The Culture Code

“You have priorities, whether you name them or not,” he says. “If you want to grow, you’d better name them, and you’d better name the behaviors that support the priorities.”

Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code

Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include: • Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. • Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. • Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. • Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative.

Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code

magazine asked executives at six hundred companies to estimate the percentage of their workforce who could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives predicted that 64 percent would be able to name them. When Inc. then asked employees to name the priorities, only 2 percent could do so. This is not the exception but the rule. Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities. The leaders I visited with were not shy about this. Statements of priorities were painted on walls, stamped on emails, incanted in speeches, dropped into conversation, and repeated over and over until they became part of the oxygen.

Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code

do highly experienced professionals like nurses and anesthesiologists really need to be explicitly told that their role in a cardiac surgery is important? Do they really need to be informed that if they see the surgeon make a mistake, they might want to speak up? The answer, as Edmondson discovered, is a thundering yes. The value of those signals is not in their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation. Those signals added up in a way that you can hear in team members’ voices.

Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code

Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.

Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code

laughter is not just laughter; it’s the most fundamental sign of safety and connection.

Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code