The Culture Code – the best culture book of 2018

The Culture Code is the best book on work culture likely to be published this year. From Daniel Coyle author of the Talent Code, an international bestseller that cracked the formula of individual success. In the subsequent 5 years he’s immersed himself in the best teams in the world – Navy SEALS, sports teams and some of the most creative companies in the world (including Pixar and IDEO).

Now he’s ready to share the remarkable output of his work. Coyle’s book gives clear guidance of what anyone who runs a team or works in a team should do.

Robot generated transcript – buyer beware!

Bruce Daisley: This is eat, sleep, work. Repeat a weekly podcast on happiness and work culture. Hello again. It’s Bruce Daley. You’re back again. This is Eat, sleep, work, repeat. You can find all of the previous episodes on our website and that’s Eat, sleep, work, repeat fm. I always welcome people linking into me as well or you can follow us on Twitter and I did a really nice.

Twitter thread, that’s was the word of two years ago. I did a Twitter thread over the weekend about the impact of laughter on us, and in fact, that’s going to inform a future episode. There’s a few sort of pieces there, and I’m gonna have an episode in a couple of weeks just talking about the impact of team rituals and the word that I’ve become obsessed with synchronization.

So you’ll, if you go to our Twitter that’s eat, sleep, work, repeat. You’ll see that Twitter thread there. So I think that is gonna be an amazing episode. Some really good episodes over the last few weeks. There was a fabulous discussion with Dan Pink last week that I hope you had the chance to catch up on.

There was obviously a brilliant discussion the week before with. Of Anita Williams Woolley and the power of collective intelligence. And quite a few people have emailed me or linked into me or tweeted me, telling me that they’ve, they did that exercise in their teams. So just a really good team exercise.

If you wanna get people talking about how to improve your team dynamic, how to improve your work culture, these really simple free ways for you to do that there. So go and check out our Twitter if you’re interested in that. So quite often in this. Podcast we focus on workplace happiness and I focus on one thing that could improve your work.

The examples I’ve given, there are good examples of that Dan Pink talking about when to do various things. Na Williams woolly, talking about how you can maximize your understanding and your empathy of. Of everyone really and this week’s episode is probably one of the most comprehensive episodes we’ve ever done because it’s someone who’s devoted the last five or six years of his life really studying how teams work and understanding how we can learn from successful teams.

It’s a discussion with Daniel Coyle, who’s the author. Of a fantastic new book called The Culture Code. This book’s now out so you can go and grab this. It came out last week, it came out on the 30th of January. She can go and grab this book and I have to tell you that sort of 50, 60 pages into this book, I wanted to stand and applaud ’cause the quality of the work.

It’s just really comprehensive and you’re gonna get some really clear models of what needs to work of the way that you can adapt your own workplace environment. I think one of the other things that comes up in our discussion is we talk about one of the other big culture books recently, which is Patty McCord’s book Powerful and Patty was one of the early.

She was actually on one of my earlier episodes. She was on that episode five or six, and she was talking about the sort of the Netflix culture document. And to a large extent, she’s played a part in helping to shape the discussion about culture in, in the most of the business world over the last 10 years.

Searching for the Netflix culture document, you’ll see no shortage of links and commentary. But we, myself and Daniel Coyle talk about that here, and we talk really about what we think the substances are of it and the climate and what that does. But that’s not where the conversation starts and ends.

Daniel gives you a very clear perspective of what you need to do. I would. Really said that the interview is a companion piece to the book. And if there’s one thing that I would recommend you do is pick up a copy of this book. Daniel was a, an international bestseller with a book called The Talent Code a couple of years ago, just really trying to understand the impact of talent and how we can cultivate and develop our own talent.

And he’s taken that. Thoroughness of approach to putting this new book together. I loved it so much. I contacted the publishers and actually we’re running an event, so we’re running a second event. Very cheap event. 25 quid. If you don’t want the book 40 quid, if you do want the book, and you’ll see that I’ve tweeted about that.

So if you want to hear directly from Daniel about his experience and the way that he feels, that you can bring what he describes as the magic of great culture, how you can bring that to your team, strongly recommend you, you pick up this book and the tickets. I know there was. I tweeted it out yesterday morning.

