Dan Coyle can fix your broken culture
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If you find yourself becoming interested in the magic of workplace culture one of the go to authors of the subject is today’s guest, Dan Coyle.
Dan’s 2018 book The Culture Code allowed him to go deep with some of the most successful cultures in the world – in the arenas of business, sport and even in military units. He’s returning after the blazing success of the Culture Code with a book, The Culture Playbook that gives more of the energy of that title but drawn into a playbook, imagine something like a journal with prompts of what to write.
He joined me for a discussion where we reflect on the challenges of the last 2 years and what any organisation should be thinking about as they set about creating a winning, forward-looking culture.
Robot generated transcript (best served cold)
Bruce Daisley: Hello, this is Eat, sleep, work repeat. I’m Bruce Daisley. It’s a podcast about workplace culture, psychology, and life. Thank you for joining and it’s a really lovely episode today. I think a lot of people have been wrestling. Over the last few months with how to bring their workplace culture back together.
While we’re in this sort of interim limbo stage of being fully from home, we recognize that we just needed to suck it up. Now we’re back in the office. Everyone has. Increasingly been vocalizing have a desire to get work culture back going again. And that’s why today’s guest is such a timely conversation.
Dan Coyle is the author of The Culture Code, probably one of the. Best books about workplace culture and probably the reason why Dan’s work is so outstanding is he gets this incredible opportunity to go inside. Really elite organizations like Pixar Sport organizations like the San Antonio Spurs, Navy Seals, goes inside these organizations to try and understand their culture and understand.
There’s some of the decisions that have contributed to that culture. He’s got a brand new book out now, which is really drawing on the success of the culture code. It’s turning it into something of a workbook, so it’s one of those books you can imagine halfway between a journal and an exercise book where you give them prompts and you’re asked to put things in.
I’d strongly recommend if anyone’s interested in these work that you start with the culture code. But this new culture playbook is most definitely something that’ll be helpful if you wanna sort of work through some of these things with your team. Great opportunity to chat to him, especially since in the few years since he published his book in 2018.
There’s obviously been a transformation in the way we’re working. Such an honor to chat to someone who is on speed dial with some of the biggest organizations in the world. So really great conversation. If you’re wrestling with how to bring some of the life back to your culture then this conversation with Dan Coyle will be great.
Here we go. Here’s Dan Coyle. Dan, thank you so much for coming back to the podcast. I’m so thrilled
Daniel Coyle: to talk
Bruce Daisley: to you.
Daniel Coyle: Actually, it’s great to be back with you at this moment in time where we’re talking about all this stuff. It seems like it’s bubbling up everywhere.
Bruce Daisley: Exactly. That because, that’s why I say great to talk to you at this moment, actually, because I just wanna ask this question that seems to be.
Fundamental to where we are right now. And that’s question how important do you think culture and workplace culture is right now?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, I
Bruce Daisley: think it’s a, it’s,
Daniel Coyle: it’s, I think we’re all wrestling with its place in our lives, right? The last two years have allowed us to zoom out and look at our lives from a slightly different point of view.
And I think it becomes more important than ever because we’ve all had this collective realization that there’s really good ways to do this and there’s really bad ways to do this and we’re living our lives and want to have happy, flourishing, lives filled with wellbeing, and we want to have jobs that support that, not the other way around.
And having a good culture seems a strong culture, a healthy culture, a culture where you can bring your whole self to work. A culture that listens, a culture that is two way and above all, a culture that can adapt to the changes that the world is bringing is, I’d say more important than ever.
It used to be an eon ago, meaning two and a half years ago. You would just show up at work and do your job. That world seemed very fixed and now we’ve gotten this glimpse of different ways we can interact in different ways, we can arrange ourselves. And to me, that cultural piece of that is asking the question, how are we going to work together?
What is it gonna mean when we work together? Where are we all headed? And to me, those are very pertinent questions to be wrestling with.
Bruce Daisley: Here’s why I asked the question now. I got an email from someone today. He said something that I think is really intriguing. He said, look, he’s really noticed that workers who joined during the pandemic and workers who are younger to the organization are showing a very different energy to the ones who came before.
And it really struck me that in the Culture code you talk about how. At the outset, you talk about how culture, good cultures you’ve witnessed, you often find yourselves in the room, in a room where you witness this sort of close physical proximity, physical touch, humor, attentiveness, energetic exchanges, and.
