Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values. The three skills work together from the bottom up, first building group connection and then channeling it into action.
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Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.
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Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
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These interactions were consistent whether the group was a military unit or a movie studio or an inner-city school. I made a list: •  Close physical proximity, often in circles •  Profuse amounts of eye contact •  Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) •  Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) •  High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone •  Few interruptions •  Lots of questions •  Intensive, active listening •  Humor, laughter •  Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)
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- [note::Indicators of good culture]

MIT Human Dynamics Lab
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- [note::Should check this out]

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.
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The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
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Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1.  Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2.  Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3.  Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4.  Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5.  Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.
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- team synergy, group performance,

Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.
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Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer.
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Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.
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In the 1990s, sociologists James Baron and Michael Hannan analyzed the founding cultures of nearly two hundred technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. They found that most followed one of three basic models: the star model, the professional model, and the commitment model. The star model focused on finding and hiring the brightest people. The professional model focused on building the group around specific skill sets. The commitment model, on the other hand, focused on developing a group with shared values and strong emotional bonds. Of these, the commitment model consistently led to the highest rates of success. During the tech-bubble burst of 2000, the start-ups that used the commitment model survived at a vastly higher rate than the other two models, and achieved initial public offerings three times more often.
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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. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be. Larry Page created one of these moments when he posted his “These ads suck” note in the Google kitchen. Popovich delivers such feedback to his players every day, usually at high volume.
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- psychological safety, 1socialpost-queue, feedback, favorite, organizational culture, employee engagement, candor,

Researchers discovered that one particular form of feedback boosted student effort and performance so immensely that they deemed it “magical feedback.” Students who received it chose to revise their papers far more often than students who did not, and their performance improved significantly. The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase. I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
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- [note::Awesome]

Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1.  You are part of this group. 2.  This group is special; we have high standards here. 3.  I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.
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They also give us insight into the reason Popovich’s methods are effective. His communications consist of three types of belonging cues. •  Personal, up-close connection (body language, attention, and behavior that translates as I care about you) •  Performance feedback (relentless coaching and criticism that translates as We have high standards here) •  Big-picture perspective (larger conversations about politics, history, and food that translate as Life is bigger than basketball)
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Beneath Hsieh’s unconventional approach lies a mathematical structure based on what he calls collisions. Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion. He has set a goal of having one thousand “collisionable hours” per year for himself and a hundred thousand collisionable hours per acre for the Downtown Project.
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“This place is like a greenhouse,” Hsieh says. “In some greenhouses, the leader plays the role of the plant that every other plant aspires to. But that’s not me. I’m not the plant that everyone aspires to be. My job is to architect the greenhouse.”
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- [note::Useful analogy]

One pattern was immediately apparent: The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.”
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The key characteristic of the Allen Curve is the sudden steepness that happens at the eight-meter mark. At distances of less than eight meters, communication frequency rises off the charts. If our brains operated logically, we might expect the frequency and distance to change at a constant rate, producing a straight line. But as Allen shows, our brains do not operate logically. Certain proximities trigger huge changes in frequency of communication. Increase the distance to 50 meters, and communication ceases, as if a tap has been shut off. Decrease distance to 6 meters, and communication frequency skyrockets. In other words, proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.
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- [note::Physical proximity of team members is nonlinearly correlated with communication frequency - Is there a way to emulate this effect in remote contexts?]

(One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)
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- [note::This result might be highly dependent on context (i.e. work being performed) and the digitl literacy of the team members. I'm under the impression that humans are naturally bad communicators in remote environments.]

Building safety isn’t the kind of skill you can learn in a robotic, paint-by-numbers sort of way. It’s a fluid, improvisational skill—sort of like learning to pass a soccer ball to a teammate during a game. It requires you to recognize patterns, react quickly, and deliver the right signal at the right time. And like any skill, it comes with a learning curve.
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For example, Will Felps, who did the bad apple study (see Chapter 1), described how insights from his research affected the way he communicated in his personal life. “I used to like to try to make a lot of small clever remarks in conversation, trying to be funny, sometimes in a cutting way,” he says. “Now I see how negatively those signals can impact the group. So I try to show that I’m listening. When they’re talking, I’m looking at their face, nodding, saying ‘What do you mean by that,’ ‘Could you tell me more about this,’ or asking their opinions about what we should do, drawing people out.”
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- [note::Bad apple study conclusion - Introducing a "bad apple" person into a group severely decreases group performance.]

Overcommunicate Your Listening: When I visited the successful cultures, I kept seeing the same expression on the faces of listeners. It looked like this: head tilted slightly forward, eyes unblinking, and eyebrows arched up. Their bodies were still, and they leaned toward the speaker with intent. The only sound they made was a steady stream of affirmations—yes, uh-huh, gotcha—that encouraged the speaker to keep going, to give them more. “Posture and expression are incredibly important,” said Ben Waber, a former PhD student of Alex Pentland’s who founded Humanyze, a social analytics consulting firm. “It’s the way we prove that we’re in sync with someone.”
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Relatedly, it’s important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance. Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging.
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Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You’re a Leader: In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents.” “Of course, I could be wrong here.” “What am I missing?” “What do you think?”
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“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says. “It’s really hard for people to raise their hand and say, ‘I have something tentative to say.’ And it’s equally hard for people not to answer a genuine question from a leader who asks for their opinion or their help.”
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Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback. In these moments, it’s important not simply to tolerate the difficult news but to embrace it. “You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”*1
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Preview Future Connection: One habit I saw in successful groups was that of sneak-previewing future relationships, making small but telling connections between now and a vision of the future. The St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, for example, is renowned for their culture and their ability to develop young players into big-league talent.
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- [note::"You know that pitcher? Three years ago he was sitting where you are."]

Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top. At the end of each basketball season, for example, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich takes each of his star players aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. Those are his exact words: Thank you for allowing me to coach you. It makes little logical sense—after all, both Popovich and the player are amply compensated, and it’s not like the player had a choice whether to be coached. But this kind of moment happens all the time in highly successful groups, because it has less to do with thanks than affirming the relationship.
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- [note::Need to do this more, but in the form of gifts and favors, not just verbal "thanks."]

thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.
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In my research, I sometimes saw the most powerful person in a group publicly express gratitude for one of the group’s least powerful members. For example, the chef Thomas Keller, who runs French Laundry, Per Se, and other world-class restaurants, has a habit of thanking the dishwasher at his restaurant openings, highlighting the fact that the performance of the restaurant depends on the person who performs the humblest task.
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Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process: Deciding who’s in and who’s out is the most powerful signal any group sends, and successful groups approach their hiring accordingly. Most have built lengthy, demanding processes that seek to assess fit, contribution (through deep background research and extensive interactions with a large number of people in the group), and performance (increasingly measured by tests). Some groups, like Zappos, have added an extra layer of belonging cues: after training is complete, they offer trainees a $2,000 bonus if they quit (about 10 percent of trainees accept the offer).
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Eliminate Bad Apples: The groups I studied had extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors. The leaders of the New Zealand All-Blacks, the rugby squad that ranks as one of the most successful teams on the planet, achieve this through a rule that simply states “No Dickheads.” It’s simple, and that’s why it’s effective.
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Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces: The groups I visited were uniformly obsessed with design as a lever for cohesion and interaction. I saw it in Pixar’s Steve Jobs–designed atrium, and in the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six’s expansive team rooms, which resemble hotel conference areas (albeit filled with extremely fit men with guns). I also saw it in smaller, simpler levers like coffee machines. A few years back, Bank of America was struggling with burnout in its call center teams. They brought in Ben Waber to do a sociometric analysis, which found that workers were highly stressed and that the best reliever of that stress was time spent together away from their desks. Waber recommended aligning team members’ schedules so they shared the same fifteen-minute coffee break every day. He also had the company buy nicer coffee machines and install them in more convenient gathering places. The effect was immediate: a 20 percent increase in productivity, and a reduction in turnover from 40 percent to 12 percent. Waber has also overseen interventions in company cafeterias: Merely replacing four-person tables with ten-person tables has boosted productivity by 10 percent. The lesson of all these studies is the same: Create spaces that maximize collisions.
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- [note::How can we emulate tbis in remote contexts?]