There was a whole load of interest, so I’ve moved quickly on that. If you’re interested. So Daniel Coyle, his new book is out now it’s called The Culture Code, and I caught up with Daniel to talk about it. Here’s Daniel.

So Daniel, thank you so much for joining me. I’m blown away by this new book, the Culture Code. The big question I think you said about answering is why some grow groups add up to more than some of their parts, and that’s, the cultural dividend that probably anyone who’s listening to this is thinking about.

So what’s the answer? 

Daniel Coyle: That’s it. And it’s funny to back up, every, and it is so good to be here with you, Bruce. Thank you so much for having me. When you think about it, most groups add up to less. When you look at most groups, when you really look at the sum total of talent and experience and charisma and energy, and you put people together in a group.

Most of them add up to a little bit less. And so I’ve spent the last five years finding groups that add up to a lot more, not a little bit, but a lot more, some of the best cultures on the planet and was privileged enough to spend time inside Pixar and the Navy Seals and the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, and Ideo and Zappos and a bunch of other places.

And there’s a pattern that they share. We typically think about culture as being this mystical, magical, it’s in their DNA. We connected to their identity, their special identity, but in fact, when you get a bunch of humans together in a group and have them interact, there are some real certain consistent tensions that come up.

And there’s certain systems that are in play, and these are places that have aligned their habits with the way. The science of how good culture actually is created. So it’s not, what I found is that it’s not magic, it’s not this sort of special sauce or DNA, it’s about really specific behaviors that have to do with how do you connect people?

How do you get them to interact in a in a truthful and high candor way? And how do you get them to move together toward a purpose? And there was one story in particular that. Really helped unlock that early on that I tell in the book. That, of course, has to do with marshmallows. It’s too 

Bruce Daisley: tempting to have had that offered to us and not hear the story.

What’s the marshmallow story? Tell one. 

Daniel Coyle: It is pretty good. Yeah. It was about a contest. There was an engineer named Peter Skillman who decided to investigate this question of why do certain groups produce so much more than the sum of their parts? And he did it. He had a contest. It was, the contest was very simple.

It was to build a tower out of the following materials 20 pieces of raw spaghetti. A yard of tape and a single marshmallow. The only rule was that the marshmallow had to go on the top. But the interesting part was the teams that he chose teams of MBAs, four person teams of CEOs, teams of lawyers, and teams of kindergartners, and he put them all in a big room.

And I like to picture it like they’re on a big football field, right? And over here, the CEOs and over here, the, are the MBAs over here? The lawyers over here are the kindergartens and they all get to work. And all of the adult groups follow the same template. They get together like any meeting, any business meeting would, right?

They talk and they analyze the problem and they suggest some solutions, and they hone those solutions. And it’s like this perfect embodiment of human cooperation. It looks lovely, it looks smooth, it looks fluent, it looks organized, it looks great. The kindergartners do not do that. Like they just start grabbing stuff and they’re shoulder to shoulder and they’re interrupting each other and they’re grabbing stuff out of each other’s hands.

And it looks like monkeys, complete chaos. And if you had to bet, if you had to bet your life savings on which group would win. If you had to put it in a wheelbarrow and push, push it to the center of the field and guess who was gonna win? Most of us would not pick the kindergartners, we’d pick the CEOs or somebody else, and, but it turns out that we’re wrong.

When you do this experiment, the kindergartners build a tower. The average height is 26 inches. The CEO’s average height is 20 inches. And the reason that we get it wrong is that we fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics with which groups come together. We think we focus on what we can see, which is smart people.

We see smart, experienced people, and we think they’re gonna combine to be a smart, experienced group in the same way that like two plus two equals four. But in the CEO’s case, two plus two equals three, two plus two equals two. The kindergartners come together, two plus two equals 10. Because we overvalue smartness, and we undervalue the most important dynamic, which is safety.

Bruce Daisley: I think this story blew me away when I read it because a friend of mine had quit a job in the last 12 months to go and become a chef and learn the chefs, the skills have been in the kitchen, and she said the fastest group, these, the, all the groups are split into different age groups. The fastest group are the 19 year olds and the people she’s with, she’s in her early thirties, she said the.

