The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 242: Daniel Coyle - The Secret Of Highly Successful Groups (The Culture Code)

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

Sustained Excellence = "They're over themselves" - They do not have an ego. They figure out the big truths, get over feelings, have clarity, vision. Great communicators - Like an athlete, they can be obsessed.  Keenly aware, active listeners, intentional with actions. Why write The Culture Code? Spending time around great teams and businesses, "I love the vibe, it's different." Had a desire to understand how that happens.  How to create trust"Typically we think of culture as in your DNA or not, but it's not.  "Great culture is something you can learn"The competition with Dan's two brothers growing up led to this fascination and curiosity with building great team culture"We routinely deeply underestimate our environments and the effect they have on us." "As leaders, we need to create the conditions for excellence"The 3 Skills -- 1) Build Safety 2) Share Vulnerability 3) Establish Purpose Build Safety - Why do a group of kindergartners do better than a group of CEOs?  The kindergartners have now agenda or care about credit.  They focus on doing the best work.  CEOs (in the study) were worried about who got credit and tearing each other down. Safety is the single most important piece of foundation needed for great culture Greg Popovich overdoes the "thank yous" - He regularly says thank you to the members of his team. A painstaking hiring process - The single most important decision is "who's in and who's out." You should script the entire first few days of a new employees time at a company -- Pixar example (20 minute mark) -- "At Pixar, we hired you because we need you to help us make our movies better." John Wooden would routinely walk the locker room and pick up trash Share Vulnerability - Functional notion that's so important "Sharing a weakness is the best way to be strong" -- Navy SEALs example: The AAR (After Action Review) The most important 4 words a leader can say, "Anybody have any ideas?" Also, "I screwed up" Over-communicate expectations "We shoot, move, and communicate "The only easy day was yesterday" How to be a great listener "Your goal as a listener should be to add energy." Ask questions, don't just sit there and nod.  Listen and absorb.  Help them leave higher than when you arrived.  Follow up to go deeper.  Being a great listener is a heroic skill. Have "empathy and energy" as a listener -- dig in to assumptions (unearth) Aim for candor, but avoid brutal honesty - good groups care about relationships, not brutality.  Candor is a better word "Culture: From the Latin word cultus, which means care." Great teams are made up of players who don't want to let their teammates down. Greg Popovich and other great coaches disappear on purpose to let their team figure out it through tough moments.  Smart leaders create opportunities for teams to struggle and figure it out. --> "The leaders job is to make the team great without him/her." Build a wall between performance review and professional development -- When you combine the two, you get neither.  Toggle, create safety so you can be more open and honest. Establish Purpose What's important now?  You must define that Value statements aren't super useful -- "fill the windshield with a story." Clear narratives guide attention Name and rank your priorities

Typically, we think of that culture as being kind of magical. You know, it's just like, oh, the seals and the Spurs, San Antonio Spurs, and Pixar just has this great culture. And it just sort of is part of who they are. It's like in their DNA. You know, that's how we normally think about it. But actually, when you go and visit these places, they're throwing tennis balls. You know, they are doing things that create those interactions. It's not magic.

It's more like physics, you know. There's a relational physics in all these places. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is making payroll benefits in HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things right. PCMag and fit small business have called Gusto the best payroll for small businesses. Gusto saves you time. 72% of customers spend less than five minutes to run payroll.

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Sign up today and you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com slash leader. G-U-S-T-O-com slash leader. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text Learners to 4-4-2-2-2.

In order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world, text learners to 4-4-2-2-2. Now, on to tonight's featured leader with the great Daniel Coyle, New York Times, bestselling author of the Talent Code, winner of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize, and he works as a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians.

His latest work is titled The Culture Code, The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, a few of the topics we got into. The three skills to building a great culture. Then the number one way to build safety for your team. Then the surprising method John Wooden used to create a way.

world-class culture. I love that story. Then Dan shares the four most important words a leader can say. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is packed with ideas for action, ways to actually implement and execute on what we've learned, which is most important in my mind. It's so good with Daniel Coyle. All right, Dan, thank you so much for joining me on The Learning Leader Show. Welcome. Hey, it's good to be here, Ryan. Thanks so much for having me. I love your work. Big fan. I've read it for years, and it's neat that you've come out with this new book, The Culture Code, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, but not to this depth in this level. So I'm excited to dive in.

But first, I'm curious from your perspectives, you spent time around some amazing leaders, people who are extremely high performers, some of the best of the best in the world, whether they're professional athletes or CEOs and many others like that. When you think of those who sustain excellence, what are some of the common traits, those people share? I mean, a couple of things come to mind. I mean, one is that they are sort of over themselves, if that makes sense. Like, they have the ability to let go of their ego in, in certain interactions and just really figure out big obvious truths that are in the environment, to kind of get over their biases, to get over their feelings and emotions, to really look at things in a clear way.

So that clarity, you sort of picture them getting up every morning and just sort of trying to develop that level of vision and sight that really makes a difference. And the other thing that I see on kind of a different level is that the way they approach communication and they approach it like an athlete. Like a lot of us sort of approach communication in sort of a casual way and we don't, you know, we think about it a little bit, but we don't really try to get better at it or don't really focus on the effect it has. And these guys are like athletes in both their kind of tirelessness, these guys and women, of course, in their tirelessness, but in the kind of obsessive way they approach communication. So I think of them as being communication athletes who really have good vision on what's really happening. And to me, those two things combine in a way that really distinguishes somebody who's an excellent leader. What do you mean by communication and focusing on? Do you mean the written messages via email, books, articles, do you mean in conversation with both formal and informal conversations, the lunches they have, the speeches they give? What do you mean by great communication? More the latter.