A lot of those things have been people looking each in each other’s eyes, and a lot of those things have been stripped from us in the last two years. And I just wonder, firstly, has that been at the expense that culture’s been damaged? But secondly, is there a danger that a whole generation of workers, a whole cohort of workers, have joined something that they, ’cause they’ve not perceived that closeness maybe.
They don’t feel the need for that closeness, and they might look at you, me, and others and say, actually I want work to be more transactional. I don’t need this artificial bonner me that connects me with people. I’ve asked so much there. So let’s go through that. Firstly, do you think anything has changed in the dynamic of culture during the pandemic?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah I think. I love this question. And there really are two schools of thought and that are responding to this today among people who are studying this and people who are trying to lead culture in this environment. And some of the people you’ve talked to, two schools of thought school, number one.
Things are broken there’s no way we’re gonna go back. People realize they just want a transactional job. There’s no way we’re gonna get people back in the workplace after they’ve tasted this freedom of being able to work from home. And it’s gonna be very fraction and different, and the glass is less than half empty school.
Number two is, this was more like an interruption and an awareness, bringing period of time. And when people realized that. The learning and the peer interactions that go on at work, they’ll realize they can’t get that at home and they will go back to the office at some level. And this group, this generation that has been onboarded during this time will gradually learn and adapt to this world, whether that’s three days in and two days off during the week or two days at home.
A hybrid workplace or whether that slowly becomes more of the physical workplace all the time. And I tend to fall in the second school. In the last few months we’ve seen big companies like Microsoft start to bring people back three days a week, four days a week. And what in those environments, and I was out at one two weeks ago in Seattle, is.
This kind of reawakening that yes, there were some things about work that were broken and there are some things that probably should be more transactional, but there is this genuine thrill, human thrill of being with your peers in an environment where you’re learning and growing and it really puts the onus on, I think companies that are gonna succeed and cultures that are gonna succeed in this environment are going to be put their focus on.
On growth, on learning, on giving people that something that they can’t get anywhere else. And in many businesses that is, it hinges on being physically present and being this sort of apprenticeship model where you are around people and learning from people and being mentored by people that help you get better.
And that’s a juice that’s, that’s a thing that, that people still crave. And so I tend to think that it isn’t the case that there is this sort of broken generation that will never be able to go back and adapt. And I think that adaptation will happen. I think it’ll happen in a slightly better way because I think the gift of the last two years has been perspective and has been, wait a minute, there are really certain jobs that are better done by myself at home, and there’s certain.
Domains where we really should be physically together, and we’ll all get a lot more out about that. So what we come away with is a higher degree of, this was basically reflection period of two years and you can’t learn without reflection. And it’s enabled us to see things a little bit more clearly.
And hopefully when we do go back, it’ll be with that much more intention and that much more purposefulness and that much more clarity around what we’re there to do together.
Bruce Daisley: So when you’ve been so fortunate that, and your the respect of your work has got you into some incredible rooms, incredible buildings, incredible environment.
If you were gonna characterize what good culture looks like. And I know that’s incredibly reductive. What are the things that you would say when you’re thinking about good culture? They generally look like this. They generally look like this. Are there any things that stand out? They do. There’s functions really, when
Daniel Coyle: we usually talk about culture, we talk about these abstractions like values and integrity and teamwork, and those are all abstract concepts.
Let’s look at it. If you X-rayed a great culture, right? If you had a machine that could X-ray the behaviors. Forget words, just the behaviors. You’d see three types of behaviors. The first type you would see is this connective behavior that creates safety, right? That’s the type of behavior. The second type of behavior you’d see is one of sharing and vulnerability.
So we can transfer information, so I can trust what you’re saying so we can see things clearly. And then the third piece would be a direction finding function where you’re trying to figure out. What matters, what doesn’t matter? Where are we headed? What’s our North star? How are we gonna navigate around these obstacles?
So every entity on earth, whether it’s an organism or whether it’s a culture a group of people has got to have those three functions. They have to have things that keep them together. They have to have things that help them share clear information and create transparency. And they have to have some direction.
And the things that I see in this new environment. Evolving. I would point to three sort of categories of behavior. For the connective behavior, I see a lot of groups going toward a concept that I would call deep fun. We’ve heard about deep work, but there’s a type of connective activity that happens in good cultures that I would call deep fun.
