Leadershipbookreview 02232019
Leadershipbookreview 02232019
Leadershipbookreview 02232019
New York:
Penguin Random House LLC.
Reviewed by Sarah Reinhardt.
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Section 1: Descriptive Review
This book is laid out in three parts, which align with the three top skills that Daniel Coyle
states all strong cultures or teams have that make them better than you would expect them to be,
if you evaluated their individual skillsets. He goes so far as to insist that we shouldn’t assume a
bunch of highly effective individuals will make a highly successful team. The three skills that
Coyle says are evident in strong cultures are building safety, sharing vulnerability, and
establishing purpose. These skills are applied slightly differently by each of the highly
successful groups that he discusses in the book. For example, the Navy Seals will approach
building safety in a different way than the teachers at a charter school will build safety for their
students or the way that a restaurant will build safety for their servers. Coyle was researching
each of these groups for another book that he was writing, The Talent Code, and found the
common themes compelling enough to write this book, The Culture Code, from some of the
same research. Each skill has a section in the book with chapters devoted to telling stories about
successful groups and some groups that are failing. Each section also includes how-to chapters
that attempt to identify how to effectively incorporate each of the skills into your culture.
Skill one is to build safety within the group so that all members are connected by
relationships that are closer to familial relationships than that of just friends or co-workers
(Location 174, Kindle Edition). Coyle starts this section out in chapter one by telling us about
some very interesting research regarding “bad apples”. These are not apples that you would
purchase at the grocery store, but rather those team members that have a bad attitude and that
throw off our group mojo with their lack of attention and “can don’t” attitude. Coyle indicates
that highly successful groups create a safe atmosphere that allows everyone to feel psychological
safety and be vulnerable in a way that we don’t normally see. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
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includes levels for “physiological, safety, belonging and love, self-esteem, and self-
actualization” (p. 106) and states that you can’t move to the next level of the hierarchy without
achieving the current level. According to Coyle, safety is achieved through a series of belonging
cues transmitted amongst group members that tell our animal brains that we are safe. The bad
apples I mentioned above would disrupt weaker groups, but not groups with strong belonging
cues. Chapters 2 and 3 in the book give additional examples of strong cultures that foster a sense
of safety and belonging and how they do it. The groups that Coyle identifies are Google,
German and British soldiers on the front-line during World War I at Christmas time, and call
center staff at a company called WIPRO. He also includes a counterpoint story about a group of
Minuteman missileers from the Minot Airforce base in Minot North Dakota. While all the
successful culture stores are very interesting, the counterpoint culture of the missileers is very
effective in pointing out some of the root causes of weak cultures such as authoritarian
leadership, lack of trust, and fear. Coyle includes three chapters in this section that help readers
build (chapter 4) and design belonging (chapter 5), as well as put these ideas in to action (chapter
6). I love the idea of the action chapter because it should provide the details that I need to
increase my skillset relative to building strong relationships and cultures. We will talk more
about how successful the action chapters are in my recommendation at the end of this paper.