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice: Ensuring that everyone has a voice is easy to talk about but hard to accomplish. This is why many successful groups use simple mechanisms that encourage, spotlight, and value full-group contribution. For example, many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something.*2 Others hold regular reviews of recent work in which anybody can offer their two cents. (Pixar calls them Dailies, all-inclusive morning meetings where everybody gets the chance to offer input and feedback on recently created footage.) Others establish regular forums where anyone can bring an issue or question before the group’s leaders, no matter how controversial it might be. But no matter how strong the rule, the underlying key is to have leaders who seek out connection and make sure voices are heard.
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One of his first acts was to hold one-on-ones with each of the ship’s 310 sailors for thirty minutes. (Completing all the meetings took about six weeks.) Abrashoff asked each sailor three questions: 1.  What do you like most about the Benfold? 2.  What do you like least? 3.  What would you change if you were captain? Whenever Abrashoff received a suggestion he felt was immediately implementable, he announced the change over the ship’s intercom, giving credit to the idea’s originator.
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- leadership, conflict management, management, servant leadership, co-creation,

This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group. Picking up trash is one example, but the same kinds of behaviors exist around allocating parking places (egalitarian, with no special spots reserved for leaders), picking up checks at meals (the leaders do it every time), and providing for equity in salaries, particularly for start-ups. These actions are powerful not just because they are moral or generous but also because they send a larger signal: We are all in this together.
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Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other. For example, suppose you are hired at Pixar, whether it’s as a director or as a barista in the company café. On your first day, you and a small group of fellow newbies are ushered into the theater where screenings are held. You are asked to sit in the fifth row—because that’s where the directors sit. Then you hear the following words: Whatever you were before, you are a filmmaker now. We need you to help us make our films better.*3 “It’s incredibly powerful,” said Mike Sundy, who works in data management. “You feel changed.”
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But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.
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In the cultures I visited, I didn’t see many feedback sandwiches. Instead, I saw them separate the two into different processes. They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise. The leaders I spent time with shared a capacity for radiating delight when they spotted behavior worth praising. These moments of warm, authentic happiness functioned as magnetic north, creating clarity, boosting belonging, and orienting future action.
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- [note::i.e. More organic feedback]

A BrainTrust meeting is not fun. It is where directors are told that their characters lack heart, their storylines are confusing, and their jokes fall flat. But it’s also where those movies get better. “The BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” said Pixar president Ed Catmull. “It depends on completely candid feedback.”
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At the Navy SEALs, such uncomfortable, candor-filled moments happen in the After-Action Review, or AAR. The AAR is a gathering that takes place immediately after each mission or training session: Team members put down their weapons, grab a snack and water, and start talking. As in BrainTrusts, the team members name and analyze problems and face uncomfortable questions head-on: Where did we fail? What did each of us do, and why did we do it? What will we do differently next time? AARs can be raw, painful, and filled with pulses of emotion and uncertainty.
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“Okay,” Reinhardt said, fixing Whitney with a bright, penetrating gaze. “The one thing we know about today is that it’s not going to go perfectly. I mean, it could, but odds are really, really, really high that it won’t.” A flicker of surprise traveled across Whitney’s face. She had trained for six months for this day, learning every painstaking detail of the job, hoping to perform well. She had worked as a back server, taken notes, sat in on lineup meetings, and shadowed shift after shift. Now she was being told in no uncertain terms that she was destined to screw up. “So here’s how we’ll know if you had a good day,” Reinhardt continued. “If you ask for help ten times, then we’ll know it was good. If you try to do it all alone…” His voice trailed off, the implication clear—It will be a catastrophe.
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“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,” Polzer says. “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves.”
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Normally, we think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown: first we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.
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After talking to Polzer and other scientists who study trust, I began to see vulnerability loops in other places I visited. Sometimes they were small, quick exchanges. A pro baseball coach began a season-opening speech to his players by saying, “I was so nervous about talking to you today,” and the players responded by smiling sympathetically—they were nervous too. Sometimes these loops took the form of physical objects, like the Failure Wall that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation built, a whiteboard where people could share moments where they’d fallen short. Sometimes they were habits of seemingly invulnerable leaders, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs’s penchant for beginning conversations with the phrase, “Here’s a dopey idea.” (“And sometimes they were,” recalls Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, in his memorial to Jobs. “Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.”) Each loop was different, yet they shared a deeper pattern: an acknowledgment of limits, a keen awareness of the group nature of the endeavor. The signal being sent was the same: You have a role here. I need you.
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Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.
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course, included Kauffman. The enlisted men of the first class took
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As one observer said, UCB’s relationship to Harolds was roughly the same as the Catholic Church’s relationship to celebrating Mass. All of which adds up to a curious situation: UCB was creating some of the most cohesive comic ensembles on the planet by spending a huge amount of time doing an activity that produced mostly pain and awkwardness.
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Good AARs follow a template. “You have to do it right away,” Cooper says. “You put down your gun, circle up, and start talking. Usually you take the mission from beginning to end, chronologically. You talk about every decision, and you talk about the process. You have to resist the temptation to wrap it all up in a bow, and try to dig for the truth of what happened, so people can really learn from it. You have to ask why, and then when they respond, you ask another why. Why did you shoot at that particular point? What did you see? How did you know? What other options were there? You ask and ask and ask.” The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions.
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Nyquist by all accounts possessed two important qualities. The first was warmth. He had a knack for making people feel cared for; every contemporary description paints him as “fatherly.” The second quality was a relentless curiosity. In a landscape made up of diverse scientific domains, he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections. “Nyquist was full of ideas, full of questions,” Bell Labs engineer Chapin Cutler recalls. “He drew people out, got them thinking.”
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- [note::Reminds me of George Lucas's habit: "Just think about it" (source: Light & Magic documentary)]