There was a great example of it. There’s a company here in the States that decided to set a team together to come up with the best single. Coffee and bring it back to the office in a machine, a best coffee, bring it back, scour the planet, find the best bean, the best roaster, the best machine, the best oat milk and bring it back to the office.
Kind of a silly, stupid idea, but one that creates this sort of connection where you’re doing, solving this kind of hard problem to benefit the group. And it creates a bit of energy around being there in the office, that kind of thing, that kind of safety creating. Behavior and you also see people getting really good at signaling fallibility, and really saying, Hey, I don’t have all the answers.
Leaders often, we grew up with this idea of leadership, that leaders were smarter and more infallible and they knew more things and had a lot of wisdom. And that doesn’t work in today’s environment, really, because it’s moving too quickly to know things, for sure. To have one person’s brain hold all the important information.
So you see leaders. Become very skilled at signaling fallibility and saying, Hey, I need some help here. We need to have a process and some systems where we go back over what we just did and really own it and really decide where I messed up and where you messed up and what we could do better. And the third behavior sort of category of behavior is.
Pausing. I see leaders and groups getting really more skilled ones that are successful, getting great at pausing. Modern life is not very good at giving us pauses. It just gives us more stuff to do. And so actively carving out, moving away from that channel of productivity and moving into pausing and saying, wait a minute.
What are we really doing here? What can we subtract from our world and make it easier to work in? What is what are we doing that is creating friction? Where are we really headed? Those moments of group reflection where you’re really building the landscape in which you’re operating and creating shared meaning around.
What’s important and what’s less important that’s the skill. So I would say getting good at deep fund, getting good at fallibility and getting really good at pausing would be a decent skillset for the next decade. Could you
Bruce Daisley: quote something in the book? Like I, I guess if someone’s, look, if someone’s listening to this, they’re probably interested in workplace culture and making work more enjoyable.
You quote something in the new book, which is firms that commit to deep fun. Four times the profits, two times the average revenue of those who do shallow engagement, what’s the source for that and what does that specifically mean? Because this sounds like one of those holy grails where, we are gonna see the benefit of having good culture.
What’s the origin of that data?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, it’s based on some work by Jacob Morgan. I didn’t, he wrote a big article in Harvard Business Review about it, where he dives into the details. But the essential distinction he is creating is between shallow fun and deep fun. Shallow is all this pleasurable stuff that we often see in office, right?
We should have ping pong machines. We have ping pong machines. We should have ping pong tables. We should have pinball machines. We should break for for beer at five o’clock on Thursdays. That sort of fun, which creates a bubbly, fizzy feeling of being together is not unvaluable, but it also creates an, a reaction that is very momentary and not really linked.
Deep fun is when you create interactions that allow members of the group to take ownership over the experience of group life. It’s when you give someone a budget to redecorate their cubicle. It’s when you put together a team to try to deselect what exercise machine or what juice machine they should get in the office.
It’s when the US National Women’s Soccer Team decides to design their own cleats and to put the names of their heroes on the back of their jerseys instead of their own names and decides to fight for pay. It’s when they take ownership, they’re not, it’s not a transactional compliant nature. It’s when they’re taking ownership.
And the ultimate is of course, actual ownership. It’s really interesting to see companies that have employee owned stock programs where the stock goes over to the employees. ESOP is the word that we use in this country. And one example that I just experienced was Tony Robbins who runs obviously all of his motivational businesses.
He actually is an esop. He has given ownership over his, of his company over to his employees, which, and it sounds very strange to say this, but I found out about that after having a lot of interactions with. With his group and you could sense something different about the group. They were simply more invested.
They were simply because it was their company. They literally are in charge of it. So there is this I think what this research is really getting at, is that word ownership. When you can create interactions that create a sense of ownership and hopefully even real ownership, that’s when you get that boost that Morgan tracked when it was.
When we talk about revenue and we talk about success, and that’s not really a shocking idea, right? We’ve known for generations that the best way to really improve is to create a sense of authentic ownership, and that’s what Deep Fund is all about.
Bruce Daisley: It’s so interesting what you say there because a lot of that leads into something that some of us, if we’re in big organizations, might feel the absence of that.