The fastest group are 19 year olds ’cause they tend to learn about half the speed of everyone else. And it’s not for any other reason than what you describe in the book as status management. Older people and people who are more senior tend to talk more to try and manage their position in the hierarchy, in the group.

Try and manage, demonstrate where they sit in the group. And there were so many echoes of what she said, Georgina said to me of the work that you’ve done here. There’s so many sort of echoes of your research. You’re effectively saying that we’ve actually become less capable in our working environment.

We find ourselves now less capable than we would be as kids. Do you wanna just explain why that is? 

Daniel Coyle: It’s our wiring. We are wired to be keenly aware of where we fit into any social order. And as those CEOs show, as your friends experience shows, we spend a tremendous amount of unconscious energy, like a secret second job of managing our status.

Those CEOs, when they’re trying to build that tower, there’s actually a little whisper in the back of their mind. Where do I fit in? Is it okay to say that? Like where do, and that takes a tremendous amount of attention, energy, motivation to pay attention to that. So when and it’s our default status, we can’t help it.

We really can’t help it. This is why most groups are less than the sum of their parts. When we come together, we’re devoting a huge amount of our attention and energy to wondering where do we fit in? Now the kindergartners are succeed because there’s none of that, and the 19 year olds succeed because there’s much less of that.

What this really shows is just how pervasive status management is. And because it’s so pervasive, culture can’t just come in and hope that it goes away. ’cause it never goes away. The cure is safety. So they, the good cultures send, they flood the zone with what are called belonging cues, small cues that send a big message, which is we’re connected.

We’re safe, we care about you, we’re committed with you. That warmth that you feel in good cultures is not an accident. It’s because they are purposely sending those signals to create safety, and that safety gets rid of the status management and lets a group become more than the sum of its parts. And there’s all kinds of cool science around this too, because, for example, there’s another story I tell in the book about a company called Wipro.

Now Wipro was struggling with retention. They were a call center in India, and so they tended to lose about half of their workforce every six months. They did a tiny experiment where they changed orientation by just one hour, the one hour. Instead of they did, they broke the group into two different groups, one.

One group got the standard orientation, which was to tell the new employees all about how great Wipro was. They met a star employee. They learned about all the perks of working there. It was a Wipro centered presentation. The other group went to a presentation that asked questions, and the questions weren’t about Wipro.

The questions were about the employees, the new trainees. The questions were like, what happens on your best day? What happens on your worst day? If we were on a desert island, what skills would you bring to our survival? So it was just an hour of asking the news, the new people, some questions. Seven months later, that second group was 250% more likely to still be employed.

To still be there. They had a sense of belonging, and that belonging wasn’t accidental. It was delivered in those quick belonging cues. When you ask an authentic question, when you demonstrate care, when you send a signal, we share a future. You are really doing something really powerful to someone’s brain.

You’re sending ’em a signal. These are your people. It’s safe to connect. You can turn off that status management virus that’s worrying in the back of your brain, and you can connect. 

Bruce Daisley: There’s a couple of things in the book that I found really interesting as a, as an interesting contrast. So in the model that you’ve built, which is first build safety second, collectively share vulnerability amongst yourselves.

I guess one of the things that sometimes we see that expressed as is family, and you even say in the start of your book, often high performance teams describe themselves as family, describe themselves as having this sort of family relations. Do you think that word’s fair? I’ve been discussing it with other people with regards to working cultures and the word family and belonging is something that some people, Patty McCord, for example from Netflix, some people feel uncomfortable with.

You seem Yep. You seem more comfortable with that sense of belonging. 

Daniel Coyle: It’s more, I think you can also, you can call it a variety of things, but I’m, but the feeling, how that gets expressed can vary. There’s the Netflix way of presenting it, which is to say, Hey, we’re not a family. This is a team.

This is a team. The difference is when you talk about the connection they feel and the connection, they behave to each other, the way they behave to each other, and when they think about the sacrifice they’d be willing to make for each other. That’s the metaphor that a lot of people reach for. And the metaphor that a lot of people describe.

Interestingly this sort of bridges into another discussion, which is there’s this sort of impression that in a great culture, everyone’s having tons of fun all the time. I think that goes along with this sort of family idea that we’re just having. We’re just having a blast together and.