Givechi approaches each Flight from the outside in. She does her research, mostly through conversations, to learn the issues the team has been wrestling with, both from a design perspective (what are the barriers?) and from a team-dynamics perspective (where is the friction?). Then with that landscape in mind, she gathers the group and asks questions designed to unearth tensions and help the group gain clarity about themselves and the project. The word she uses for this process is surfacing.*1 “I like the word connect,” Givechi says. “For me, every conversation is the same, because it’s about helping people walk away with a greater sense of awareness, excitement, and motivation to make an impact. Because individuals are really different. So you have to find different ways to make it comfortable and engaging for people to share what they’re really thinking about. It’s not about decisiveness—it’s about discovery. For me, that has to do with asking the right questions the right way.”*2
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questions teams could ask themselves, then provided those modules to design teams as tools to help them improve. For example, here are a few: •  The one thing that excites me about this particular opportunity is                         •  I confess, the one thing I’m not so excited about with this particular opportunity is                         •  On this project, I’d really like to get better at
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Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often: As we’ve seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say. I
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Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: •  What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? •  What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? •  What can I do to make you more effective?
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Overcommunicate Expectations: The successful groups I visited did not presume that cooperation would happen on its own. Instead, they were explicit and persistent about sending big, clear signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles to maximize helping behavior.
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Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person: This was an informal rule that I encountered at several cultures. It goes like this: If you have negative news or feedback to give someone—even as small as a rejected item on an expense report—you are obligated to deliver that news face-to-face. This rule is not easy to follow (it’s far more comfortable for both the sender and receiver to communicate electronically), but it works because it deals with tension in an up-front, honest way that avoids misunderstandings and creates shared clarity and connection.
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Listen Like a Trampoline: Good listening is about more than nodding attentively; it’s about adding insight and creating moments of mutual discovery. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, analyzed 3,492 participants in a manager development program and found that the most effective listeners do four things: 1.  They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2.  They take a helping, cooperative stance 3.  They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4.  They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths
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As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude. Also like trampolines, effective listeners gain amplitude through repetition. When asking questions, they rarely stop at the first response. Rather, they find different ways to explore an area of tension, in order to reveal the truths and connections that will enable cooperation.
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“I’ve found that whenever you ask a question, the first response you get is usually not the answer—it’s just the first response,” Roshi Givechi says. “So I try to find ways to slowly surface things, to bring out what ought to be shared so that people can build from it. You have to find a lot of ways to ask the same question, and approach the same question from a lot of different angles. Then you have to build questions from that response, to explore more.”
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In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.’ ”
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Use Candor-Generating Practices like AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teaming:
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One good AAR structure is to use five questions: 1.  What were our intended results? 2.  What were our actual results? 3.  What caused our results? 4.  What will we do the same next time? 5.  What will we do differently?
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- [note::Should use this template for my weekly review]

Some teams also use a Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions: 1.  What are our intended results? 2.  What challenges can we anticipate? 3.  What have we or others learned from similar situations? 4.  What will make us successful this time?
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the goal of an AAR is not just to figure out what happened but also to build a shared mental model that helps the group navigate future problems.
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BrainTrusts, the project-based method pioneered by Pixar, involve assembling a team of experienced leaders who have no formal authority over the project and letting them critique its strengths and weaknesses in a frank and open manner. A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. This rule maintains the project leaders’ ownership of the task, and helps prevent them from assuming a passive, order-taking role.
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Red Teaming is a military-derived method for testing strategies; you create a “red team” to come up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan. The key is to select a red team that is not wedded to the existing plan in any way, and to give them freedom to think in new ways that the planners might not have anticipated.
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Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty:
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Embrace the Discomfort: One of the most difficult things about creating habits of vulnerability is that it requires a group to endure two discomforts: emotional pain and a sense of inefficiency. Doing an after action review or a BrainTrust combines the repetition of digging into something that already happened (shouldn’t we be moving forward?) with the burning awkwardness inherent in confronting unpleasant truths. But as with any workout, the key is to understand that the pain is not a problem but the path to building a stronger group.
- Location 2070
- group vulnerability, group_dynamics, post-mortem, discomfort, vulnerability, emotional pain,

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development: While it seems natural to hold these two conversations together, in fact it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate. Performance evaluation tends to be a high-risk, inevitably judgmental interaction, often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth. Linking them into one conversation muddies the waters. Relatedly, many groups have moved away from ranking workers and shifted to more of a coaching model, where people receive frequent feedback designed to provide them with both a vivid performance snapshot and a path for improvement.
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Use Flash Mentoring: One of the best techniques I’ve seen for creating cooperation in a group is flash mentoring. It is exactly like traditional mentoring—you pick someone you want to learn from and shadow them—except that instead of months or years, it lasts a few hours. Those brief interactions help break down barriers inside a group, build relationships, and facilitate the awareness that fuels helping behavior.
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Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments. One of the best at this is Gregg Popovich. Most NBA teams run time-outs according to a choreographed protocol: First the coaches huddle as a group for a few seconds to settle on a message, then they walk over to the bench to deliver that message to the players. However, during about one time-out a month, the Spurs coaches huddle for a time-out…and then never walk over to the players. The players sit on the bench, waiting for Popovich to show up. Then, as they belatedly realize he isn’t coming, they take charge, start talking among themselves, and figure out a plan.
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These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.
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Purpose isn’t about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we’ll call high-purpose environments. High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go.
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Step 1: Think about a realistic goal that you’d like to achieve. It could be anything: Become skilled at a sport, rededicate yourself to a relationship, lose a few pounds, get a new job. Spend a few seconds reflecting on that goal and imagining that it’s come true. Picture a future where you’ve achieved it. Got it? Step 2: Take a few seconds and picture the obstacles between you and that goal as vividly as possible. Don’t gloss over the negatives, but try to see them as they truly are. For example, if you were trying to lose weight, you might picture those moments of weakness when you smell warm cookies, and you decide to eat one (or three). That’s it. It’s called mental contrasting,
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We tend to use the word story casually, as if stories and narratives were ephemeral decorations for some unchanging underlying reality. The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation.
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Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.
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What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors.
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They created a high-purpose environment, flooded the zone with signals that linked the present effort to a meaningful future, and used a single story to orient motivation the way that a magnetic field orients a compass needle to true north: This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.
- Location 2299
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One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.
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These signals consisted of five basic types: 1.  Framing: Successful teams conceptualized MICS as a learning experience that would benefit patients and the hospital. Unsuccessful teams conceptualized MICS as an add-on to existing practices. 2.  Roles: Successful teams were explicitly told by the team leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and why it was important for them to perform as a team. Unsuccessful teams were not. 3.  Rehearsal: Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication. Unsuccessful teams took minimal steps to prepare. 4.  Explicit encouragement to speak up: Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up if they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process. The leaders of unsuccessful teams did little coaching, and as a result team members were hesitant to speak up. 5.  Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements. For example, the team leader at Mountain Medical wore a head-mounted camera during surgery to help facilitate discussion and feedback. Unsuccessful teams tended not to do this.
- Location 2384
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Sometimes those signals involved the hospital (MICS is an important learning opportunity); sometimes the patient (Patients will benefit); sometimes the team member (You have a role and a future with this team); sometimes they placed value on rehearsal or reflection. But they all performed the same vital function: to flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.
- Location 2397
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- [note::The "Why"]

This is the way high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal. They are less about being inspiring than about being consistent. They are found not within big speeches so much as within everyday moments when people can sense the message: This is why we work; this is what we are aiming for.
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These tasks are not simple, because they depend on an unbroken chain of awareness and action. The waiter who brought the Château d’Yquem had to (1) be alert to the dynamic between the excited, hopeful young woman and her worried parents; (2) notice the father’s comment about the wine; (3) connect it to an idea; (4) be empowered to spend the restaurant’s money on a gesture; and (5) deliver that gesture with grace. At any point, the chain could have been broken, and no one would have noticed.
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- [note::Could create a diagram that visualizes this.]