It seems that, the more you describe ownership, the more you describe authenticity. These feel like things that we’re very comfortable in establishing in small groups, but often uncomfortable in the establishing in big groups and in your observations, observing. Teams like the San Antonio Spurs and looking at high performance groups.
Do you think there’s something that culture doesn’t necessarily easily scale and so as a consequence, we should be thinking about trying to create culture in smaller groups?
Daniel Coyle: I love that. No, I think you’re exactly right, Bruce. Things, relationships don’t actually scale. Human relationships.
We know from Dunbar’s number that we are capable of keeping relationships with about 150 people at any given time. When you get beyond that, it becomes, you can’t really trust, you can’t really know, and so it’s absolutely natural that there’s not a single culture in these big organizations. What you have in successful, big organizations is a bunch of microcultures.
The model or the metaphor is more like the ecosystem, the jungle, where there are these micro ecosystems of culture that, that do exist. These 10 people, these 20 people, and part of what about part of building a strong microculture is in attending and realizing that’s the group that matters.
It was just at a at an event where we broke. It was a very big company, broke everybody up and then had them create their own mantras. What are the, what’s the language that really resonates with this groups, when you talk about your ambition for this, for these 20 people, not for the 3000 people that work there.
And one of the groups came up with with a mantra that was very simple. One, it was do epic shit. That was their mantra. That’s what and that those words would have no meaning to anyone else in the company. But they have massive meaning because there’s a whole set of stories and personalities that people know in relationships in where that, that mantra is super meaningful to that group.
And so that approach where you actually take time and let’s attend to the people, the relationships, the safety, the vulnerability, the purpose of. The deep fun, the pauses the reflection of that smaller group. There’s a saying that I really like, which is culture is the 15 feet around you. I think that gets a, an essential truth that it is, it’s continuous.
It has to do with the signals you send and the behaviors you put in the environment and with the space between the people you know well. And the idea that. Oh, we don’t have a culture that is a really common and pernicious myth. You do have a culture. The culture might be one of, it’s very transactional where you have decided to ignore each other, but it’s there.
And so the question to people is, do you want to take control over that or not? Do you want to, do you want to take some actions that help strengthen and build that microculture of which you’re apart?
Bruce Daisley: It’s really interesting though, isn’t it? Because to take that. Brilliant quotation then, and to extrapolate it over the last two years.
Then actually, the absence of us being around other people might in fact have had this unintended consequence of making us feel maybe more productive. Like our work could get done in a more considered way, but might have disconnected us a little bit from the human element of the cultures that we’ve previously been part of.
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, massively. And it’s inevitable, right? How do you feel together when you can’t be together? And so it ends up being this really interesting challenge and some of the more interesting innovations that people are doing in this area are trying to break down that distance.
Now, I don’t think it’s ever possible to have a real relationship purely, virtually, like until they invent. Far better holograms. It’s not gonna happen. Even though with all good intentions, we’re gonna have a great team. We’ll meet virtually once a day. No, you won’t. It’s really hard. Smart teams are starting to realize they need to toggle between real life and virtual.
To use virtual for product, for productivity and in-person, for more creative work where you get a lot more done creatively and to do things like normalizing conversations around mental health. That’s an area, if a coworker came in with a sprained ankle, you would realize it.
You’d see it. But mental health is exactly the same. And so a lot, some groups, Genentech the tech company, they just did a series of videos. By their leaders that where the leaders talked very openly and vulnerable, vulnerably about their own mental health challenges. And it’s called hashtag Let’s Talk.
And the idea there is to normalize this. So we’re not just letting that isolation happen without doing anything about it. We’re doing what society is doing, which is, hey let’s bring that in the open, let’s talk about it and deal with it together.
Bruce Daisley: I’d love to to delve into two or three of the comp, the organizations that you’ve had the honor to work with.
And one of the things that really struck me about the San Antonio Spurs and Coach Popovich has just become the, I think it’s described as the most winningest coach in history, but the one thing that they spend a lot of time doing, he spends a lot of time doing, is curating these dinners.
In fact also moments where he doesn’t join his leadership team, he leads them to huddle. I wonder if you could describe to me a couple of your experiences of witnessing such a high performing environment like the San Antonio Bear.
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, no, like I’m a basketball fan and I, there were the people I was most interested in seeing, partly because from a great distance coach Popovich looks like the crankiest man on the planet.