That’s not actually what goes on. There’s there’s a very deep level of engagement, but it’s not fun and it’s not fun and games all the time. There’s a sense of fun, but it’s more like a deep engagement. It’s more like working on hard problems together, a deep involvement.

And the feeling that people have when they’re connected to a strong culture like that is often, boy, sometimes I wish I could quit, but I just can’t. The, it’s just too fascinating. I’m too connected to these people. I just I hate it, but I love it. Kinds of emotions that come out when they’re connected to that culture.

It’s a really complex thing to call it family is too simple and a term but it does evoke some of the push pull and the intensity of the bond. Is family-like. 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. And the thing that really struck me from what you said how to cultivate that family or intense feeling is something that you can only create authentically.

So one of the things that you mentioned is that there’s this survey that showed the most valuable successful cultures and the survey was in Silicon Valley, which often just a great place to see lots of different cultures emerging very quickly. But you said it was a commitment model and you described what the commitment model is, but effectively that’s where people are working to a shared set of values.

And I sat there and I thought. You’d struggle to find any company in Silicon Valley that doesn’t espouse shared values. There’ll be very different experiences at those different companies though. How’d you ensure that those shared values actually authentically work, rather than just look like they’re going through the motions of shared values?

Daniel Coyle: Yeah, I know. And then that’s where you really get it. It’s tricky because everyone’s talking this language right now. Everyone’s everyone wants to present as having that sort of culture. And I think there’s a few indicators that make it, that distinguish kind of the pretend shallow cultures, let’s make the world a better place and, and play foosball together with a deeper, more intense culture that can that actually has that authenticity that you’re talking about. And one is the sh the leadership, the shadow of leadership, it’s called the behaviors of the leader end up really driving the culture to a tremendous degree.

And so when you have got a leader whose behaviors reflect these on a deep level in a consistent way. Then you’ve got a shot. That was one thing that I saw at all of the cultures that I visited, their leaders were were absolutely the embodiment of that culture, of that, of cultures of care.

One, one example I guess I saw with the San Antonio Spurs Greg Popovich. The care that he takes with each interaction with each player is the purest distillation of that culture. So when you’ve got, when you’ve got the leaders, the other thing that you see. In a strong culture like that is that you don’t see any bad apples.

The absence of bad apples, the zero tolerance for bad apples, the ferocity with which they defend their culture against jerks is typically very. Clear, explicit, and strong. So you at once between those two indicators a leader who’s whose every behavior sort of captures and models that, and a zero tolerance for even the most brilliant jerk.

Because they want to defend that culture as much as possible. And I guess a third indicator would be that if you pay attention to the way people treat each other, typically the way they treat each other in a great culture is the highest priority. They’ll prioritize each other’s relationships over other pressing, pressing commitments.

So the way that they treat each other, if you pay attention to that ends up being another, a third sort of indicator that yes, this is something that might go beyond the sort of surface appearance of good culture and actually goes deep into the behavior. But the other thing I would just add to that, as long as we’re talking about this too, is that.

All these cultures struggle. There’s no such thing as a perfect culture out there. They all struggle with things. The same reason that. Cultural fitness is the same thing as fitness for you and me. It’s not easy to eat right and keep your mind sharp and exercise, and good cultures are the same way.

They need to maintain their fitness and they will have bad moments and they’re, they will have very real struggles and they will be terrified of certain things happening. But that’s just part of putting a group together and part of being a culture. 

Bruce Daisley: So we touched on it briefly before I read your book back to back with Patti McCord’s book.

Patti was one of the instigators of the Netflix culture document, and he talked about it there. Not only does Patty overtly say that work isn’t a family, but they almost deliberately go against your notion of building safety by saying, look, if you’re not delivering here, we’re gonna fire you. And my take is when I see that I, I question the evidence for their approach, whether.

Whether it was just one or two genius inventions and that’s made their success rather than their culture. What’s your take on something like that? 

Daniel Coyle: Yeah it’s it could, those things can coexist, I would say. It’s not safety does not mean a complete a military bunker from which no one can be can be taken out is not perfect safety.