When they are with a person, they are keenly aware of the message they're trying to deliver, but they're also listening very actively and intently to what's coming on the other way. and they're tireless in the way that they will keep working around a problem. A lot of times somebody asks a question and gets a response. A leader will try to recognize if that's a response or an actual answer. You know, will constantly be communicating for a purpose, communicating to get to the end of something, to find out the solution to something, to reach and build a relationship with someone.

So it's that level of kind of interest and energy they bring to everyday interactions. And of course, they're doing other stuff too, reading and learning and getting better and listening to podcasts like this one. But mostly it's that interactional athleticism that they bring to every interaction they have. Interactional athleticism. Interesting point. So, Dan, I became a big fan of yours when you wrote the book called The Talent Code, which I was fascinated by. And we could spend a whole podcast talking about that one. But for the sake of brevity, I want to focus on your most recent work.

I'm very grateful for you and your team to say, me. It's called the Culture Code, the secrets of highly successful groups. And as I just spoke with Dan Pink and talked about his most recent book and listeners will have listened to that one, episode 239. And Dan Pink mentioned to me, when you decide to write a book on a topic, you have to live inside that topic for many years, both as you're thinking of it, as you're putting the proposal together, as you're writing the book. You are, deep inside of it. And then as you're promoting it, you're giving speeches about it, you're working with others talking about it. So why was culture and the culture code the best topic

for you to be studying and writing about? Yeah, it's kind of funny. It was a bit of a story there because I did the book you mentioned, the talent code, which was kind of about how individuals get great, how you build a fast, fluent brain. And when I researched that book, I find myself going to these places, these talent hotbeds. And they felt different. There was like a vibe. You know, there's just like a feeling you can't put your finger on like when you're in a, I don't know, a really great restaurant or a really great school or a really great business. You kind of feel this snap, this magnetic, cool quality to all the interactions. And I kept feeling that. And I felt it, I was at this Russian tennis club. And this tennis club has produced like way more top 20 players

than the whole United States has. It's this tiny little club called Spartak. And the teacher was there. And a new student showed up and she was a new tennis player. She was about eight or nine. and this teacher noticed her come in the room, went over to her, and this girl was scared. She had her tennis racket in her, in a plastic bag, in a shopping bag. And the teacher went over with a tennis ball in her hand. And she said to this scared little girl, she said, I want you know, a welcome. I'm so glad you're here. I want you to do something for me.

I want you to catch this ball. And she threw the ball and the little girl caught it. And it was like this 10 second interaction. But in the space of that interaction, that girl went from being a scared outsider to feeling like part of a family, feeling a connection and a trust and a sense of belonging, all these emotions, you could see it and feel it. And it just got me thinking, what is that made of? Like, that is an incredible skill. It's probably more important than hitting a forehand, you know, what they're doing here. And so that got me keenly interested in what we call culture,

that feeling that certain groups get, those interactions are able to create. And typically, we think of that culture as being kind of magical, you know, it's just like, oh, the seals and the spurs, San Antonio Spurs, and Pixar just has this great culture and it just sort of is part of who they are. It's like in their DNA. You know, that's how we normally think about it. But actually, when you go and visit these places, they're throwing tennis balls, you know. They are doing things that create those interactions. It's not magic. It's more like physics, you know. There's a relational physics in all these places. And so it really got me totally obsessed and fascinated with this question of what that's made of. Like, how do you do that?

And so I ended up going from Sealed Team 6 to Pixar to the San Antonio Spurs to Zappos to IDO to all these other places and to some awful cultures to sort of keep things balanced out to see what that's made of. And that's what the book is about. It's about the skills they build culture. And I really am going to dive deep on the three skills. But before that, for the person listening who doesn't know you, would you mind given a brief background on why you feel you're the guy to write this book and write the book, The Talent Code? I'm curious, just the mindset of people who put together these brilliant works of art almost and science and how you got to this point to be the guy to do this.

Well, that's, of course, a completely impossible question to answer. But I think I just tend to get really, really curious about digging deep in this stuff. I mean, if I went really deep, it was going to be a doctor and bailed out of that at the last minute to go into writing and always maintain that level of curiosity. And as a journalist, you run into a lot of excellent performers. That's who you tend to write about for magazines and for books. And you keep seeing these patterns, you know. you keep seeing patterns in great performers and that's what led me to explore uh explore talent and then to explore culture so this you know and if i were to dig even deeper it would probably be the fact that

i had two brothers that i competed like hell with through most of my childhood so figuring out how to how to how to beat them uh maybe is it a part of it too in a strange way but you know uh it as as somebody who got obsessed with this question and it just it's one of those doorway questions you know, how did that person get so good? Well, what's going on inside their brain? Well, what's going inside their culture? And it just goes to the next level, the next level, the next level. And it's been a really, really wonderful and enriching journey, mostly because it brings me into contact with people like you and with groups who want to have these conversations, groups, in the military groups, and professional sports, groups, and business. Everybody's trying to, you know, sort of crack this,

this problem. And there's some big, basic human evolutionary truths at the core of it that are, that are really powerful. And it's fun to have conversations where you can create a bridge between very different worlds. And that's the part that I've found to be really addictive when you can say, here's a music teacher, here's a swim coach, here's a business leader. You know, we're kind of all doing the same thing in a way. It's not that different. And there's language and concepts and mental models that we can use across the board to connect

them all and have them make sense and give us control. I like learning a little bit about how great performers who sustain excellence, how they do it, or where it comes from. You mentioned your two brothers. And I also grew up with two brothers. And you mentioned competing, which I competed on a daily basis. So civilly with my younger brother, AJ, because we were close in age. He's only two years younger.

