The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
If you'd like to learn the three skills that make highly successful groups, I recommend this bestselling book.
If you’d like to learn the three skills that make highly successful groups, I recommend the bestselling book “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle. This book was named a Best Business Book of the Year by Bloomberg and Business Insider.
Daniel Coyle shares research-based evidence and examples to answer the question, “Why do certain groups add up to be greater than the sum of their parts, while others add up to be less?”. This is an easy-to-read book with actionable advice for improving the impact of our groups.
Here are some insightful quotes that resonated with me:
On highly successful groups: One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together.
Skill #1: Build Safety (“here is a safe place to give effort”)
Why build safety? The moment you believe you are part of a group, your brain starts intensely tracking the members because these people are now valuable to you. It’s a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision making system.
Our brain is naturally wired so that if our social system rejects us, it believes we could die. We are therefore built to require lots of signaling, over and over, that we belong.
Ideas for building safety include making sure everyone has a voice and embracing the messenger (it’s not enough not to shoot them).
Skill #2: Share Vulnerability (“we share risk here”)
People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s about sending a really clear signal that you could use help. If you never have that vulnerable moment, then people will try to cover their own weaknesses and never ask for help.
Normally we think: first we build trust, then we leap into vulnerability. But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability precedes trust. Leaping to the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.
Skill #3: Establish Purpose (“what’s this all for? what are we working toward?”)
Purpose is not some mystical internal drive. It’s about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal.
Successful cultures relentlessly tell and retell their story of the shared goal by creating a link between the present moment and a future ideal with two simple prompts: “Here is where we are (present moment)” and “Here is where we want to go (future ideal)”. The surprising thing, scientifically, is how responsive we are to this pattern of signaling.
Stories don’t cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation.
