me to stop doing? Two lines.

12:51 Very simple, very powerful signal. I'm curious. Teach me. Help me. We're going to be working together for a while here. I want to get better. And what you find is when you send that email, it's a bit contagious. More people will send that email out. It'll become sort of a cascade. Another big one that's really simple is it was taught to me by a Navy Seal commander. He pointed out that your face is like a door. It's got two settings. It can be open or it can be closed.

13:16 We kind of know what close looks like, right? We got our our brow is down. Our jaw is set. We're determined. We've got kind of that Clint Eastwood. We're transmitting some message to someone. Open. This is your frontalus muscle, and it's probably the most important muscle on your body when it comes to communicating curiosity, connection, you know, energy, excitement, enthusiasm. This muscle, it doesn't really have much of an evolutionary function. Has a tremendous social function. It might be the most important muscle you have, especially in a world where we're on Zoom calls more than ever. The last idea would say, "Embrace the messenger." We're often told that we should not shoot the messenger. That's a pretty low bar, I think. What I see great leaders doing when they're be given bad news, they actually celebrate that moment and they celebrate the person who brought them that bad news. It's not enough just not to shoot them, to actually say, "I know this is bad news and thank goodness you brought it to me." It's almost like this is the moment where we're going to learn together. This is a moment where we're actually going to grow, where actually are facing a truth together. I was at a meeting recently with a major league baseball team. They were about to make a big decision to hire a new manager.

14:27 And at the last minute, there was one person in the room who brought a passionate argument against that. absolutely derailed the meeting, stopped the action from happening, and it was a really awkward finish to the meeting because everyone thought we were headed in this direction. The first thing the leader did, the president did after that was go straight over to the person who had made the objection and thank him for it. The person had derailed the whole decision process. The person had stopped what everyone thought was going to happen from happening.

14:57 And the president said, "Thank you." And it really had an impact on everybody in that room. You know, it's not enough not to shoot the messenger to actually say thank you is is really an incredible cultural signal. The second skill of building culture is sharing vulnerability. Now that we've established this foundation of safety, how are we going to face the truth together? How are we going to build a shared consciousness? And the way to do that is to create these moments of openness. And they feel really weird. My favorite experiment with this is something called the two-minute experiment. You take a bunch of people, you divide them into two groups, and they each pick a partner, turn to the person next to them, pick a partner. Group A gets to pick a question, and the questions are very kind of fact-based. It would say, "Talk about your favorite pop star or talk about the last pet you owned." Group A talks about those questions. Group B gets a different set of questions. Questions are a little more personal. The questions are like, "When was the last time you cried?" Or, "Is there something you've always dreamed of doing?

15:59 Why haven't you done it? Questions like that. So, group B talks about those questions. And what you find when you do this is the energy level on the two sides of the room is radically different. Group A is talking normally, exchanging facts and information. Group B, they're they're turning toward each other. Their voices are getting raised. They're leaning in. They're laughing. They're they're animated. There's a device called a sociometer that captures the texture of social interactions. And if you had a sociometer on each side, they'd be radically radically different. The energy on this level is completely different.

16:32 The question is why? Why does that little personal question, when was the last time you cried? When is there something you've always dreamed of doing? Why haven't you done it? You cannot answer those questions without creating a moment of openness, without creating a moment of genuine openness and disclosure, without connecting. And that openness is what creates connection, what creates energy, and what ultimately creates relationships and trust, which is kind of crazy because we're always taught and trained that we have to build up trust before we can be vulnerable. The science shows we've got it exactly backwards. Moments of vulnerability, when shared, create trust, ignite connection, ignite relationship. In the original experiment, two strangers who were in group B and began to talk about those deep questions got married.

17:26 So, you got to be careful who you do these questions with. And what's fascinating about cultures is that they don't treat those moments of vulnerability as something just organically happens. They actually engineer them. They treat them more like a calisthenic. We're going to circle up and we're going to talk about the truth. We're going to we're going to see what's going on here. We're going to share and create a shared consciousness around these hard things we're doing together. Like a calisthenic, it burns. It hurts, right? And like a calisthenic, it makes you better. One of the guys who is the best at explaining this was a man named Dave Cooper. Dave Cooper commanded the troops that got Bin Laden. And when I had breakfast with him, he said, "The four most important words a leader can say are, "I screwed that up." Why is that?