He’s 155 years old and he seems to yell a lot at his players. And so the first day I got there, I was keenly interested because I got there on. The day after they had lost a big game to their arch rival and the first thing that Popovich did walking onto the court, he was dressed in these baggy shorts and this shirt from a crab shack in Maine, and he looked like a crazy uncle.
He walked right over to the player who had missed the big shot the night before, the player who had choked, and he put his hand on that player and he started talking to that player, not about. Shot, but about the dinner that Popovich had arranged for that player and the bottle of wine Popovich had ordered.
And to your point, he spends in the mid six figures on meals for his team. Not because he loves to eat, he does love to eat, but because this is the space where they connect, it’s this sacred space at the end of every year. Every coach gets a leather bound album of all the menus of the places they visited and the wines, the wine label.
And then it was time to watch some film, and I went thinking I would be seeing some game film. You watch the film and you criticize, you make comments and you get better. But when he pushed play, what started to play was not game film, but a documentary on the history of the Civil Rights Voting Act, and then Popovich created this extraordinary conversation about it.
What would you have done? What would your parents have done? Intimate, real. Curious and the thing that you walk away with is that he’s curious and entrepreneurial about connecting. He’s always looking for an opportunity, like every leader has a to-do list, right? We need to get from A to B2C. We need to get ready for the game.
His ability to pause. And when I, we talked before about being great at pausing. He’s great at pausing. He’s great. He’s always looking for an opportunity to find some connective material that will bring his team closer. There was a night right before they started to play in the NBA championships, the night before game one, and they’re getting together to talk as a team, and Popovich starts talking about Eddie Mabo day.
Eddie Mabo Day is an Australian indigenous holiday named after the indigenous man who sued the government and it, he’s got an indigenous Australian man and Patty Mills on the team, and he, it was Eddie Mabo day. And so he talked about it and Patty Mills is in tears and he’s talking to his teammates about Pat.
It was the most incredible moment. Why did that happen? Because. What makes Popovich great is not that he’s really smart. There’s a lot of coaches that are smart, not that he is really funny. A lot of coaches are really funny, not that he’s good at connecting. A lot of coaches are really good at connecting.
What makes him great is his ability to pause and zoom out and say, what would connect my team right now? What would connect them? And he thinks about that in such a relentless, creative, curious way. And then he implements that’s what makes him great. And that’s what really came to light.
The more you spend time with him, the more you see him. Being really opportunistic about connection.
Bruce Daisley: I love that. And I’ve, you’ve just given me so much more depth to a story that I already knew. ‘Cause I was thinking that, any leader in this moment might be thinking the importance of getting my team back together and having breaking bread with them, having a meal with them.
Whether that’s the lunchtime meal or if you can’t impose on people’s evenings or taking people for an evening meal. But you’ve gone beyond that. I think that notion of being entrepreneurial with connecting is so valuable because I read those things that you’d written about those stories where he was imbuing a sense of purpose, or he was having an excursion into civil rights and I thought, oh, that’s really, that’s noble.
The, he’s brought a sense of purpose, but exactly as you say there, this is not specifically about him, him imparting his values, but trying to activate a connection with him and the people he’s responsible for inspiring. So brilliant to hear you describe it.
Daniel Coyle: And there’s a deeper thing happening now, which, we talk a lot in this world about mindfulness and being tuning into the moment.
I think he’s always, look I think there’s something there about him too, the way he sees, he’s always trying to expand the present moment to be as big as possible and to connect to things that are really in the environment. A lot of times as leaders, we think we’ve gotta bring something.
Ourselves in and impose some idea of ours on the environment. And that’s not what he’s doing. He’s actually just like laying back and keenly observing what’s there. There’s his player, he’s an indigenous Australian. What? I wonder what holidays they have. Oh, it’s today. Like that is simply paying deep attention to now.
And that I think is an underrated skill. And as for a leader, it’s in a weird way, it’s easier and in a weird way, it’s easier to say, I’m gonna pay attention to now and make now as rich and connective as possible, as opposed to, I’m gonna have a 16 point plan to connect my team and I’m gonna execute that plan.
The second is pretty exhausting. The first is actually pleasurable, and so to look at connection as not as this. Task to click off your list or this linear cause and effect thing, but more I’m gonna look for possibilities. I’m gonna throw some things in the environment.
I’m gonna see what happens and it’s gonna be fun.