And so we would, my older brother's four years older, so we weren't as close in age. But age and I would, we live by a park. And so we could go back and play games in the park, any games you could think of tennis, and then we can play basketball, then we play ping pong, and we play football and baseball and all the sports, and we have friends over. And I think that athletic competition helped prepare us both for what was to come later on. And my brother went on to become a professional athlete for 11 years and had a lot of success. And I think it's helped me as well because nothing has ever really been that hard.

as comparative to that. And I wonder if that was what your upbringing was like as well, Dan, when you think about competitiveness with your brothers and how that made you this kind of high achieving person who sustains excellence himself, who's able to uncover why people are great and how it's not, you're not necessarily born, that it's grown. And you show how in the talent code and you show how in the culture code,

if that has something to do with it. I'm curious to your thoughts. I think it's absolutely true. We routinely deeply underrate our environments when it comes to creating who we are. And we can't always control our environments. You know, let's say you had known all this when you were grown up with AJ. You know, would that have made you sort of go out there and do it more often if you knew that it was going to lead to what it led to?

Maybe it would. So the idea that we can learn by observing these patterns and tapping into them and seeing the ways in which we can build environments for our families and our workplace, conditions, you know, we always, you know, that phrase creating conditions for excellence is a phrase we hear a lot. Sometimes it can sort of feel hard to do. You know, it's almost like Genesis, you know, creating conditions. But actually when you dig deep, it's it's about, you know, creating a park and a ball and a couple kids who want to play day after day after day, and giving them those tools that they can do to go and build that, that level of excellence

and motivation and willpower that really have driven you and your brother. and a lot of other people. So you mentioned we tend to think of great culture like DNA. Some groups have and others don't. However, that's not true. Great culture is something that you can learn. And there are specifically three skills that you talk about when it comes to that. And your book is designed really well.

I encourage people to get it. But I'll name the three skills. And you also have ideas for action as a part of all three of those skills, which people know me know I'm really big into the action and execution. portion of ideas. It's great to be a learner. It really is. It's great to reflect and to learn, but it's even better to put those learnings into action, to actually be a doer. So the three skills are build safety, share vulnerability, and establish a purpose. And I want to start with the first one, Dan, when it comes to building safety. And then I'll dive straight to ideas

for action. And then maybe you could share the story or some of the research behind that. Is that cool? Cool. Sounds great. Okay. So overcommunicate your listening is an idea for action when it comes to building safety. What do you mean by over communicating your listening? I want to pull back for just a second and explain a little bit of the why here because, you know, people think of safety as being kind of this atmospheric thing.

Like it's kind of nice to have and it's a little benefit. It's kind of icing on the cake. That's wrong. Without a sense. And the really answer lies in our brains. You know, we have got these alarm systems in our. our brains that are keenly attuned to tiny social cues. And so if you have a tiny social cue that things aren't safe in this group, you shut down. You start looking elsewhere. Now, this makes

great evolutionary sense because if you were in a, you know, scroll the clock back a few hundred thousand years, if you got a cue that you weren't part of the tribe, you really should start looking for another one. So our brains are built to be super hair trigger on this. And so, you know, there's some amazing science around this where you'll have one guy in a group, sort of an actor, behavior, even a lethargic way or maybe even aggressively jerk-like way, he can instantly lower the group's performance by 30 to 40 percent. It's the bad apple research. And it's not random.

It's the way our brains are built. And as a result, because of this, with great groups, great cultures, you always see safety being vastly and repeatedly overcommunicated. There's a story I tell in the book how you can, is a contest to build this tower, and you have CEOs versus kindergartner. and the CEOs lose to the kindergarteners every single time. It's not because they're dumber. It's not because they're less verbal or less intelligent.

They're capable of building it, but they lack the sense of safety. They're constantly in their little CEO group looking at each other, wondering where they fit in, wondering if it's okay to make a joke, and it shuts down performance. Kidgarteners don't care who's in charge. Kindergarteners just simply get together, start iterating in perfect safety, and they're able to build taller towers. It's not an accident. So as a result, and there's all manner of other science that shows the importance of safety.

As a result, building safety is the single most important foundational thing that happens in a group. And good cultures have all manner of way of doing it. And over-communicating you're listening is a perfectly good one. It's not enough just to sort of sit and quietly absorb something. To over-communicate your understanding of what's going on and to use it as a way of building that relationship ends up being a really, simple but very powerful thing that you can do. Even in some of the places I visited, it was funny. I kept seeing the same expression on people's faces when I visited, and it was weird because I'm visiting the Seals and I'm visiting Pixar and I'm visiting San Antonio Spurs. And this expression

is very primal. It's like eyebrows way up, like face totally absorbed in what the person is saying. That expression, which you see in each of these places, is not an accident. It's the expression of somebody over communicating what they're absorbing it and really building a relationship by actively listening to the person that they're talking to. And putting attention toward that to create a sense of safety, a sense that we share a future, of sense that we're connected isn't just sort of a nice thing to do. It's not just politeness. It's actually a key functional part of creating a good culture. You mentioned the San Antonio Spurs and Coach Popovich has a specific thing in regards to thank yous that he does that helps build safety. Can you share

more about that? Yeah, it's like, it's pretty amazing. You know, Pop has got this reputation of, and it's well, it's really well deserved of being a yeller. You know, he yells at his players. He gives him extremely tough feedback. I encourage you to Google YouTube videos of Popovich yelling at his players. It's, it's unbelievable. You know, his face turns beat red and he'll scream at him. But he also communicates his love for them and his respect for them. And those are the two things he does. He tells you the really hard truth and he loves you. And those things together are incredibly powerful at creating a sense of belonging and safety.