Here are a few: Read the guest Athletic hospitality Writing a great final chapter Turning up the Home Dial Loving problems Finding the yes Collecting the dots and connecting the dots Creating raves for guests One size fits one Skunking Making the charitable assumption Planting like seeds in like gardens Put us out of business with your generosity
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Many leaders of high-proficiency groups focus on creating priorities, naming keystone behaviors, and flooding the environment with heuristics that link the two. For example, if you spend time around the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team, you will hear them talk about “leaving the jersey in a better place,” and saying, “If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere,” keeping a “blue head” instead of a “red head” (which refers to calmness under pressure), “Pressure is a privilege,” “TQB—total quality ball,” “KBA—keep the ball alive,” “Front up, or fuck off,” “It’s an honor, not a job,” “Go for the gap,” and “Better people make better All-Blacks.” KIPP, the network of highly successful charter schools, is similarly built around catchphrases like “No shortcuts,” “Work hard, be nice,” “Don’t eat the marshmallow,” “Team and family,” “If there’s a problem, we look for the solution,” “Read, baby, read,” “All of us will learn,” “KIPPsters do the right thing when no one is watching,” “Everything is earned,” “Be the constant, not the variable,” “If a teammate needs help, we give; if we need help, we ask,” “No robots,” and “Prove the doubters wrong.”
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Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.
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- [note::LOVE this phrasing. Reminds me of "you have to coe up with 10 bad ideas before coming up with a kinda sorta good idea"]

“There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”
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ownership over the project.* Accordingly, Catmull
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Catmull has almost no direct involvement with creative decisions. This is because he realizes that (1) the teams are in a better position to solve problems, and (2) a suggestion from a powerful person tends to be followed. One of his frequently used phrases is “Now it’s up to you.” This is also why he tends to let a troubled project roll on “a bit too long,” as he puts it, before pulling the plug and/or restarting it with a different team. “If you do a restart before everyone is completely ready, you risk upsetting things,” he says. “You have to wait until it’s clear to everyone that it needs to be restarted.”
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Catmull is congenitally wary of mottoes and catchphrases, as he believes they can easily distort reality. Nonetheless a handful of “Ed-isms” are heard in Pixar’s corridors. Here are a few: Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.
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building creative purpose isn’t really about creativity. It’s about building ownership, providing support, and aligning group energy toward the arduous, error-filled, ultimately fulfilling journey of making something new.
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This gives us insight into building purpose. It’s not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite from a hymnal of catchphrases. It’s a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting, and above all, learning. High-purpose environments don’t descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.
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Name and Rank Your Priorities: In order to move toward a target, you must first have a target. Listing your priorities, which means wrestling with the choices that define your identity, is the first step. Most successful groups end up with a small handful of priorities (five or fewer), and many, not coincidentally, end up placing their in-group relationships—how they treat one another—at the top of the list. This reflects the truth that many successful groups realize: Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. If they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.
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Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be: A while back Inc. magazine asked executives at six hundred companies to estimate the percentage of their workforce who could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives predicted that 64 percent would be able to name them. When Inc. then asked employees to name the priorities, only 2 percent could do so. This is not the exception but the rule. Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities. The leaders I visited with were not shy about this. Statements of priorities were painted on walls, stamped on emails, incanted in speeches, dropped into conversation, and repeated over and over until they became part of the oxygen. One way to create awareness is to make a habit of regularly testing the company’s values and purpose, as James Burke did with the Credo challenge. This involves creating conversations that encourage people to grapple with the big questions: What are we about? Where are we headed? Many of the leaders I met seemed to do this instinctively, cultivating what might be called a productive dissatisfaction. They were mildly suspicious of success. They presumed that there were other, better ways of doing things, and they were unafraid of change. They presumed they didn’t have all the answers and so constantly sought guidance and clarity.
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Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity. Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time. They are about delivering machine-like reliability, and they tend to apply in domains in which the goal behaviors are clearly defined, such as service. Building purpose to perform these skills is like building a vivid map: You want to spotlight the goal and provide crystal-clear directions to the checkpoints along the way. Ways to do that include: •  Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. •  Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. •  Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). •  Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill. Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include: •  Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. •  Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. •  Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. •  Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative. Most groups, of course, consist of a combination of these skill types, as they aim for proficiency in certain areas and creativity in others. The key is to clearly identify these areas and tailor leadership accordingly.
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Embrace the Use of Catchphrases: When you look at successful groups, a lot of their internal language features catchphrases that often sound obvious, rah-rah, or corny. Many of us instinctively dismiss them as cultish jargon. But this is a mistake. Their occasionally cheesy obviousness is not a bug—it’s a feature. Their clarity, grating to the outsider’s ear, is precisely what helps them function. The trick to building effective catchphrases is to keep them simple, action-oriented, and forthright: “Create fun and a little weirdness” (Zappos), “Talk less, do more” (IDEO), “Work hard, be nice” (KIPP), “Pound the rock” (San Antonio Spurs), “Leave the jersey in a better place” (New Zealand All-Blacks), “Create raves for guests” (Danny Meyer’s restaurants). They’re hardly poetry, but they share an action-based clarity. They aren’t gentle suggestions so much as clear reminders, crisp nudges in the direction the group wants to go.
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Measure What Really Matters: The main challenge to building a clear sense of purpose is that the world is cluttered with noise, distractions, and endless alternative purposes. One solution is to create simple universal measures that place focus on what matters. A good example happened in the early days of Zappos, when Tony Hsieh noticed that call center workers were measured by the number of calls they handled per hour. He realized that this traditional measure was at odds with the group’s purpose and that it was driving unwanted behaviors (haste and brevity, for starters). So he banished that metric and replaced it with Personal Emotional Connections (PECs), or creating a bond outside the conversation about the product. It’s impossible, of course, to measure PECs precisely, but the goal here is not precision; it is to create awareness and alignment and to direct behavior toward the group’s mission. So when a customer service agent spent a company-record 10 hours and 29 minutes on a call, Zappos celebrated and sent out a press release.*
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Focus on Bar-Setting Behaviors: One challenge of building purpose is to translate abstract ideas (values, mission) into concrete terms. One way successful groups do this is by spotlighting a single task and using it to define their identity and set the bar for their expectations.
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Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values. The three skills work together from the bottom up, first building group connection and then channeling it into action.
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Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.
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Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
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These interactions were consistent whether the group was a military unit or a movie studio or an inner-city school. I made a list: •  Close physical proximity, often in circles •  Profuse amounts of eye contact •  Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) •  Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) •  High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone •  Few interruptions •  Lots of questions •  Intensive, active listening •  Humor, laughter •  Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)
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- [note::Indicators of good culture]

MIT Human Dynamics Lab
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- [note::Should check this out]

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.
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The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
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Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1.  Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2.  Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3.  Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4.  Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5.  Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.
- Location 266
- team synergy, group performance,

Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.
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Google didn’t win because it was smarter. It won because it was safer.
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Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.
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In the 1990s, sociologists James Baron and Michael Hannan analyzed the founding cultures of nearly two hundred technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. They found that most followed one of three basic models: the star model, the professional model, and the commitment model. The star model focused on finding and hiring the brightest people. The professional model focused on building the group around specific skill sets. The commitment model, on the other hand, focused on developing a group with shared values and strong emotional bonds. Of these, the commitment model consistently led to the highest rates of success. During the tech-bubble burst of 2000, the start-ups that used the commitment model survived at a vastly higher rate than the other two models, and achieved initial public offerings three times more often.
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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. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be. Larry Page created one of these moments when he posted his “These ads suck” note in the Google kitchen. Popovich delivers such feedback to his players every day, usually at high volume.
- Location 760
- psychological safety, 1socialpost-queue, feedback, favorite, organizational culture, employee engagement, candor,

Researchers discovered that one particular form of feedback boosted student effort and performance so immensely that they deemed it “magical feedback.” Students who received it chose to revise their papers far more often than students who did not, and their performance improved significantly. The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase. I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
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- [note::Awesome]

Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1.  You are part of this group. 2.  This group is special; we have high standards here. 3.  I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.
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They also give us insight into the reason Popovich’s methods are effective. His communications consist of three types of belonging cues. •  Personal, up-close connection (body language, attention, and behavior that translates as I care about you) •  Performance feedback (relentless coaching and criticism that translates as We have high standards here) •  Big-picture perspective (larger conversations about politics, history, and food that translate as Life is bigger than basketball)
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Beneath Hsieh’s unconventional approach lies a mathematical structure based on what he calls collisions. Collisions—defined as serendipitous personal encounters—are, he believes, the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion. He has set a goal of having one thousand “collisionable hours” per year for himself and a hundred thousand collisionable hours per acre for the Downtown Project.
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“This place is like a greenhouse,” Hsieh says. “In some greenhouses, the leader plays the role of the plant that every other plant aspires to. But that’s not me. I’m not the plant that everyone aspires to be. My job is to architect the greenhouse.”
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- [note::Useful analogy]

One pattern was immediately apparent: The most successful projects were those driven by sets of individuals who formed what Allen called “clusters of high communicators.”
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The key characteristic of the Allen Curve is the sudden steepness that happens at the eight-meter mark. At distances of less than eight meters, communication frequency rises off the charts. If our brains operated logically, we might expect the frequency and distance to change at a constant rate, producing a straight line. But as Allen shows, our brains do not operate logically. Certain proximities trigger huge changes in frequency of communication. Increase the distance to 50 meters, and communication ceases, as if a tap has been shut off. Decrease distance to 6 meters, and communication frequency skyrockets. In other words, proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.
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- [note::Physical proximity of team members is nonlinearly correlated with communication frequency - Is there a way to emulate this effect in remote contexts?]

(One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster.)
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- [note::This result might be highly dependent on context (i.e. work being performed) and the digitl literacy of the team members. I'm under the impression that humans are naturally bad communicators in remote environments.]

Building safety isn’t the kind of skill you can learn in a robotic, paint-by-numbers sort of way. It’s a fluid, improvisational skill—sort of like learning to pass a soccer ball to a teammate during a game. It requires you to recognize patterns, react quickly, and deliver the right signal at the right time. And like any skill, it comes with a learning curve.
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For example, Will Felps, who did the bad apple study (see Chapter 1), described how insights from his research affected the way he communicated in his personal life. “I used to like to try to make a lot of small clever remarks in conversation, trying to be funny, sometimes in a cutting way,” he says. “Now I see how negatively those signals can impact the group. So I try to show that I’m listening. When they’re talking, I’m looking at their face, nodding, saying ‘What do you mean by that,’ ‘Could you tell me more about this,’ or asking their opinions about what we should do, drawing people out.”
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- [note::Bad apple study conclusion - Introducing a "bad apple" person into a group severely decreases group performance.]

Overcommunicate Your Listening: When I visited the successful cultures, I kept seeing the same expression on the faces of listeners. It looked like this: head tilted slightly forward, eyes unblinking, and eyebrows arched up. Their bodies were still, and they leaned toward the speaker with intent. The only sound they made was a steady stream of affirmations—yes, uh-huh, gotcha—that encouraged the speaker to keep going, to give them more. “Posture and expression are incredibly important,” said Ben Waber, a former PhD student of Alex Pentland’s who founded Humanyze, a social analytics consulting firm. “It’s the way we prove that we’re in sync with someone.”
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Relatedly, it’s important to avoid interruptions. The smoothness of turn taking, as we’ve seen, is a powerful indicator of cohesive group performance. Interruptions shatter the smooth interactions at the core of belonging.
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Spotlight Your Fallibility Early On—Especially If You’re a Leader: In any interaction, we have a natural tendency to try to hide our weaknesses and appear competent. If you want to create safety, this is exactly the wrong move. Instead, you should open up, show you make mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like “This is just my two cents.” “Of course, I could be wrong here.” “What am I missing?” “What do you think?”
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“To create safety, leaders need to actively invite input,” Edmondson says. “It’s really hard for people to raise their hand and say, ‘I have something tentative to say.’ And it’s equally hard for people not to answer a genuine question from a leader who asks for their opinion or their help.”
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Embrace the Messenger: One of the most vital moments for creating safety is when a group shares bad news or gives tough feedback. In these moments, it’s important not simply to tolerate the difficult news but to embrace it. “You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”*1
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Preview Future Connection: One habit I saw in successful groups was that of sneak-previewing future relationships, making small but telling connections between now and a vision of the future. The St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, for example, is renowned for their culture and their ability to develop young players into big-league talent.
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- [note::"You know that pitcher? Three years ago he was sitting where you are."]

Overdo Thank-Yous: When you enter highly successful cultures, the number of thank-yous you hear seems slightly over the top. At the end of each basketball season, for example, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich takes each of his star players aside and thanks them for allowing him to coach them. Those are his exact words: Thank you for allowing me to coach you. It makes little logical sense—after all, both Popovich and the player are amply compensated, and it’s not like the player had a choice whether to be coached. But this kind of moment happens all the time in highly successful groups, because it has less to do with thanks than affirming the relationship.
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- [note::Need to do this more, but in the form of gifts and favors, not just verbal "thanks."]