Bruce Daisley: You’re exactly right. It needs such a skilled craftsman. ’cause you can most definitely see that someone who’s less adept, less empathetic might set about these things and really clumsily introduce something that just isn’t land. Attribute not only to the empathetic mind that creates those ideas and that creates that entrepreneurial sense of connection, but also the exquisite expertise to, to deliver that with capability. Look nicely said. Yeah so look incredible. You’re able to witness that firsthand. Tell me, you, you describe a little bit about Pixar and I think we’re all very familiar with Pixar and the track record of success of Pixar.
Describe to me what’s it like walking into a place like Pixar? Does it emanate a sense of creativity from the building? Is the building constructed to, to create these connections?
Daniel Coyle: Yes, it does. There’s energy. It’s really interesting. People say Steve Jobs greatest creation was the iPhone. I think it was his second greatest ’cause, the Pixar atrium.
It’s something that he put a ton of time into. He was of course part of the founding group of Pixar with Ed Kamo and John Lasseter. This atrium, you walk in and it’s right there in front of you. You see a big outside is the famous lamp you walk in, there’s a giant Lego sculpture of Woody and I think some others.
And then you go into this atrium, which is this beautiful, airy space. There’s tables and. Interestingly, I think they put the restrooms together at the far end to, and it’s all designed to create collisions. It’s like this collision machine. They had a moment early on where people were leaving the building to go eat elsewhere, and they had this realization, wait a minute, these collisions that happened in this room are.
Our most important asset. We’re a creative company. We need to have these continual conversations and continually looping and bumping like noodles in a pasta pot, right? We’re just, we just want people to boil and simmer and bounce off each other, and that’s how they built the building.
And so you feel that when you’re in there, you feel this buzz of energy. Which is ironic ’cause for vast stretches of the building, it’s they’re a tech company, right? What do they do? They put lines of code onto a screen that build things, that render graphics. They’re a graphics company, but they’re able to continually keep that because of the way they design this space.
And the other thing, they have, like a lot of great cultures they’re always capturing artifacts, right? There’s things on the walls, early sketches of their first. The first things, the really primitive animations that they did, continually seeking to tell their story and remind people of where they came from.
Their biggest challenge when you talk to Ed Kamo now is that people walk in and they just think I’m at Pixar. Things are smart here. Things are great here. We’re gonna make great stuff together. And that is a horrible, very difficult place to start because the fact is creative works really hard no matter where you are.
There’s this sort of sense that we have about culture where we assume great cultures operate on a higher plane. That, that there’s no arguments. Every idea is a great one, and every draft is really good. And the truth is precisely the opposite. Like great cultures are great because they are always turning toward.
The hard stuff turning toward the problem, realizing that first draft is terrible and we need to completely rebuild it. How are we gonna do that? And they don’t turn away from the problems. We talked about a holy grail before. There’s a holy grail element here where it’s you need to build relationships strong enough to disagree with them and to fight out and let the best idea win.
And that’s actually what they’re great at. They’re great at having these arguments in the con, in this safe, high belonging context where they can. Take a movie and give it to their brain trust. And the brain trust can say, man, you got a long way to go. This is not good. And they can actually be heard and the movie can gradually, as Ed Kamal says, go from suck to not suck.
Bruce Daisley: Tell me this. ’cause one thing that’s so fascinating about that, you talk about the importance of speaking up and the importance of cultures that permit speaking up. And the one thing that Pixar seemed to have done, and they’ve. They pretty much packaged it up and handed it to Disney as well. Is this brains trust and story trust at Disney, which Systematizes speaking up.
Yeah. I wonder if you could just give us an insight. Did you get the opportunity to observe it or did you observe any of the consequences of it?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, they’re very, they’re very close. They don’t like other people in there. It’s a very close system, but I, they have another version of it where they will call it.
Plusing, which is when they will show a draft of a movie to the entire group. The entire group gets to see the draft and gets to offer. Comments. And those comments are called pluses because you’re, they don’t wanna frame them. They’re framing them as a positive thing. And I met a guy who, he had a very small job.
He wasn’t sweeping the floors, but he wasn’t too far off it. And he had made a suggestion that the filmmakers had followed it was a medal. On the movie up, there’s a Boy Scout and the Boy Scout has a series of medals and he had a visual joke that he suggested for the types of metals to use.