18:13 That's kind of a remarkable thing for a great leader of kind of an invincible group to say, but when you look at it through the lens of vulnerability, what that is, it's an invitation to say, "Yeah, we're all going to talk about those things together." The SEALs are really good at it. They've operationalized it into what they call an AAR, afteraction review. Whenever they do a mission or finish a training run, the first thing they do before eating, before sleeping, is they circle up and they ask three tough questions. What went well? What didn't go well?

18:48 And what are we going to do differently? Really simple questions, really powerful questions. But in that conversation, people are saying, "I screwed up. I think you screwed up. What I think that was ter I think that was right." and they have this conversation of real vulnerability where they create a shared awareness of what they're actually trying to do and get a little bit better. It's almost like groups are sort of they get stronger the same way our bodies get stronger, which is by enduring these moments of kind of a test, right? We get stronger when we do hard things together and groups get stronger when they do hard emotional things together.

19:23 places that really do this well, they tend to focus on small groupoup conversation. They'll do just like the SEALs do with an AAR. They circle up and they talk about what happened. And when you see that same pattern of taking action and then doing something that's difficult for most groups to do to pause and really assess and connect and those assessments often are not led by the leader. They're often led by people who are lower on the totem pole. Why is vulnerability so important?

19:54 You know, that's a good question. Can't we just sort of build safety and do stuff and figure that the purpose of creating a safe environment is not just to make people feel safe. It's to give people the courage to speak out. There was a great moment in the NBA finals back in 2015. The Golden State Warriors were losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers that nobody could defend LeBron. And so the Golden State Warriors had a meeting and they were saying, "How can we defend LeBron?"

20:18 and the video intern at the meeting raised his hand with a suggestion and it turned out to be a really smart idea and they used it and they defended LeBron better and they won the series. The interesting part of that story is not the moment the video intern shares the idea. It's the million moments before that gave him permission to raise his hand. It's the how many little interactions did he have with the players, with the coaching staff that he felt courage enough to raise his hand and share that idea. Those moments are where safety and vulnerability really start to play. The purpose of safety is to let people be vulnerable. So, you can't have one without the other. And that's why they're so powerful together because that moment of safety, that moment of connection lets you reach with courage and step into uncertainty like that video intern did, which makes you feel more connected. And that's what great culture is.

21:13 Those moments of of feeling so connected that you can speak out and that deepens your connection. We started with safety, the foundational skill, then vulnerability, which creates action. And now we've got a question. How do we figure out our direction? And that's the third skill, establishing purpose. We see purpose sort of written in mission statements and we see it on the walls and we see it we see it as as like these big statements, these big north stars we're moving toward. What I find in high performing groups is that they're much more skilled at creating the lowercase P purpose. What's our purpose as this team right now in this space?

21:50 A lot of them will have these moments where they will come together and talk about why they're doing the task right now. I've seen groups call it process called teaming. The teaming process begins with bring coming together and talking about the why. Talking about what's our ideal end state here and why does this matter. Getting personal about what we're energized by and what we're deenergized by. And that moment of bringing the team together to talk about that stuff lets them create their own sense of purpose for this project. They're not doing it for the, you know, that big how pie in the sky long distance thing. They're doing it for each other and they're doing it to solve a problem together. And often times from on the best teams, the purpose often can end up being each other, the relationships on the team. If you talk to great teams about why they do things, they will inevitably talk about doing it to be a teammate, to be a great teammate, to support the people next to them. There's something about turning toward hard problems with people we like and admire that is addictive. And I think great cultures tap in to that feeling, that energy we get. There's nothing like turning toward hard problems with people that we admire. And so finding spaces where people can create those kind of cohesive teams is really an important part of purpose. The other thing about creating purpose is that you can't talk about it too much. I went into my research thinking that purpose would be something kind of in people's heart and they wouldn't necessarily talk about it very much.

23:17 But what I found was the opposite. And a lot of the high performing cultures that I visited, they would talk about it all the time. You know, at Pixar, they would always talk about the culture. The Navy Seals are always talking about the only easy day was yesterday, and we shoot, move, and communicate, and we're the quiet professionals. Like, they actually can't shut up about how quiet they are. I'm reminded of a study they did where they asked CEOs, "How many people can name the top three priorities of your organization?"

23:46 And they thought about it and they estimated. They estimated 64% could name the top three priorities and then they surveyed the people it turned out to be 3%. 3%. So we routinely overrate the clarity factor. And so I think one of the reasons that these cheesy mantras, these cheesy repetitions always are brought in is because they stick in your head and because they work and because they they make it vivid in in times where we're constantly being pulled different directions. Having a good cheesy saying like quiet professional works.