thank-yous aren’t only expressions of gratitude; they’re crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.
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In my research, I sometimes saw the most powerful person in a group publicly express gratitude for one of the group’s least powerful members. For example, the chef Thomas Keller, who runs French Laundry, Per Se, and other world-class restaurants, has a habit of thanking the dishwasher at his restaurant openings, highlighting the fact that the performance of the restaurant depends on the person who performs the humblest task.
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Be Painstaking in the Hiring Process: Deciding who’s in and who’s out is the most powerful signal any group sends, and successful groups approach their hiring accordingly. Most have built lengthy, demanding processes that seek to assess fit, contribution (through deep background research and extensive interactions with a large number of people in the group), and performance (increasingly measured by tests). Some groups, like Zappos, have added an extra layer of belonging cues: after training is complete, they offer trainees a $2,000 bonus if they quit (about 10 percent of trainees accept the offer).
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Eliminate Bad Apples: The groups I studied had extremely low tolerance for bad apple behavior and, perhaps more important, were skilled at naming those behaviors. The leaders of the New Zealand All-Blacks, the rugby squad that ranks as one of the most successful teams on the planet, achieve this through a rule that simply states “No Dickheads.” It’s simple, and that’s why it’s effective.
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Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces: The groups I visited were uniformly obsessed with design as a lever for cohesion and interaction. I saw it in Pixar’s Steve Jobs–designed atrium, and in the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six’s expansive team rooms, which resemble hotel conference areas (albeit filled with extremely fit men with guns). I also saw it in smaller, simpler levers like coffee machines. A few years back, Bank of America was struggling with burnout in its call center teams. They brought in Ben Waber to do a sociometric analysis, which found that workers were highly stressed and that the best reliever of that stress was time spent together away from their desks. Waber recommended aligning team members’ schedules so they shared the same fifteen-minute coffee break every day. He also had the company buy nicer coffee machines and install them in more convenient gathering places. The effect was immediate: a 20 percent increase in productivity, and a reduction in turnover from 40 percent to 12 percent. Waber has also overseen interventions in company cafeterias: Merely replacing four-person tables with ten-person tables has boosted productivity by 10 percent. The lesson of all these studies is the same: Create spaces that maximize collisions.
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- [note::How can we emulate tbis in remote contexts?]

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice: Ensuring that everyone has a voice is easy to talk about but hard to accomplish. This is why many successful groups use simple mechanisms that encourage, spotlight, and value full-group contribution. For example, many groups follow the rule that no meeting can end without everyone sharing something.*2 Others hold regular reviews of recent work in which anybody can offer their two cents. (Pixar calls them Dailies, all-inclusive morning meetings where everybody gets the chance to offer input and feedback on recently created footage.) Others establish regular forums where anyone can bring an issue or question before the group’s leaders, no matter how controversial it might be. But no matter how strong the rule, the underlying key is to have leaders who seek out connection and make sure voices are heard.
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One of his first acts was to hold one-on-ones with each of the ship’s 310 sailors for thirty minutes. (Completing all the meetings took about six weeks.) Abrashoff asked each sailor three questions: 1.  What do you like most about the Benfold? 2.  What do you like least? 3.  What would you change if you were captain? Whenever Abrashoff received a suggestion he felt was immediately implementable, he announced the change over the ship’s intercom, giving credit to the idea’s originator.
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- leadership, conflict management, management, servant leadership, co-creation,

This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group. Picking up trash is one example, but the same kinds of behaviors exist around allocating parking places (egalitarian, with no special spots reserved for leaders), picking up checks at meals (the leaders do it every time), and providing for equity in salaries, particularly for start-ups. These actions are powerful not just because they are moral or generous but also because they send a larger signal: We are all in this together.
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Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other. For example, suppose you are hired at Pixar, whether it’s as a director or as a barista in the company café. On your first day, you and a small group of fellow newbies are ushered into the theater where screenings are held. You are asked to sit in the fifth row—because that’s where the directors sit. Then you hear the following words: Whatever you were before, you are a filmmaker now. We need you to help us make our films better.*3 “It’s incredibly powerful,” said Mike Sundy, who works in data management. “You feel changed.”
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But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.
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In the cultures I visited, I didn’t see many feedback sandwiches. Instead, I saw them separate the two into different processes. They handled negatives through dialogue, first by asking if a person wants feedback, then having a learning-focused two-way conversation about the needed growth. They handled positives through ultraclear bursts of recognition and praise. The leaders I spent time with shared a capacity for radiating delight when they spotted behavior worth praising. These moments of warm, authentic happiness functioned as magnetic north, creating clarity, boosting belonging, and orienting future action.
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- [note::i.e. More organic feedback]

A BrainTrust meeting is not fun. It is where directors are told that their characters lack heart, their storylines are confusing, and their jokes fall flat. But it’s also where those movies get better. “The BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” said Pixar president Ed Catmull. “It depends on completely candid feedback.”
- Location 1270
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At the Navy SEALs, such uncomfortable, candor-filled moments happen in the After-Action Review, or AAR. The AAR is a gathering that takes place immediately after each mission or training session: Team members put down their weapons, grab a snack and water, and start talking. As in BrainTrusts, the team members name and analyze problems and face uncomfortable questions head-on: Where did we fail? What did each of us do, and why did we do it? What will we do differently next time? AARs can be raw, painful, and filled with pulses of emotion and uncertainty.
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“Okay,” Reinhardt said, fixing Whitney with a bright, penetrating gaze. “The one thing we know about today is that it’s not going to go perfectly. I mean, it could, but odds are really, really, really high that it won’t.” A flicker of surprise traveled across Whitney’s face. She had trained for six months for this day, learning every painstaking detail of the job, hoping to perform well. She had worked as a back server, taken notes, sat in on lineup meetings, and shadowed shift after shift. Now she was being told in no uncertain terms that she was destined to screw up. “So here’s how we’ll know if you had a good day,” Reinhardt continued. “If you ask for help ten times, then we’ll know it was good. If you try to do it all alone…” His voice trailed off, the implication clear—It will be a catastrophe.
- Location 1288
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“People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that’s not what’s happening,” Polzer says. “It’s about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves.”
- Location 1319
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Normally, we think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown: first we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing us that we’ve got it backward. Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.
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After talking to Polzer and other scientists who study trust, I began to see vulnerability loops in other places I visited. Sometimes they were small, quick exchanges. A pro baseball coach began a season-opening speech to his players by saying, “I was so nervous about talking to you today,” and the players responded by smiling sympathetically—they were nervous too. Sometimes these loops took the form of physical objects, like the Failure Wall that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation built, a whiteboard where people could share moments where they’d fallen short. Sometimes they were habits of seemingly invulnerable leaders, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs’s penchant for beginning conversations with the phrase, “Here’s a dopey idea.” (“And sometimes they were,” recalls Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, in his memorial to Jobs. “Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.”) Each loop was different, yet they shared a deeper pattern: an acknowledgment of limits, a keen awareness of the group nature of the endeavor. The signal being sent was the same: You have a role here. I need you.
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Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.
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course, included Kauffman. The enlisted men of the first class took
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As one observer said, UCB’s relationship to Harolds was roughly the same as the Catholic Church’s relationship to celebrating Mass. All of which adds up to a curious situation: UCB was creating some of the most cohesive comic ensembles on the planet by spending a huge amount of time doing an activity that produced mostly pain and awkwardness.
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Good AARs follow a template. “You have to do it right away,” Cooper says. “You put down your gun, circle up, and start talking. Usually you take the mission from beginning to end, chronologically. You talk about every decision, and you talk about the process. You have to resist the temptation to wrap it all up in a bow, and try to dig for the truth of what happened, so people can really learn from it. You have to ask why, and then when they respond, you ask another why. Why did you shoot at that particular point? What did you see? How did you know? What other options were there? You ask and ask and ask.” The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions.
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Nyquist by all accounts possessed two important qualities. The first was warmth. He had a knack for making people feel cared for; every contemporary description paints him as “fatherly.” The second quality was a relentless curiosity. In a landscape made up of diverse scientific domains, he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections. “Nyquist was full of ideas, full of questions,” Bell Labs engineer Chapin Cutler recalls. “He drew people out, got them thinking.”
- Location 1846
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- [note::Reminds me of George Lucas's habit: "Just think about it" (source: Light & Magic documentary)]

