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Culture is a big deal. Not only does culture apparently eat strategy for breakfast, an organization’s culture also has massive impacts on performance, achieving results, and attracting and retaining talent. Incredibly, some people still argue that the impact of culture can’t be measured—that it’s a nice-to-have without any demonstrable impact on the bottom line. To which the only real response is: OK, so point to a high-performing organization that has a crappy culture.
In classic terms, culture can be seen as an interrelated set of assumptions, beliefs, values, rituals, artifacts, and behavior patterns exhibited in an organization. Even more essentially, it can be thought of as an organization’s unwritten rules: “how we do things around here.” But often for the people who work and live in a culture, whether good or bad, asking them to fully articulate it would be like asking a fish to describe water. It’s just all around us.
About a year ago I finally read one of the more enthusiastically reviewed recent books on culture, Dan Coyle’s The Culture Code. I was hoping this book would provide some support for a fairly large-scale culture reboot engagement I was about to embark on with a client. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Coyle’s book is much less about broad organizational culture and transformation and more about what makes high-performing teams click. While the book wasn’t what I needed to jump-start that project, I truly enjoyed it and have found myself thinking about and referring to it often in the months since.
Coyle’s core argument is that all high-performing groups or teams share three essential characteristics:
- They establish a safe environment that allows everyone to feel comfortable working together.
- Members demonstrate vulnerability, which in turn allows their teammates to do the same, building trust and free collaboration.
- The team has a strong common purpose and is committed to laying out clear path to achieve its goals.
If you’ve done much work with high-performing teams, you know Coyle doesn’t really tell us anything new. Simon Sinek and Daniel Pink, among many others, have made a strong case for the importance of purpose to motivate people and foster great results. And Amy Edmundson and Charles Duhigg have shown in-depth how psychological safety can be a huge differentiator in performance. That said, Coyle explains his three principles in a memorable and engaging way via some great stories, including taking us back-stage with highly successful teams like Pixar, Danny Meyers’s restaurants, and the San Antonio Spurs. (And I still want to know how the heck he tracked down those Serbian jewel thieves to interview them!)
However: frameworks on their own have very limited value, especially if you’re a manager and not a business school professor. As my friend Kyle Havlicek-McClenahan likes to say, ““data without the right questions is useless.” The real value of a framework like Coyle’s is how you use it—how you adapt it for your team or organization, and what you do with it. Hence the question in this article’s title: “Can you code your culture?”
For the teams I’ve been part of and the (many many) I’ve consulted to, I’d fine-tune Coyle’s model a bit. I would start with purpose, because without purpose nothing else matters—not even the quality of your talent. “Why and What” have to come before “Who and How.” I would then combine vulnerability and psychological safety into one, because they feel to me like two sides of the same coin: it’s hard to imagine one without the other. I would then add a third characteristic, which is accountability. If I am looking to bring on new players, a high level of accountability is the first thing I test for: accountability for results as well as accountability to teammates. I don't care how smart someone is if he doesn’t have incredible drive for results and an unwillingness ever to let his teammates down.
But that’s just my take. How would you code your organization’s or team’s culture? What behaviors or values drive great results? What gets in the way of performance or demotivates people?
You might say you don’t believe in the power of culture, but that doesn’t really matter: your organization has a culture, for better or for worse, no matter what you believe. So why not spend some time figuring out how to make yours (even) better?
#MLQH = Monday Leadership Quick Hit. Start your week right!