Coyle suggests, among many other items, that we need to overcommunicate, show our
weaknesses or mistakes early, hug and thank the messenger instead of shooting them, make sure
Section two of the book highlights the tough skill of sharing vulnerability. Coyle starts
out this section with Chapter 7 by telling the story of United Airlines Flight 232 to Chicago on
July 10th, 1989. By all accounts this flight should have crashed when it experienced catastrophic
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engine and brake failure, and all aboard should have perished. Through a series of coordinated
actions between the pilot, co-pilot, and an airline pilot trainer, who just happened to be on the
flight that day, the flight was able to land. 185 people out of 296 survived. The number of
survivors doesn’t seem that incredible until you understand that this flight was recreated through
simulation over two dozen times by the NTSB in the weeks after the landing. In every
simulation the plane crashed and there were no survivors. This story is a case study in
vulnerability starting with the captain admitting that he didn’t know how to fly the plane without
the engines or how to land without the breaks. Coyle indicates that exposing vulnerabilities
generates “the highly cohesive, trusting behavior necessary for smooth cooperation” (Location
1339, Kindle Edition). Chapter 8 digs in to the vulnerability loop that helps to encourage us to
cooperate and trust each other (Location 1388, Kindle Edition). This vulnerability loop is really
a transactional communication model (pg. 10) where the signal of vulnerability is received and
then a reciprocal signal of vulnerability is sent back creating a sense of increased “closeness and
trust” (Location 1388, Kindle Edition). Chapter 9 focuses on groups that show extreme levels of
cooperation and risk sharing including the Navy Seals, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and a
highly evolved team of robbers called the Pink Panthers. Chapter 10 talks through the different
ways that some groups have established this high level of cooperation and what actions help
improve cooperation for them which include having direction and open lines of communication
as well as making it ok for followers to point out areas for improvement or errors in a leader’s
logic. Chapter 11 focuses on the same concept of cooperation but instead of focusing on this
cooperation at the group level it focuses on the individual. The concept of pointing out areas for
improvement is handled differently by each of the groups but it amounts to something akin to a
highly focused lessons learned session where the team dismantles their performance and makes
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suggestions for next time. In some cases, these sessions are done at the end of a project or
mission but in other cases they are done as reviews as the project or mission is underway. These
sessions allow for the team to autocorrect. They are called AARs, Brain Trusts, and Red
Teaming by the different organizations that use them. Making sure the leader is vulnerable first,
overcommunicate expectations, deliver the negative stuff in person, and use candor generating
practices like AARs, Brain Trusts, and Red Teaming is covered in Chapter 12, which is the ideas
In section three Coyle discusses establishing purpose for the group. Chapter 13 discusses
how “high-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link
between the present moment and a future ideal” (Location 2296, Kindle Edition). In practice,
this is the group sharing their purpose or values together and linking that purpose to everything
they do. There is a great overview of the Johnson and Johnson Tylenol crisis in this chapter that
highlights Johnson and Johnson’s focus on following their credo, which elevates their
responsibly to Tylenol’s users above any other objective, including profits. Chapter 14 focuses
on additional examples of high purpose environments including the police preparing for a soccer
match that promises to end in riots as well as a series of hospitals taking on a new medical
procedure. In both cases, the police and the hospitals that were the most successful shared
several characteristics but the most important one is that they each “sent a handful of steady,
ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal (Location 2504, Kindle Edition). In
Chapter 15 Coyle talks about how to lead for proficiency and we learn about a charter school
called KIPP, as well as a restaurant group that includes Shake Shack and Gramercy Tavern. In
each case, there is a “heuristic” or series of them that are applied to every day situations that help
both the servers and the students recall and focus on their purpose in the organization. Chapter
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16 covers leading for creativity, rather than proficiency, which discusses the transformation of
Pixar and Disney into, or back into in the case of Disney, the creative giants that they are today.
Chapter 17 pulls together section three with some tips on how to put establishing purpose into
practice in your organization. Some of these potential actions are to name and rank your
priorities and be very clear about them, embrace the use of catch phrases (heuristics), measure
According to his LinkedIn profile, Daniel Coyle has been an author with Penguin
Random House and a contributing editor for Outside Magazine for the last twenty-four years.
Daniel has written several books in addition to the Culture Code. He completed his bachelor’s
degree in English and Pre-Med at the University of Notre Dame. He also completed his master’s
Cleveland, Ohio with his wife and children during the school year. He spends his summers with
his family in Homer, Alaska. After reviewing his credentials and some of the other writing that
he has done, I’m not fully convinced that he has the right set of skills to tackle this topic. The
writing is engaging, so his skill as a writer comes through for me in this book. The area that I am
unsure of is his leadership background and how he determined that the skills he highlights are
really the ones that will make the average team into a highly successful one. He does reference
many sources for his conclusions and includes references to other works in the notes section.