On every sports team, on every military team there’s a chance of someone getting cut, of someone getting demoted. And that sort of exists on a slightly different level, it’s there, it’s not part of the, I don’t know, almost daily consciousness. I think good places try.

Their culture’s more of using the interactions to create energy in a positive way rather than using fear. Those aren’t cultures of fear typically that are really good. And when you find a culture of great fear, it typically it can be effective for a while. I think it’s a decent lever, but in the long run it is a volatile fuel that sort of burns itself out.

These places that I saw even when someone was let go or when someone was fired or when someone moved on, there was. The bonds of the group always stayed strong. There still was a sense of team and connection because of. Safety because of the vulnerability they shared, because of the purpose that they shared, they had built that bond.

Bruce Daisley: Is it then, and I’m trying to un interpret this. I know that the metaphor of family isn’t the right one, but is it like this fraternal or sorority thing where teams that seem to work really well, you talked about military teams, you talked about sporting teams. There’s this like certain servant leadership amongst the leaders.

It seems to be characteristic in all those teams. And you talked about the sports coach who’s picking up litter every day, picking up, going around, picking up trash. So this servant leadership, this sort of leadership without ego seems to be really common. I wonder if that’s what forges the bond between the members of the team, that you’ve got the servant leadership that then permits the relationship between the team members.

Is there anything in that at all? 

Daniel Coyle: The leaders that I saw were very good at, we have an authoritarian part of our brains, right? That it wants to immediately fall into a hierarchy, and most of these leaders as you mentioned, go out of their way to throw a bug into that software.

They constantly are being vulnerable with the team. They constantly are confessing their own shortcomings and their own weaknesses to try to create what would be called a vulnerability loop when two people share the truth. And so the leaders are the ones who set that tone.

There tends to be it varies by group. Each group is different. Some groups, the leader is a little bit, is a little bit separate. Other groups, the leader is right in there all the time. But there is always that sense of we need to tell the truth. We need to open up to each other. And the leader is the one who’s usually instigating that exchange.

As one of the Navy Seal Commanders told me, I screwed that up, is the most important four words that any leader can say. ’cause it allows other people to share their screw ups. It allows people, and even more fascinatingly when you pull the camera way back and look at each of these groups as an organism, as a cellular organism.

With all these pieces moving together, they move in certain ways and one of the ways in which they move that creates vulnerability is they constantly circle up and tell each other the truth. You know they can, which is really hard to do. It’s awkward, it’s painful. It’s embarrassing. At times. But almost an athlete develops workout habits.

These cultures develop habits where at Pixar it’s called The Brain Trust. 

Bruce Daisley: Okay, I was gonna ask you about the Brains Trust now, actually. What firstly, what an incredible book by Ed Kaul in the first instance. But the Brains Trust really is it’s actually not that welcoming, is it? It’s not a warm, happy thing.

Do you wanna talk about the role that the Brains Trust plays at Pixar? 

Daniel Coyle: Oh, it’s incredible. Every movie goes through several years of development and every few months they get together, they watch the latest draft of the movie. And this is a group of veteran Pixar storytellers the best storytelling minds in the company.

And they watch the movie and they circle up, and then they. Basically tear it apart. It’s not pretty, it’s not fun. The director’s sitting there watching this thing that he’s labored over for months and sometimes years, and people will simply say things like, I don’t like that character. I don’t think that plot’s working.

And it’s very blunt. And the one rule of the brain trust is you’re not allowed to offer a solution. And the reason that rule exists is because if one of these powerful people in the brain trust offered a solution, the director would just do it and give over authority and give over control of the project in that way to that person who made the suggestion.

So all they’re allowed to do is point out flaws. So it makes it even more uncomfortable and difficult, and there’s tons of silence and there’s tons of awkwardness and. It’s the best thing that group does it ’cause that shows the path forward that helps the director. It’s really hard to build a movie.

There’s a lot of moving parts. This helps it more than anything else. Ed Kamal the president of Pixar said it’s the single most important thing that happens here, and he’s right because it is mutual vulnerability. It shows the way because they’re honestly confronting their weakness. 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. The thing that really strikes me when you’re going through all of this is if you’re gonna have that trust, if you’re gonna build safety and then allow people to feel vulnerability, and there’s the leaders, and like you say these, the brains trust everyone’s sharing vulnerability.