24:21 One of the best stories about that that I know has to do with Danny Meyer. Danny Meyer opened a restaurant in New York. He now runs Shake Shack. He's opened 22 restaurants. He's sort of the Pixar of the restaurant world, I would say. He opened his first restaurant. It was successful. He opened his second restaurant and they both started to fail because he couldn't be in both places. When he was in the room, you knew what proficiency was.

24:50 Everyone looked at him. Everyone knew how to behave. Everyone knew what mattered. But when he couldn't be in both restaurants, they both started to fail. And that's where he did something really smart when it comes to building a culture of proficiency. He closed both restaurants and went on a retreat. and he started building what he called a mantra map which was distilling the comp all the key behaviors of his culture into a series of catchphrases. They were really kind of cheesy catchphrases. It was like the excellence reflex.

25:22 Mistakes are waves. Servers are surfers of those waves. The road to success is paved with mistakes wellandled loving problems. Those were all the kind of mantras and those seem kind of cheesy at first, right? Excellence reflex, loving problems, athletic, hospitality. But I was having breakfast with Danny Meyer one day in in his one of his restaurants and in the corner of the restaurant, somebody dropped a tray of glasses on the floor and Danny Meyer stopped talking to me and he started looking in the corner and I said, "What are you looking for?" And he said, "One of two things is about to happen. Either this restaurant's going to come together and they're going to clean up this mess together and the energy level is going to go up or there's going to be some hint of anger and blame, resentment, and the energy level is going to drop.

26:13 Litmus test. As it happened, they came together. It went up and it really put a spotlight on how genius his mantra map is. Culture doesn't happen when things are smooth. Culture happens when there's a moment of adversity. And when there's a moment of adversity, it is very helpful to have a compass. It is very helpful to have a map of mantras, athletic hospitality, loving problems. The road to success is paved with mistakes wellandled. That's not cheesy. That's genius.

26:48 And so building that kind of language, language is immensely powerful when it comes to sending a lighthouse beam of clarity around proficiency. And so creating getting your team together and building your own mantra map ends up being one of the most powerful things you can do because you already know what challenges you are going to face. It's not a mystery. If you're a trauma team, if you're a high school teacher, if you're a tech worker, you know what those challenges are going to be. So why not anticipate that? Why not talk about the kinds of responses you think you should have? Why not create a mantra with your team? The other thing you do is storytelling. Stories are so powerful. Stories are the most powerful drug ever created. Stories stick in your head 22 times better than data does. And so when there is a story to be told, treating that as a little nugget, as a little piece of gold, as a little radio station you can broadcast into your group.

27:46 I know a lot of tech groups that they'll do an end of the week gathering and it's called a CSWD meeting. Cool stuff we do. And they're just sharing cool ideas that they've heard. Cool stuff we have a CSWD meeting. Simple stories that can be shared and that can help people navigate. Stories are navigational tools. Another one are symbols. Symbols are important. Symbols capture things that can't be captured in words. There's a reason that every belief system in the world uses symbols because they're powerful. If you walk in to the headquarters of the San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful NBA organizations on the planet over the last 30 years, you walk in and you see a rock and a hammer sitting there behind glass case. Just a big rock and a big old hammer.

28:32 It comes from a story that the coach Greg Papovich saw years ago. It was about a granite quarryman who's pounding on a rock with a sledgehammer and someone comes along and says, "Why do you keep pounding that rock?" And he said, "When the rock splits, I will not know if it is the last blow or all the blows that came before that did it." That's a story that he tells in the group. And he makes that story come alive every time the players come in. Every time they leave, what do they see?

29:00 What's the mantra at the San Antonio Spurs? Pound the rock. So, these things turning our behaviors into language that can be shared, that can be spotlighted, that can be celebrated, and not just good stories, by the way. The bad stories matter, too. Telling stories about the disasters that happened, about the mistakes people made, that is perhaps even more powerful in helping us navigate. Because when it comes navigating, knowing where to go is really good. And knowing where not to go is even better. So you build safety at the bottom. That's the connective function. Safety. Do I belong? Do I have a place here? Do I have a future? Do we care about each other? Upon that we add sharing vulnerability. Are we telling the truth? Do we have a shared consciousness? Are we hiding and avoiding or are we facing problems together? And then finally, how do we handle direction? We do that with a really clear northstar of purpose. So cultures are these living feedback spirals that are moving in search of some north star. So it's a set of living relationships establishing safety, sharing vulnerability, and moving toward that purpose.

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