Section 1 of the book, which talks about building safety within teams immediately
reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the human need to fulfill certain basic
physiological needs (pg. 106). Coyle’s building safety is an organizationally based way of
meeting those physiological needs and eliminating the things that scare us. The fear in this
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example is not a fear of physical danger but a fear of being wrong or a fear of being vulnerable in
front of others. By establishing a safe space for us to work, where we do not have to focus on
our own “safety”, we are free to identify with our co-workers, develop relationships, and satisfy
our need to belong. This also establishes a level of interconnectedness between the team
members that is difficult to replicate. There are also many ways that the concept of
communication is used in each of Coyle’s examples. Two of my favorite ways are that he says
we should always overcommunicate and avoid sandwich feedback. The avoidance of sandwich
feedback, where we give negative feedback in between good feedback, is new to me. I learned
this methodology of delivering feedback some time ago and had always thought it was solid
feedback. Coyle suggests that we should separate out the negative feedback and always provide
it in person to ensure that the feedback is understood as he feels the sandwich feedback method
“leads to confusion, as people tend to focus either entirely on the positive or entirely on the
negative” (Location 1175, Kindle Edition). Coyle says we should overcommunicate our
Overcommunicating in Coyle’s world is being “explicit and persistent about sending big, clear
signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles
to maximize helping behavior” (Location 2072, Kindle Edition). This communication concept is
a critical part of team building. In fact, the types of communication that Coyle highlights
throughout the book help to “establish clear and inspiring goals” (pg. 235) as well as ensuring
that everyone “clearly understands his or her role in the overall successful functioning of the
group” (pg. 235). Many of the topics that the groups in Coyle’s book focus on are the basic
creativity), striving for unified commitment, and providing a collaborative climate (pg. 236).
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Many of the leaders that were mentioned in the book are leaders that could be viewed as
leadership involves key characteristics such as being creative, interactive, and empowering (pg.
110). The creative and interactive aspects of transformational leadership are the aspects that I
feel occurred most often in the book. One focus of creative leaders is that they “go looking for
“trouble” by posing questions that challenge current products, practices, procedures, and beliefs”
(pg. 113). This was something that Coyle discussed in his stories about Disney, the Navy Seals,
and Gramercy Tavern where we see leaders taking a step back and asking how things can be
done better. At Disney it was through a reorganization of work space, team structure, and
creative process that eliminated executive leadership from making creative decisions. With the
Navy Seals it was not taking no for an answer and practicing all possible outcomes when a
higher-level leader refused to allow the mission to be changed in a way that guaranteed success.
I really enjoyed this book for several reasons. The stories about the high performing
teams were very interesting to me as they spanned several different types of “teams” from the
Navy Seals, to movie development teams, and even bank robbers. The book is written in an
engaging and informative manner and at times is funny, scary, and heartwarming. I would
recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the concepts of team building and fostering
strong company cultures. My interest in this book initially was to find some actions or methods
that I could use to better connect with the folks on my team and in other departments at my
company. I believe I got some suggestions, but not as many as I was hoping. I also found that
the book gave more of a ten-thousand-foot view of concepts rather than the concrete actionable
examples I had hoped would be included. I also feel that some of his examples are repetitive and
yet unclear. I would love a summary of the points for each section of the book because I feel
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like many of them were lost in the examples. I think he intended the actions chapter at the end of
each section to give clear cut instructions on what to do to implement the suggestions, but I need
more than what he provided. I would recommend the book for an interesting read with tons of
examples of high performing teams that could be modeled elsewhere. It’s a positive feelgood
book which is great for raising optimism about different team-based situations. I wouldn’t
recommend the book to someone that is looking to learn about leadership within high performing
groups or to someone looking to build a high performing team unless they already had some
experience in this area and are looking for additional nuggets of wisdom. While I enjoyed this