Givechi approaches each Flight from the outside in. She does her research, mostly through conversations, to learn the issues the team has been wrestling with, both from a design perspective (what are the barriers?) and from a team-dynamics perspective (where is the friction?). Then with that landscape in mind, she gathers the group and asks questions designed to unearth tensions and help the group gain clarity about themselves and the project. The word she uses for this process is surfacing.*1 “I like the word connect,” Givechi says. “For me, every conversation is the same, because it’s about helping people walk away with a greater sense of awareness, excitement, and motivation to make an impact. Because individuals are really different. So you have to find different ways to make it comfortable and engaging for people to share what they’re really thinking about. It’s not about decisiveness—it’s about discovery. For me, that has to do with asking the right questions the right way.”*2
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questions teams could ask themselves, then provided those modules to design teams as tools to help them improve. For example, here are a few: •  The one thing that excites me about this particular opportunity is                         •  I confess, the one thing I’m not so excited about with this particular opportunity is                         •  On this project, I’d really like to get better at
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Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often: As we’ve seen, group cooperation is created by small, frequently repeated moments of vulnerability. Of these, none carries more power than the moment when a leader signals vulnerability. As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say. I
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Laszlo Bock, former head of People Analytics at Google, recommends that leaders ask their people three questions: •  What is one thing that I currently do that you’d like me to continue to do? •  What is one thing that I don’t currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? •  What can I do to make you more effective?
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Overcommunicate Expectations: The successful groups I visited did not presume that cooperation would happen on its own. Instead, they were explicit and persistent about sending big, clear signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles to maximize helping behavior.
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Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person: This was an informal rule that I encountered at several cultures. It goes like this: If you have negative news or feedback to give someone—even as small as a rejected item on an expense report—you are obligated to deliver that news face-to-face. This rule is not easy to follow (it’s far more comfortable for both the sender and receiver to communicate electronically), but it works because it deals with tension in an up-front, honest way that avoids misunderstandings and creates shared clarity and connection.
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Listen Like a Trampoline: Good listening is about more than nodding attentively; it’s about adding insight and creating moments of mutual discovery. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who run a leadership consultancy, analyzed 3,492 participants in a manager development program and found that the most effective listeners do four things: 1.  They interact in ways that make the other person feel safe and supported 2.  They take a helping, cooperative stance 3.  They occasionally ask questions that gently and constructively challenge old assumptions 4.  They make occasional suggestions to open up alternative paths
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As Zenger and Folkman put it, the most effective listeners behave like trampolines. They aren’t passive sponges. They are active responders, absorbing what the other person gives, supporting them, and adding energy to help the conversation gain velocity and altitude. Also like trampolines, effective listeners gain amplitude through repetition. When asking questions, they rarely stop at the first response. Rather, they find different ways to explore an area of tension, in order to reveal the truths and connections that will enable cooperation.
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“I’ve found that whenever you ask a question, the first response you get is usually not the answer—it’s just the first response,” Roshi Givechi says. “So I try to find ways to slowly surface things, to bring out what ought to be shared so that people can build from it. You have to find a lot of ways to ask the same question, and approach the same question from a lot of different angles. Then you have to build questions from that response, to explore more.”
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In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.’ ”
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Use Candor-Generating Practices like AARs, BrainTrusts, and Red Teaming:
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One good AAR structure is to use five questions: 1.  What were our intended results? 2.  What were our actual results? 3.  What caused our results? 4.  What will we do the same next time? 5.  What will we do differently?
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- [note::Should use this template for my weekly review]

Some teams also use a Before-Action Review, which is built around a similar set of questions: 1.  What are our intended results? 2.  What challenges can we anticipate? 3.  What have we or others learned from similar situations? 4.  What will make us successful this time?
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the goal of an AAR is not just to figure out what happened but also to build a shared mental model that helps the group navigate future problems.
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BrainTrusts, the project-based method pioneered by Pixar, involve assembling a team of experienced leaders who have no formal authority over the project and letting them critique its strengths and weaknesses in a frank and open manner. A key rule of BrainTrusts is that the team is not allowed to suggest solutions, only to highlight problems. This rule maintains the project leaders’ ownership of the task, and helps prevent them from assuming a passive, order-taking role.
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Red Teaming is a military-derived method for testing strategies; you create a “red team” to come up with ideas to disrupt or defeat your proposed plan. The key is to select a red team that is not wedded to the existing plan in any way, and to give them freedom to think in new ways that the planners might not have anticipated.
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Aim for Candor; Avoid Brutal Honesty:
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Embrace the Discomfort: One of the most difficult things about creating habits of vulnerability is that it requires a group to endure two discomforts: emotional pain and a sense of inefficiency. Doing an after action review or a BrainTrust combines the repetition of digging into something that already happened (shouldn’t we be moving forward?) with the burning awkwardness inherent in confronting unpleasant truths. But as with any workout, the key is to understand that the pain is not a problem but the path to building a stronger group.
- Location 2070
- group vulnerability, group_dynamics, post-mortem, discomfort, vulnerability, emotional pain,