And one of the really cool things he does, I think, that is a really, again, really obvious thing to do that I think, you know, more, many of these things are kind of low-hanging fruit. At the end of each year, he takes each player aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. he says to Tim Duncan, Tim, you know, to Kauai Leonard, these guys make $20 million a year. He says, thank you for allowing me to coach you. And it's really an acknowledgement

of their connection, a deep appreciation of what he put them through and an expression of his appreciation and love for them. So it's such a basic thing to do that so many leaders just forget to do because they just sort of think, well, you know, Kwai Leonard's paid $20 million to play for this team. Why should I have to thank him?

Pop realizes it's not about the paycheck. It's not about the perk. It's about the interaction. You know, creating culture is the sport of human interaction. That's really what it is. And Pop realizes that. And so he maximizes the safety by saying just those two words. Thank you.

How about being painstaking in the hiring process? The reason I ask is I'm working with a really successful company now, but we're revamping a little bit about how their hiring. process and really putting a putting one in place as opposed to just kind of going with gut feeling and this is very common i know among among some companies depending on the size but where there might not be a process in place but that that being painstaking in the in the hiring process can lead to or can lead to great or poor culture that's right that's huge that's one other thing that i see in in spades in all of these places so they're incredibly painstaking the single most important decision

any tribe, any human group makes is who's in and who's out. And so they pay equal attention to that, to those questions. Now, typical hiring business hiring process that as you talked about can kind of be gut feeling driven. You may as well throw darts. You know, small sample sizes lead to bad decision. Emotional biases lead to bad decision. Human biases lead to bad decision. So there's a great book called by Laslo Bach.

It's called Work Rules. It's fantastic. I mean, it goes into all these reasons and I'd recommend it to everybody to whoever. Anybody who thinks they can get a good sense of somebody in a 30-minute interview should go read this book immediately. There's much better ways to hire people. And they're more rational and more, and obviously way more successful. But beyond that, having the opportunity to, be really painstaking does a couple of things.

And make sure that you get the right people. But it also allows your group to experience the process of adding someone to that group. In a lot of the groups that I visited, the whole group was involved in the interview. You know, the whole group got a chance to spend time with this new person. It wasn't a decision that was made by one or two people and then they just sort of inserted the newcomer. The whole group got to sit in a very non-hierarchical way. get to know that person. And the painstakingness of that isn't extra work.

It's actually an accurate reflection of the importance of that decision to add some. Extending from that, those first days that people spend with the new group in the cultures that I visited in these incredibly high-performing supercultures I started to think of them. The first day was a really, really big deal. At first day, they scripted the first day. and they scripted the interactions to really frame it in the most tribal way possible. At Pixar, they did a really good job of it. Now, you know, Pixar could kind of do anything. You're excited for your first day at Pixar that you wouldn't think they would have to spend time sort of scripting that day.

But actually, on the first day, all the new employees come in. They sit in the fifth row of the theater because that's where directors sit when they watch the show. And the president of Pixar comes out. And he just says a couple words. He doesn't say much. He says a couple sentences. He says, whatever you did before, you're a movie maker now. We need you to help make our films better.

This is kind of a hell of a thing to say, really. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And this is the baristas go to this meeting. You know, this is if you're in tech or if you're an IT or support, you go to this meeting. Whatever you did before, you're a movie maker now. We need you to help us make our movies better. So it's really an expression of vulnerability on the group's part, of need, of their role, of openness.

And it's, of course, reinforced by other behaviors where they do get an opportunity to participate in the moviemaking process. So it's such a moment, you know, when somebody joins that smart cultures take maximum advantage of that moment and really reinforce it in making it, make it as meaningful as humanly possible. Remind me of Chip and Dan, he spoke the power of moments and John Deere story. They told about what John Deere does on the first day, that it's such a, it's such an important. time. It's a, it's a transformational time in person's life when they started a new job. And so it's so important to get that right. And the other part, Dan, you're talking about a little bit earlier when it comes to hiring process. I'm a huge believer. I've learned the hard way from hiring hundreds of people over the course of my career and the profession of selling as a

manager and as a as a leader of leaders in that profession. Learning the hard way when you make bad hires, that can that can get you fired if you may do it too many times. But what I found by by going to companies do this now and helping them with their hiring process is that it gets the group in the room and it helps them document exactly what they value, what they look for, and then how to find it, the questions that ask. I think that's a very valuable moment for some companies that maybe, again, depending on the size of the company, that has never been documented exactly what the group of leaders value most. And then how do you go about uncovering that through the interview process. And it's amazing to kind of see a look on their faces of the people in the meetings

when you're having those conversations that you just ask very basic questions. What do you want? What do you value? What do you think makes this place great? What can make the place even better? And then what questions do we ask? What's our process to find that out? And I think that's why the painstakingness of the hiring process is so vital to the success of companies moving forward. mend that. No, that's awesome. The social truth. Yeah, man.

The other cool part, you talk about John Wooden. He's been talked about a lot. And when it comes to building safety, and this reminded me of a book called Legacy by James Kerr. Not sure if you read that. Oh, so good. Oh, man, it's great. But he talks about the players of the New Zealand All Blacks would sweep the stalls.