It feels like there’s a finite limit to how big a team that shares vulnerability to. Can be though effectively, if you’re gonna make sure that sort of companies work well. If you’re gonna create successful teams within companies, then you’ve gotta find a way to connect people in those teams.

Do you have any perspective, you don’t really talk about team size, but do you have any perspective on how big teams can be or how small teams need to be to adapt this culture code? 

Daniel Coyle: Yeah, I think when you get into certain teams, you have to, I’m a believer in the two pizza rule. The Bezos any team that’s bigger than can be fed with two pizzas is possibly too big.

And so the sort of level of vulnerability that you’ll have inside those smaller teams is a order of magnitude higher than you’ll get outside of those teams and bigger. So what you end up seeing is a landscape, larger landscape of some safety with this intensely shared vulnerability, truth telling face-to-face, person to person inside those smaller teams to drive.

Behavior to help uncover what weaknesses really are. So yes, you’re constantly balancing those things, creating safety so that you can have vulnerability and in the largest sense, I think we tend to think about cultural problems in a little bit of the wrong way. We, every culture has got the set of issues.

Every culture has got these little, I don’t know, disorders, diseases, whatever you wanna call it, but those aren’t really problems. Those are biological requirements. You’re navigating tensions that are part of being a group of human beings together. And those tensions will always revolve around, do we feel connected?

That’ll be one big point of tension. Are we really connected? Are we really telling each other? The truth is the other one. And the other one is, what’s our purpose? Where are we headed? So the idea that these problems are more than just systemic, can sometimes lead you to a false path.

So treating them like, Hey, this is the price of doing business. This is like an athlete training. The leaders that you see in these places tend to be, they’re almost like communication athletes, they’re. Are compelled, they take a sort of craft person like approach to it and they’re very disciplined about it.

And so that tho that sort of model where you’ve got it’s almost an athletic model for building culture ends up being, I think a little more helpful than thinking, oh, we have these 

Bruce Daisley: problems. One of the things I scribbled down was that you made reference to something saying. The most successful projects were driven by what you describe as clusters of high communicators, and I guess that’s what you’re saying there, these singular communicators, generally the dynamos, the drivers for good culture.

In fact, one of the things you talk about is how energy is contagious. These are contagion of energy from strong leaders. 

Daniel Coyle: That’s right. You have these people who are able to, they’ve actually, there’s actually a series of fascinating experiments done by a guy at MIT named Sandy Pentland. Yeah, we had him on the show.

No kidding. Oh, he’s what? Legends. He probably talked about these charismatic connectors. You see them on his map moving and connecting and bringing that knowledge back and bringing that energy back. And we’re in such a fascinating age with his work to be able to say, look, this isn’t just a feeling.

Here’s the experiment. Here’s how many collisions we had. Here’s what those collisions led to. This idea that when you take a God’s eye view of a successful group, they all look the same. You know that they’re all having these short, quick conversations, high energy conversations.

They’re circulating. Everyone’s talking to everybody. You know that feeling you have when you walk into a great culture, whether it’s a great restaurant or a great school or a great business, that feeling is always the same. 

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. But don’t you think electronic communications killing this and only the book you talked to Ben Weber and Ben followed on Sandy Pentlands work and we chat to Ben on the show a few weeks ago.

All of it seemed to be reminding you the magic, the singular sort of. Power of face-to-face communication and how we can create that kinetic energy. And for me, the growing burden of meetings and emails upon people seem to be silently bulldozing that magic. Do you agree on that? What’s your take on the impact of email?

Daniel Coyle: I agree a thousand percent with you. Face-to-face is the original software. It does it works extraordinarily well. The research will show that if you make a request, if I were to make a request to you face to face, it’s 34 times. More likely that you would respond to it than if I sent you an email.

By that measure spending time together is is 34 times more effective than spending time communicating digitally. So yes, there is a amazing tension in the workplace right now between balancing these things and it seems like we are bulldozing a lot of. Old fashioned, better face-to-face technology for the sake of swift, less meaningful communications.

