Culture in organizations really matters. With the aim of learning more about the traits existing in the cultures of high performance teams, I read the book “The Culture Code”. Here is my brief summary of this amazing book.

When companies with teams developing software start using new stacks and tools, it often implies working in a different way and therefore people needing to change their behavior. This is the reason why I started reading this book, I wanted to find out the role of culture in these kinds of contexts.

The book is basically into 5 parts: It starts with an impactful introduction, followed by the description of each of the key factors of successful cultures, and it ends with some additional resources.

Introduction: When two plus two equals ten

Short but powerful, the introduction completely captured my attention with the example of an experiment involving the building of spaghetti towers (the winner is the one who builds the tallest tower with spaghettis). There are two teams: one of proficient high school students and the other one of kindergarten students. To find out who wins, you will need to read the book! I will only detail the main characteristics of each team:

• High School team
  • Well-organized
  • Procedural process
  • Slow flow
• Kindergarden team
  • Fail fast
  • Direct communication
  • Constant Experimentation

Key Factors For Successful Cultures

1st Key Factor: Build Safety

Building safety is key to ensure a good culture in your organization. The book details how some teams value this factor and how leaders or the team itself work to nurture safety.

You can take many actions to build safety in your organization by using some of the examples described in this section. For instance, using belonging cues, like having coffee every morning with all your team members. It is really interesting how these little actions can contribute to create a feeling of safety. I recommend to you to try it out, as well as some of the other actions listed in the book.

2nd Key Factor: Share Vulnerabilities

The second key factor is sharing vulnerabilities. Once people feel safe in your organization, the second step is to invite people to honestly share their work challenges and concerns. This information must flow bidirectionally in the organization hierarchy, from the top down and from the bottom up.

Knowing the problems of your organization, is the first step towards solving them and becoming more efficient and effective.

From top down, it is important to clearly communicate any problems that have been identified in order for people to work on solving them.

Managers and leaders should allow for opportunities for everyone to safely share weaknesses, mistakes, setbacks,… In these spaces when vulnerability is detected, positive feedback needs to be provided.

Colleagues from any organization must feel safe in order for them to be willing to share their difficulties and problems. If they do not feel like they are in a safe environment, they maight be afraid to share their vulnerabilities. They may not think that this information will be used to improve the system, but instead be used against them. In this instance, vulnerability will not be shared but hidden, which does not promote a positive culture.

An interesting point in this section identifies people with specific skills (super -cooperators) like humility. Allow cooperation between people and teams, allow to share vulnerability, identify and solve problems faster.

This section of the book also enumerates and describres some actions you can take to facilitate sharing vulnerabilities amongst with your teams.

3rd Key Factor: Establish Purpose

This third factor is less surprising than the other ones, but not less important. It is also really important to measure what really matters in order to evaluate if your organization is working in alignment with its purpose. One thing you could do to establish purpose is using catchphrases, such as “Work hard, be nice” (KIPP).

This part of the book distinguishes two types of teams according to how you want to lead, for proficiency or for creativity.

Proficiency teams excel in specific and well-known tasks. So book details actions to focus this team in this way.

Creative teams perform at their best when they have autonomy to try new ideas, are trusted to fail fast and feedback is provided. Actions to focus this kind of team differs from a team focused on proficiency.

In this chapter, you find actions to establish purpose for each kind of team.

Epilogue, Acknowledgments and Notes

Throughout the book, the author explains his journey and gives thanks to many people who helped his project succeed. You will also find a lot of useful information and references that the author used to write the book, which you can use to go deeper if you are interested.

Conclusions

In my opinion this book can help you understand how culture works inside an organization, and the benefits of cultivating a healthy culture within your organization. Each concept described above references real live examples from organizations; such as Navy Seals, Pixar, sports teams,… These examples clearly show the positive consequences of applying these actions.

I have personally tried out some of these actions in my daily work. I have had surprising results, particularly with the actions to promote safety and sharing vulnerabilities amongst teams I have worked with. I fully recommend to you to apply some of these techniques at your daily workplace, as you will see positive changes in a short time. By adopting little changes you and your teams can achieve powerful results!

I completely agree with the ideas and actions explained in this book, you can figure out how to create a healthy culture in your organization that allows high performance team.

I think that if you think to start some of these actions, you should take care of consistency between these three pilars: safety, share vulnerability and purpose. If your organization achieve it, then values and behaviours will also be aligned, and therefore a healhty culture, which will allow the creation of high-performance teams and better results.

I highly recommend you to buy and read this book:

Thank you for reading. I highly appreciate your feedback, so please contact me if you want to discuss about the book or this post.