The players themselves, the superstars of the team, of certainly of New Zealand, Zealand and even in the world, these guys sweep the stalls. And they said, John Wooden would regularly walk around the locker room and pick up the trash by hand. And that was his way of building the culture that there's nobody too big to be doing that. Exactly right. And you see that example actually elsewhere. You see that example not just with John Wooden. I spent some time looking at a lot of different coaches and leaders and it was not unusual to see them do that or to get somebody a glass of water or to do some, just that extra tiny thing. that shows that they're serving the group.

It's such a powerful, you know, all the stuff with culture is the same. It's like little stuff is big stuff, you know, soft stuff is hard stuff. We see those over and over again, and it's never more apparent than when a leader is serving. The second skill is sharing vulnerability. Why is that the second skill? Well, it's funny. Because basically this is in the world, if you're going to get better as a a group, you have to be in tune with what's really happening. You cannot be in a position of

hiding weakness. This is a functional notion that is incredibly important. Groups that hide their own weaknesses from each other are not going to be as good at groups that share weaknesses with each other. And so vulnerability is not an option. It's not like it's really a biological necessity for any human group that wants to be more than the sum of its parts. If you hide your weaknesses, is you will be weak. So sharing weakness ends up being the best way to get strong. And you see that. You see that really vividly in all of these groups.

The challenge that you deal with when you're dealing with a culture is that we're kind of allergic to vulnerability. We don't like showing weaknesses, especially in groups. And so good cultures find ways, build habits, almost like cultural calisthenics, to create what are called vulnerability loops. Vulnerability loops are moments when one person shares a hard truth, a candid, truth, a weakness maybe, or a problem that the group has had, and then the other person responds by doing that. It sounds like a really simple thing to do, but it is incredibly elusive and powerful.

And you see examples, especially with like the Navy SEALs, they have made such a great habit of it. Their habit that they use to create vulnerability loops is called an AAR after action review. Now, that is when after a mission, they get off the helicopter, and before they take a nap before they have a meal, they sort of circle up and they talk about what you have, what just happened. And it's a very simple discussion. What went wrong? What went right? What are we going do differently next time? And people end up having to confess to mistakes. People end up having to say, hey, why weren't you over there? You should have been on the left. Why were you on the right? And for the book, I talked to a former seal named Dave Cooper who trained the groups for the bin Laden raid.

And Dave said one of the more profound things I've ever heard a leader say. He said, the most important four words a leader can say are I screwed that up. I screwed that up. Talk about a vulnerability loop. Having a leader say that gives permission for everybody else to say that. If a leader doesn't say that, if a leader doesn't lean into that vulnerability, You've got a situation where everybody's trying to cover up. You know, in most organizations, everybody has a secret second job of maintaining their status,

of watching their back, of making sure they're secure, of worrying about their situation in a group, wondering what's going to happen next, being a little bit nervous and anxious about this. Great cultures take that away. Take that away. Everybody's going to be vulnerable. You know that. You've got to open up. So you can stop worrying about that second job and put that energy toward actually getting better.

It's hard. It's hard to do that. It's embarrassing. It's difficult. It's awkward. But they find ways to do it. And they almost approach it like it's a workout. You know, we know no pain, no gain with our muscles, right?

This is like the emotional version of that where you have this pain of like, ah, I've got to admit this. But you get this huge gain of the group understanding what really happened and understanding what it should do to get better, as opposed to concealing and hiding. What about the over communicating expectations? Yeah, that was another thing that you see in a lot of these groups. It's, you know, when you look at how they describe roles, when you look at how they communicate what the plan is, when they look at how they communicate in a daily way,

they often will over communicate, over-emphasize exactly what it is they're out to do. all these places are kind of chronic over-communicators in a way, especially when it comes to something like purpose, especially when it comes to something like goals, they end up kind of flooding the zone. You know, when I visited these places, I kind of expected like the seals not to talk about being a seal. Like I figured they'd kind of be the quiet professionals and not talk about all the time. They talk about it quite a lot, actually.

They talk about what do we do? We shoot, move, and communicate. You know, the only easy day was yesterday. They actually say all that stuff because it's. got meaning. It works sort of like emotional GPS establishing what should be in their windshield right now. The listening like a trampoline. How do you listen like a trampoline? Yeah, it's funny. People typically think of listening as kind of a, I don't know, sort of passive thing where you're absorbing energy, you're absorbing ideas. But that idea, that model of listening like a trampoline,

your goal as a listener should be to add energy, to absorb their ideas, to absorb their emotion, to absorb their excitement, and to add energy to the situation by sort of asking questions that unearthed deeper things. And you see that with good listeners. They're not just going, uh-huh, uh-huh, got it, uh-huh. They're actually listening, absorbing, and then saying, well, if that's true, then what about this? And what if we applied it over here? Or that reminds me of this and they're constantly bridging out from that moment of listening to other important sort of things that might might add energy to the system so i love that metaphor to me it really captures what great listeners do they lead they lift you up you know they leave you higher

than you arrived you're not just downloading a modem onto them they are actually that interaction and that's what you see in great cultures you see people who are who have that We have that skill. And we sort of think of it as being, you know, kind of magical when we have a conversation like that. But again, it's not magic. It's not magic. It's skill.

Right. But skilled listeners don't just interrupt with phrases like, hey, here's an idea. Or let me tell you what works for me in a similar situation because they did understand. It's not about them. Exactly right. Exactly right. They're sort of egoless. They kind of lose themselves in the situation a little bit.