And we’ve seen that move that maybe the pendulum is moving a bit. There’s, there has been, many, several. Large companies who have recently said, look, we’re putting a priority on face-to-face communication. We’re building workplaces that will help prioritize that. And we’re really, we really do have a deep understanding that the magic really does happen when two people are in the same space.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. Fascinating. I do hope that people power are the ones who realize this. I fully agree. I’ll just finish on one question, Daniel. Actually, it was the footnote really at the end of the book. I was really moved by the story you gave of how having spent time with all these teams and all these coaching environments you took on the task of coaching a school writing team.

I’d be thrilled if you just talk through your experience of that. 

Daniel Coyle: Oh, it was cool. I was spending time, going around the planet, with all of these remarkable teams. And I was, there was a team down the street. My kids go to a school down the street and they have a writing competition.

Where they write short stories and they get judged. You have, you give a prompt, you have a short amount of time. And so spent the year kind of applying some of these ideas to that group to see if we could improve the culture and the cohesion and the performance of that group. And originally I set out coaching like any coach would, I, I stood up at the front.

I told ’em what to do. I evaluated them. After I got immersed in a lot of these theories of culture I ended up taking a very different approach, going from the side, trying to generate conversations, connect, trying to create a sense of safety. I was very purposely vulnerable with them, showing them my work and showing how many crossouts there were and how bad I, how badly I struggled to to finish certain stories.

And getting them to talk and trying to connect into their world and gradually flooding the zone with a lot of really clear signals of safety, of shared vulnerability and a lot of sort of catchphrases. We see that with a lot of, with a lot of leadership. I tried to flood the zone with these sort of GPSs that would help them solve problems.

Just like I had seen so many groups do. It was really cool because what we saw was, some the performance level, huge increase in performance. We did really, the team did, sensationally well, but even more inspiring was the way it brought out the kids where they really brought their whole selves to class and really connected to as a team and a family by, to use that word.

In a way that, that I hadn’t expected. It was a good combination of saying, look and a nice little test drive of some of these ideas to say Hey, and everybody at the end was saying, oh, this just is like magic. What a magical team. We’re still this legendary team and I wanted on the one hand, I love that. On the other hand it’s frustrating because I’m saying, look, it’s not magic, it’s just behavior. It’s not magic anymore than if we had, really practiced at a video game or at a golf game or anything else. But we just did. We followed best practices.

We, we, culture is not magic. It’s a set of behaviors. And if you know the behaviors, you can create 

Bruce Daisley: the magic. I love that story and hearing you retell it, I I’m loving it again, actually, more than anything, it makes you realize irrespective of your own work situation, you can have an impact on people who you’re like you say, down the street or, you are in your social circle.

You can use these things, whether it’s in your job, whether it’s in your life. Actually, these things can have an impact on everyone around you and the happiness of people around you. 

Daniel Coyle: Yeah. We’re. We’re built that in a way that every interaction matters, which is a, corny thing to say.

Every interaction matters. In fact, that’s the way, that’s the way human beings are built. Every interaction really does matter to us. We react to all of them. And so if you pay attention and maximize those in ways and align yourself with the ways that create cohesion, you can really make them matter a lot.

Bruce Daisley: Like I say, if you’re interested in attending an event with Daniel Coyle, that’s at the start of March, you can go to my Twitter, which is eat, sleep, work, repeat, search for, eat, sleep, work, repeat. You’ll see that, or you can see it on my own Twitter, but in amongst pop music and opinions on politics. So you might not wanna delve too deeply into that, but either way you can find it.

Always welcome people linking into me and contacting me, and you can see all of this stuff. If you’re interested on the website, there’s a full transcript of today’s episode with Daniel Coyle on the website and that’s eat, sleep, work, repeat fm. I can’t tell you how much I love all of your feedback.

It’s really good to hear what you think. I’ve done well and what you think I’ve done badly and we’ve got some great episodes coming up. I’m trying to put these episodes together before I go away. But this a fantastic episode about sort of workplace changes that we can all do That’s coming up, some fantastic contributors there.

Then there’s an episode about workplace rituals and synchronization, and I think you’re gonna find that fabulous. So some really good stuff coming up. Do get in touch. Speak to you soon.