And I forget what it was. But there he was having a sort of very ancillary job at Pixar. He watches the movie, he raises his hand, words come out of his mouth, and those words get translated into a movie that is seen by millions and millions of people, and he sees that’s what voice is, right? People talk about safety as if safety is the goal.
Safety’s not the goal. Voice is the goal. And so building systems that ensure support, share that voice is what places like Pixar do really well. And it’s a place where other people fall down where they think, oh, we’re just supposed to create safety and belonging. That’s we’re done. You’re not done.
You’re not done until the weakest person in the room says something brave and accurate before everybody else.
Bruce Daisley: Oh, that’s so interesting. So do you think we’ve lost some degree of that through being on Zoom Hangouts with 30 people? What’s your perspective of that?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah, completely it. It’s very difficult to speak up in that mind, and that’s why.
This leadership bar, this bar for leadership behaviors keeps going up because now the leader’s gotta say, Hey intern, I’d love to hear from you on this, and maybe even give the internal warning that he’s gonna be called on during the meeting, and to focus on. The other sort of way to adapt to this is to really model fallibility over and over again and to continually say these, and we really need your help here.
What am I missing here? You need to over communicate fallibility to, to make it safe. And there’s a saying. That leaders should not shoot the messenger. That’s, as Amy Edmondson at Harvard points out, that’s not enough. It’s actually not enough not to shoot them.
It’s really important in this day and age, especially with this, in these virtual ways we’re interacting to actively. Thank the messenger of hard news. Thank you for sharing that with me. That is, it’s really important that I know that. And in a virtual environment, all of those things need to be overdone because the virtual environment dampens the human signal that is coming through.
It’s one thing for someone to say that in real life, that’s another thing to be said virtually. So amplifying that fallibility signal is a key skill.
Bruce Daisley: I’ve spent a lot of time reading your stuff and listening to your stuff and I end up thinking that, the currency of culture from what you say is elite level communication.
It’s the ability to communicate. And the interesting thing is that the, we’ve ended up in the course of the last two years believing that we’ve been doing more communication than ever before. The amount of meeting time and video time has gone up exponentially, but it’s we’ve created.
Communication noise, but we haven’t communicated effectively between us. The difference between message sent and message received. Just intriguing that, if I’m hearing what you’re saying, these grounds for people to think that actually creating good cultures is still going to be possible, it’s actually gonna be even more of a differentiator before, but the skills that are required are really.
Honing our communication skills and being honest about when we’re communicating and when we’re literally just, logged into the zoom call. ’cause that isn’t communication. That’s just being online. It’s just a really interesting to, to perceive the expertise seems to sit in elite level communication.
Daniel Coyle: I love that. I think that’s a perfect framing. These people, they’re elite communicators and they’re also, I would add elite learners. That’s the piece I would add to it, where they’re continually looking at their communication and everything else to say, did what could I have done better?
What, what didn’t land there? Why are all everyone’s cameras turned off during this Zoom call? What do we need to do now? What do we need to do now? And this, it’s not. Merely there’s an interesting distinction between things that are complicated and things that are complex.
Complicated things have a linear cause and effect, and you can do a and expect B, right? It’s like building an engine. You give me a plan, some expert can put it together. But complex things aren’t like that, complex things. Are more like raising a child.
Everything you do affects the system. It’s not linear. Good leaders have to be complexity athletes in a way. Like they have to say that didn’t work, but that also changed the system. Now what? What can we try over here? What can we try over here? What direction should we go here? And it becomes much more subtle, much more nuanced, much more in word, complex.
Because that’s the kind of leadership skillset. This sort of high level learning, high level of communication, high level of reflection. I would say too, to be able to navigate these very complex organisms that are our entities, our groups.
Bruce Daisley: There’s gonna be no shortage of people right now who are back at the office a couple of days a week or three days a week, and they’re thinking things don’t feel the same.
Bit like that email I read there and they’re trying to fashion the way to make things feel more connected, fashion the way to, to make their culture better. And look, you’ve just written this whole book, stroke work book, which invites people to commit ideas to paper, to think about these things.
If you were going to help someone right now, what are the two or three questions they need to be asking? What are the two or three? Actions that they might consider taking first, where would you start? Just to round us off?
Daniel Coyle: Yeah. I guess I would start I would start with a reflection piece. Think about where you are and where you want to go as a group, as an individual and try to build what habits of reflection do you have?