That's right. That idea that reflex to add value, to. say like, okay, this person came to me with a problem. Well, I had a problem like that recently, and here's exactly how I solved it. And you blurred out, but you didn't really either connect with them and you didn't really solve the problem by just making this connection. So there's this beat that good listeners have. They let someone express something. And then they follow up to try to go deeper. They always follow up, try to go deeper. They usually know that the first thing you hear is just the first thing. And you really want someone to keep expressing it until you have a genuine

understanding of what's going on, not just a reflexive, I'm going to paste my solution and near a problem sort of response. I think in some ways, like listening is the lowest hanging fruit. It's like the most basic skill that could add the most value to every organization, whether it's your family or your team or whatever, and that people don't do as well as they could if they really understood a few really basic principles like, don't just blurt out the answer right away. Don't try to help right away. Give it, give it a little bit of time, you know. So there's a real, a real cool, is a cool woman who's in the book, Roshi Kavecchi,

who's like the greatest listener I've ever encountered. And her story is told. And I think it's, it's great to put listening up there as kind of a heroic skill, because it really is heroic. It really is a pretty cool thing. It really is a distinguishing skill of great organizations that they are really listening to each other and it lets you work better together and solve problems better. What differentiated her from other great listeners?

is why she's just stood above all of them? The whole way she approaches an interaction. It's very warm. She got very high standards. She's not, she's not just sort of a puddle of empathy. She listens very closely and she tries to, she really is a trampoline. It's funny, when I was talking to her, she asked, what's the subtitle of your book? And I told her one of the, my working subtitle.

and she sort of asked a couple questions like, well, is that quite, what do you think about this? That reminds me of this. And we just sort of went down this road and by the time we finished, I don't know how she did it, but I had a different subtitle. It's like kind of, you know, even when you're in it, you don't quite understand what's happening. But it's empathy plus energy, plus she digs into the assumptions behind my statements. Gently unearths. Her word is unearths.

Like, because there's built-in stuff that's behind what I'm saying, right? And she's very good at kind of bringing those assumptions to the surface and trying to say, well, why do you think that? You know, that's a hell of a question. Like, why are you approaching it this way? Because we have so many biases and assumptions in our thinking and good listeners are able to sort of unearth the real truth underneath that and let us see things in a new way. You know, it's like she's a, she's pulling, you know, kind of these gems out of the, out of the soil that she holds up in front of me and I can see, I see through them and see everything in a new way.

What about aiming for candor, but avoiding brutal honesty? Yeah, these places, when you talk about vulnerability, that's skill of vulnerability loops, it's very tempting to just go off and say, all right, we're going to be vulnerable, you suck, you know, and I suck. And this whole thing sucks. And that's not actually vulnerability. You know, good groups care about their relationships with each other and simply saying, I'm going to be brutally honest here, is often just an excuse for brutality.

And the focus is on brutality, not on the honesty part. A better word and a better mental model is candor, which is I care about us getting this right, you know, getting this right. And it's the difference between me saying like, hey, Ryan, this interview sucks. And me saying, hey, Ryan, I noticed a couple things on this interview that I think we should, you know, we should think about. What do you think of it? And bringing those to your attention. So that's what you see in these groups. It doesn't mean they're less that they're flinching away from stuff, but it just means they're not bringing that extra like triumphal brutality to the equation.

What's underneath the candor is care You know really care for each other to say The reason that I'm bringing this up is because I really want us to work well together And you wrote this in there but culture comes from the Latin cultus which means care Did I pronounce that right? Yeah, right. Isn't that cool? I didn't know It was one of the things that I discovered part right through the Part way through the process and I thought well that's kind of neat because that's the feeling that you get When you're around these groups you know when you're on a great group

group, it's, and I know you felt this as a former athlete, and I know your brother has felt it, but when you're on a great team, it's kind of addictive. Like, you love it. And the work, you know, isn't necessarily always really fun. It's not like you're, you know, it's not like it's all super lighthearted, but it's that care, you know, it's that I know that these people care about me, my whole person, and that I care about them. And that's what holds the group together, They're not the fun, although fun is a part of it and not the success, although success is a part of it. It really comes down to humans caring about other humans. I'm thinking about when you were maybe with the Spurs and perhaps other companies, but I remember the best teams I was on.

I was, I don't know the right word. I guess I could say to steal from Jim Collins, I was productively paranoid slash scared to let my teammates down. I was more concerned about letting them down than anything else. I just wanted to be there for them. I wanted to show them that I was going to, at minimum, I was going to do my part and maybe even play above my level sometimes and make plays to help us win games. What type of this productive paranoia or this I don't want to let my teammate down feeling did you feel when you're spending time with SEAL Team 6 or the Spurs or Zappos or IDO?

or any of the other places. Did you get that sense? Big time. Big time. And they would talk about it. They would talk about it. It was one of the seals told me, it's like, I, I, this guy did not, did not like jumping out of airplanes.

You know, he goes, but I'm not doing it for myself. I'm doing it for the guy behind. And I'm doing it for the guy in front of me. And if it was up to me, I would never do it. But I have to do it for them. And that is exactly. I don't know if paranoia exactly is it, but that productive, that productive connection to the group that does manifest at times is like, I don't.

want to let them down and I want to do extra things to sacrifice for them even beyond yeah even beyond not letting him down to like making you get you a position of giving things up and to to give to the group that's exactly it and you know pop at the santanus purse calls that getting over yourself getting over yourself it's such a simple phrase but there's something sort of zen about it right you're just you realize that that the world does not revolve around you and your ego maybe isn't as important as you thought it was. And when you do that, when you achieve that, it sort of opens up. The world becomes a much bigger place. And we had some of the best teams. They almost self-policed themselves where the coach didn't need to get on a player because

his teammate would. And specifically, I'm thinking when there's veterans and rookies and all varying levels of tenure, so to speak, is that some of the more veteran players, if they notice the any other player, whether it's a veteran or a newer player, but they, they led the way by holding each other accountable to a certain level of work that we were going to put into it. And that, that's where I think some of that not letting them down comes from, was that that I've been held accountable. And I have then learned to hold other people accountable that we were peers. I wasn't necessarily coached to player, but necessarily player to player. And so I've tried to develop that type of culture where people truly do care and they're willing to hold each

other accountable with with candor as you said not solely brutality but with candor that's right that's exactly right and that peer that is such a tell of a great culture you know if if it is if those peers are holding each other accountable and you can talk about it in terms of accountability which I love but I also love the word ownership because you know no one really holding people's feet to the fire is uncomfortable for the holder and for the person whose feet are to the fire so that concept ends up being sometimes being a little bit brutal. That idea, though, of ownership, players own the practice. You know,

players own the practice. That's what you see in great teams. If you have got your coach out there constantly as you see so many coaches in modern sport these days, overtalking and calling every shot and blowing the whistle and dominating the scene with their interaction, that team, by definition, cannot have a great culture. Good coaches disappear on purpose sometimes to let the team solve problems by itself. If any, then, and that goes for good teams in sports, that goes for good teams in the military, that goes for good teams in business. If the team itself doesn't have the capacity to navigate a problem and they're always leaning

on the coaches of crush, how are they going to have a culture? How are they going to own those problems and own those solutions? So, smart leaders create opportunities for the team to struggle and figure out that for themselves. Pop walks away. You'll see it occasionally in games. Popovich walks away from the huddle. He'll call a timeout.

And about once a month, he just won't enter the player's huddle. And all of a sudden, they realize he's not coming back. And they're like, he's not going to tell you what to do. Let's figure this out. And they do. And it's incredibly powerful. And the same is Drew Purcell's teams. The best ones are not, don't have that many interactions with their commander.

The best ones are ones that own it and hold each other to that level of accountability, an ownership that really defines a great team. So sometimes that idea of a leader can cause us to kind of overplay a leader's hand a little bit. The leader's job is really to create the sustaining ownership among the team. The best leaders are the leaders of teams that don't need leaders, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but it's really deeply true. The best leader should be able to leave the office for a month and things run the way they should run. That's the measure of a great team. it's a measure of a great culture because then you've got something that can really be sustained

through leaders, through CEOs, through coaches, year after year after year. And that's what you see in truly great organizations. They're not built on one person. Yeah. It does remind me of Phil Jackson back in his Michael Jordan days where when the other team would go on a run, he was famous for sitting down and not calling a timeout when every other coach in the NBA would call a timeout to try to halt the momentum. The other team was creating that Phil during the regular season, especially would say his thought process that he shared later was,

was I needed my team to go through this adversity on their own. I needed them to be able to figure it out. So then when it really got tough, they weren't just going to wait for me to call a time out. They were, they were forced so many times, got so many repetitions at figuring out halting momentum of the opposition that it made them better long term.

And they end up winning six championships for it. And Phil went on to win more with the Lakers. So I think that's, that's part of what great. leaders have the security in themselves to not be just a constant screamer and yeller and calling timeouts. They don't overcoach. They are putting their players in position to learn, to grow, to fight through adversity

without the need of them to always, I don't know if I'd say coddle them, but to take care of them when adversity strikes. That's right. That's right. The complicated thing to navigate and manage. And then you can sort of layer in. and then looping around back with the players individually to sort of make sure those connections are strong. So this idea of the leader as a communication athlete again, you know, kind of pops up over and over again where it's like they are really watching how this good leader is really watching the team dynamic and really seeing where I can add value by pulling back and creating autonomy and where I need to come back and reconnect.

And you're kind of balancing those two core things of like creating safety and being a little bit vulnerable. at times being a little bit vulnerable by opening it up and letting the team handle it and creating safety by reconnecting with the team and talking with them about how it went. One note that I pulled that I wanted to make sure I got to Dan here before I know you have to cut to flight, but is there's a difference between a performance. I'm shifting now to the corporate world because I know we have a lot of listeners who are in that space, but the difference between a performance review and professional development, can you, because I think a lot of us, me included, have met.

this up big time in the past of just kind of blending all of these interactions with your team, whether they're one-on-one or in a team setting. We don't build a wall between performance reviews and professional development. Can you share more about that? Yeah, and a lot of teams, they sort of treat all that as the same, right? I'm going to review how you did, and then we're going to give you a few things to work on so you get better. And this comes down to the importance of creating safety. If you want someone to really open up, if you want to create a team that really learns, you can't have the review piece, the evaluative piece that says, well, if you're going to be a C or a D, are you going to be here one year? Are you on double secret probation? When you have that, you're eliminating the possibility of genuine vulnerability and weakness, of genuine of seeing what's actually going on. And so when you combine those two things, you get neither. You neither get a good performance review and you don't.

get much learning about it because you're shutting things down. You need to have the review take place completely separate from the professional development piece of it, where you're actually trying to say, okay, for professional development, you and I both need to be completely open about what you're good at, what you're bad at, and what you should work on. That's really hard to do when your salary's on the line. So we're going to have that conversation completely separate after we figure out your salary, after we figure out where you're going to be, actually at your level, okay you're safe we've created safety now we're going to go to this vulnerability piece where we're going to open up and that sort of toggle where you are constantly creating safety so that you can be more

open and vulnerable and honest is the essential two-step of great culture and you don't do them both at once you have to separate them so you've got okay let's be safe here's where you are you're going to have you're going to be here for a while you're doing this is what I'm telling you the truth and then we're going to go over here and talk about what you can get better at so keeping those things separate is massively important. So the third skill, we're not going to do it justice, but we're going to get to some of it. Okay, establish a purpose.