That would be one question to ask. Yourself, because that’s gonna be a skill, your skill, ability to pause, zoom out make decisions, see the landscape clearly as a group and as an individual is gonna be really important for more sort of simple tactical suggestions. This is a kind of a silly one, but it is I think it’s meaningful.
Keep an open face. The face is like a door. It has two settings. It can be open it can be closed. We know what close looks like. We’re intent. Our attention is a narrow spotlight. And open is broad attentiveness. The frontalis muscle is your forehead muscle, and. It might be the most important muscle on your body when it comes to creating culture, especially in virtual worlds, because it’s how it has no, this muscle has got no evolutionary use except social signaling.
It’s how we signal excitement, interest, engagement. If you think of the leaders, think of the faces of the leaders you admire. Are they open or closed? And pay attention to the signals you are sending. The second thing I would say is send the two line email. The two line email is an email use, it’s an idea from Laslo Bach who used to head up people analytics at Google.
Tell me one thing I should keep doing. You send it to your team. One thing I should keep doing and please tell me one thing I should stop doing, short email, big signal. And the third thing I would say is make the habit of doing an a r. An A R is an after action review. It’s an idea that originated in the military, but has broad application.
It’s the one thing. I think if there was one thing from the book for people to do, I might suggest that it’s after you finish doing something as a group, get together and ask these questions. What went well, what didn’t go well, and what will we do differently next time? They’re hard meetings to have because they put a spotlight on where people might have screwed up on, where people might have did well.
And it creates the, a hard but very productive conversation that gives you a sort of a shared landscape where we’re going together, what we’re learning. And. That having a simple, short five minute a r at the end of something, that’s the kind of cultural calisthenic that makes groups stronger. It’s a little painful, but just like physical exercise, like our social groups are not that different from our bodies, like the pain.
Creates the game. And if you have that pain of oh, I’m gonna have to admit that I screwed that up and they’re gonna do the same and I’m gonna talk about where I think they could have been better, that’s a painful conversation a little bit, but it’s, it brings you closer. Think about your best friends in your life.
Are they people that you’re never vulnerable with? Or are they the people that you’re the most open with? So that same dynamic works
Bruce Daisley: in our groups. And I guess the secret of all of that is that, there’s no point entering into all of these things unless you’re willing to act on the harsh feedback you’re gonna get.
It’s it’s a learned call and response if people tell you hard truths and then you pretty much ignore it, then of course you know they’re not gonna do it next time.
Daniel Coyle: That’s right. And those hard truths. It’s interesting. Over time it becomes just like physical exercise.
It actually gets easier. You start to crave it. When you’re in a good culture, there’s sometimes where people will, approach you and say, really, you push me on this. What? Help me out. What am I missing? And you begin to really enjoy those moments where someone comes to you and says, Hey, here’s a gap you can fill.
And that can be a really thrilling experience as opposed to the other experience where everyone protects your status and protects your reputation and doesn’t dare offer you anything that could make you better.
Bruce Daisley: I’m so grateful for the opportunity to pick your brains and to try and catch up on exactly what’s gone on and the way we can rethink about this.
Dan it’s been such an honor to chat to you. Thank you. And best of luck with the new book because. At this time when everyone’s looking for new pointers, it’s it’s a very practical guide to thinking about just those tactical things that can have a small impact on and in aggregate can have a big impact on the way we do our jobs.
So thank you so much.
Daniel Coyle: You’re having a big impact on the world, Bruce, and I’m grateful for the conversation and thanks for your great question. You’re great conceptualizing of this stuff. You’re so good at navigating this landscape, so thank you.
Bruce Daisley: Thank you so much.
Thank you to Dan, and like I say, Dan’s the author of a brand new book, the Culture Playbook. You can find a link for that in the show notes. If you are interested in workplace culture. Then in three weeks time, there’s a really nice announcement coming here where you can. Get a hold of some incredible exclusive content completely free.
So if you are not signed up to the newsletter, I’d strongly recommend you, you follow the link in the show notes, sign up for make work better, ’cause there’s gonna be a great offer coming your way. In the meantime, I’ve been Bruce Daley. Feel free to link into me and I’d love. Love it. If you could share this with friends or colleagues who are interested in the same thing.
Thank you for your company today. See you next time.