And there's a lot, too, of this, but maybe quickly a high level overview on establishing a purpose. Now, think of it in a functional way. You know, like your culture is sort of like an athlete. It's sort of like a giant entity, right? And giant entity needs to stick together. That's the safety piece. It needs to be honest and cooperating.

with each other. That's the vulnerability and cooperation piece. And it needs to go somewhere. It needs to know where it's going. It needs to navigate to a target, to a goal. And that is the purpose piece. And that's why it's so important. You can be safe and connected and cooperative and trusting and have all that good stuff. But where are you going? What's important now? What is the most important thing and what's the second most important thing? And so what I saw in great groups is this ability to fill the windshield with story, not with fact, not with principal or a value statement. If you took all the value statements of, when you read enough sets of value statements, they all start to sound alike.

You know what I mean? There are all those value statements are not super useful. What's really useful is story. What's really useful is this is who we are. This captures who we are. And they become very, very good at creating these kind of, filling the windshield of the the of the company with these very clear narratives that guide attention and then create energy. A good example is from this, from this study actually was done by Adam Grant, who I'm betting

has been on your show. He's a brilliant writer and researcher. And there were there were people that were in a call center and they were they were supposed to raise money for the University of Michigan Scholarship Fund. And there was a tough job. Call centers are tough calling alumni to get money is tough. And one day, Adam did an experiment where he brought in a person who was benefiting from that scholarship fund. And that person's name was Will. And Will just got up and told a story. He said, hey, here's where I came from. I benefit from the scholarship fund. I'm the first person of my family to go to college or whatever he said. I'm the 10th person to go to University of Michigan. In the weeks after, Will shared his five-minute story. Time spent calling went up, I think, 172 percent.

money raised went up 150%. It massively tapped into the sense of motivation, direction, and focus. He gave them that sense of purpose. He gave this, put the story in the windshield that connected with this moment now, what they're doing now is calling to some larger benefit. And when you do that, every group has got a story like that. Every group has something that benefits from it. And when you fill the windshield with those stories,

you tap into the sort of human motivational engine to unleash a lot of pent-up energy. And it's important to name and rank your priorities. Exactly right. I mean, to sort of, you know, you see that in all these places. And the most interesting piece of that is that the number one priority for all these top performing cultures was their relationship with each other. Even when it was, say, a restaurant where you'd think, well, their most important relationship is with the diner. or, you know, is with the person they're serving or the client.

Not true. The truth that you see or in a hospital where you'd say, oh, it must be the patient who's most important. Not true. If you treat each other really well, the other stuff takes care of itself. Always prioritizing the relationship with each other ends up being a really basic but really, really powerful way of creating a strong and cohesive culture. Building safety, sharing vulnerability, a staff. A Purpose of Three Skills. The book, though, goes in so much more depth.

And it's fantastic. I could not. I really highly, highly recommend the Culture Code, the secrets of highly successful groups by Daniel Coyle. Also, the Talent Code. I'd get that, too. It'll be extremely helpful. Dan, thanks so much, man, for being here, for sharing. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online?

I got a website at Danielcoil.com. That's got some cool stuff on it. Well, I hope it's cool stuff. You guys can tell me it's cool stuff. Sort of a quiz to measure the strength of your group's culture and a few other things that are kind of fun. So checking out. Fellow Ohio and at least part of the year. What's it like, man, living in Cleveland and then living in Alaska.

I don't know any other person who does that. So you guys split time. It makes zero sense, Brian, but we do. We winter in Ohio like no one else. The fun part is kind of getting, it's been fun lately connecting with some of the local sports teams here, which has been a lot of fun. So working a little bit with the Indians and working a little bit with some other places has been a blast.

But yeah, on a personal level, it's fun too. Do you help build the Indians culture? I've been working with it for about five years as an advisor. And there's so many parts and pieces and there's so many excellent people there that it's not. It ain't happening because of me. But it is, I have had a front row seat to the sort of transformational change that's happened there. It's been really cool to see how they have really systematically and sustainably taken, you know, the team was, you know, when they made the movie Major League about the hapless, hopeless team,

they chose the Indians for a reason. They haven't won a World Series since the Truman administration. But lately, we've just set a record for consecutive wins and just went to the World Series last year before last. So, yeah, things are looking good and it's not magic. It is. There's some really good culture building going on. I love it, man.

Well, Dan, thanks again for being here, man. I definitely want to continue this dialogue as we both progress. It's been great getting talked to you. When you get to Ohio, again, you get to Ohio. again, get in touch. We'll go to a game. All right, man. Thanks so much, Dan. Stuff. Thanks, right. Wow, what a useful conversation with Daniel Coyle.

I really enjoyed it. Got a lot out of it, a lot of things to implement and execute on, which is what I love the most, how we take our learnings and put it into action. If you enjoyed it and got value from it, I love it if you would subscribe, rate, and write a review on iTunes Apple Podcasts. That's subscribe, rate it, hopefully five stars, and write a thoughtful review in iTunes, Apple Podcasts that helps spread the message. Thank you again for being here. Cannot wait for the next one. See you next week. This episode is brought to you by

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