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development: While it seems natural to hold these two conversations together, in fact it’s more effective to keep performance review and professional development separate. Performance evaluation tends to be a high-risk, inevitably judgmental interaction, often with salary-related consequences. Development, on the other hand, is about identifying strengths and providing support and opportunities for growth. Linking them into one conversation muddies the waters. Relatedly, many groups have moved away from ranking workers and shifted to more of a coaching model, where people receive frequent feedback designed to provide them with both a vivid performance snapshot and a path for improvement.
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Use Flash Mentoring: One of the best techniques I’ve seen for creating cooperation in a group is flash mentoring. It is exactly like traditional mentoring—you pick someone you want to learn from and shadow them—except that instead of months or years, it lasts a few hours. Those brief interactions help break down barriers inside a group, build relationships, and facilitate the awareness that fuels helping behavior.
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Make the Leader Occasionally Disappear: Several leaders of successful groups have the habit of leaving the group alone at key moments. One of the best at this is Gregg Popovich. Most NBA teams run time-outs according to a choreographed protocol: First the coaches huddle as a group for a few seconds to settle on a message, then they walk over to the bench to deliver that message to the players. However, during about one time-out a month, the Spurs coaches huddle for a time-out…and then never walk over to the players. The players sit on the bench, waiting for Popovich to show up. Then, as they belatedly realize he isn’t coming, they take charge, start talking among themselves, and figure out a plan.
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These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.
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Purpose isn’t about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we’ll call high-purpose environments. High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go.
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Step 1: Think about a realistic goal that you’d like to achieve. It could be anything: Become skilled at a sport, rededicate yourself to a relationship, lose a few pounds, get a new job. Spend a few seconds reflecting on that goal and imagining that it’s come true. Picture a future where you’ve achieved it. Got it? Step 2: Take a few seconds and picture the obstacles between you and that goal as vividly as possible. Don’t gloss over the negatives, but try to see them as they truly are. For example, if you were trying to lose weight, you might picture those moments of weakness when you smell warm cookies, and you decide to eat one (or three). That’s it. It’s called mental contrasting,
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We tend to use the word story casually, as if stories and narratives were ephemeral decorations for some unchanging underlying reality. The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation.
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Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.
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What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors.
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They created a high-purpose environment, flooded the zone with signals that linked the present effort to a meaningful future, and used a single story to orient motivation the way that a magnetic field orients a compass needle to true north: This is why we work. Here is where you should put your energy.
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One of the best measures of any group’s culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.
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These signals consisted of five basic types: 1.  Framing: Successful teams conceptualized MICS as a learning experience that would benefit patients and the hospital. Unsuccessful teams conceptualized MICS as an add-on to existing practices. 2.  Roles: Successful teams were explicitly told by the team leader why their individual and collective skills were important for the team’s success, and why it was important for them to perform as a team. Unsuccessful teams were not. 3.  Rehearsal: Successful teams did elaborate dry runs of the procedure, preparing in detail, explaining the new protocols, and talking about communication. Unsuccessful teams took minimal steps to prepare. 4.  Explicit encouragement to speak up: Successful teams were told by team leaders to speak up if they saw a problem; they were actively coached through the feedback process. The leaders of unsuccessful teams did little coaching, and as a result team members were hesitant to speak up. 5.  Active reflection: Between surgeries, successful teams went over performance, discussed future cases, and suggested improvements. For example, the team leader at Mountain Medical wore a head-mounted camera during surgery to help facilitate discussion and feedback. Unsuccessful teams tended not to do this.
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Sometimes those signals involved the hospital (MICS is an important learning opportunity); sometimes the patient (Patients will benefit); sometimes the team member (You have a role and a future with this team); sometimes they placed value on rehearsal or reflection. But they all performed the same vital function: to flood the environment with narrative links between what they were doing now and what it meant.
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- [note::The "Why"]

This is the way high-purpose environments work. They are about sending not so much one big signal as a handful of steady, ultra-clear signals that are aligned with a shared goal. They are less about being inspiring than about being consistent. They are found not within big speeches so much as within everyday moments when people can sense the message: This is why we work; this is what we are aiming for.
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These tasks are not simple, because they depend on an unbroken chain of awareness and action. The waiter who brought the Château d’Yquem had to (1) be alert to the dynamic between the excited, hopeful young woman and her worried parents; (2) notice the father’s comment about the wine; (3) connect it to an idea; (4) be empowered to spend the restaurant’s money on a gesture; and (5) deliver that gesture with grace. At any point, the chain could have been broken, and no one would have noticed.
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- [note::Could create a diagram that visualizes this.]

Here are a few: Read the guest Athletic hospitality Writing a great final chapter Turning up the Home Dial Loving problems Finding the yes Collecting the dots and connecting the dots Creating raves for guests One size fits one Skunking Making the charitable assumption Planting like seeds in like gardens Put us out of business with your generosity
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Many leaders of high-proficiency groups focus on creating priorities, naming keystone behaviors, and flooding the environment with heuristics that link the two. For example, if you spend time around the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team, you will hear them talk about “leaving the jersey in a better place,” and saying, “If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere,” keeping a “blue head” instead of a “red head” (which refers to calmness under pressure), “Pressure is a privilege,” “TQB—total quality ball,” “KBA—keep the ball alive,” “Front up, or fuck off,” “It’s an honor, not a job,” “Go for the gap,” and “Better people make better All-Blacks.” KIPP, the network of highly successful charter schools, is similarly built around catchphrases like “No shortcuts,” “Work hard, be nice,” “Don’t eat the marshmallow,” “Team and family,” “If there’s a problem, we look for the solution,” “Read, baby, read,” “All of us will learn,” “KIPPsters do the right thing when no one is watching,” “Everything is earned,” “Be the constant, not the variable,” “If a teammate needs help, we give; if we need help, we ask,” “No robots,” and “Prove the doubters wrong.”
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Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices.
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- [note::LOVE this phrasing. Reminds me of "you have to coe up with 10 bad ideas before coming up with a kinda sorta good idea"]

“There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.”
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ownership over the project.* Accordingly, Catmull
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Catmull has almost no direct involvement with creative decisions. This is because he realizes that (1) the teams are in a better position to solve problems, and (2) a suggestion from a powerful person tends to be followed. One of his frequently used phrases is “Now it’s up to you.” This is also why he tends to let a troubled project roll on “a bit too long,” as he puts it, before pulling the plug and/or restarting it with a different team. “If you do a restart before everyone is completely ready, you risk upsetting things,” he says. “You have to wait until it’s clear to everyone that it needs to be restarted.”
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Catmull is congenitally wary of mottoes and catchphrases, as he believes they can easily distort reality. Nonetheless a handful of “Ed-isms” are heard in Pixar’s corridors. Here are a few: Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.
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building creative purpose isn’t really about creativity. It’s about building ownership, providing support, and aligning group energy toward the arduous, error-filled, ultimately fulfilling journey of making something new.
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This gives us insight into building purpose. It’s not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite from a hymnal of catchphrases. It’s a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting, and above all, learning. High-purpose environments don’t descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates its problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.
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Name and Rank Your Priorities: In order to move toward a target, you must first have a target. Listing your priorities, which means wrestling with the choices that define your identity, is the first step. Most successful groups end up with a small handful of priorities (five or fewer), and many, not coincidentally, end up placing their in-group relationships—how they treat one another—at the top of the list. This reflects the truth that many successful groups realize: Their greatest project is building and sustaining the group itself. If they get their own relationships right, everything else will follow.
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Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be: A while back Inc. magazine asked executives at six hundred companies to estimate the percentage of their workforce who could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives predicted that 64 percent would be able to name them. When Inc. then asked employees to name the priorities, only 2 percent could do so. This is not the exception but the rule. Leaders are inherently biased to presume that everyone in the group sees things as they do, when in fact they don’t. This is why it’s necessary to drastically overcommunicate priorities. The leaders I visited with were not shy about this. Statements of priorities were painted on walls, stamped on emails, incanted in speeches, dropped into conversation, and repeated over and over until they became part of the oxygen. One way to create awareness is to make a habit of regularly testing the company’s values and purpose, as James Burke did with the Credo challenge. This involves creating conversations that encourage people to grapple with the big questions: What are we about? Where are we headed? Many of the leaders I met seemed to do this instinctively, cultivating what might be called a productive dissatisfaction. They were mildly suspicious of success. They presumed that there were other, better ways of doing things, and they were unafraid of change. They presumed they didn’t have all the answers and so constantly sought guidance and clarity.
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Figure Out Where Your Group Aims for Proficiency and Where It Aims for Creativity: Every group skill can be sorted into one of two basic types: skills of proficiency and skills of creativity. Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time. They are about delivering machine-like reliability, and they tend to apply in domains in which the goal behaviors are clearly defined, such as service. Building purpose to perform these skills is like building a vivid map: You want to spotlight the goal and provide crystal-clear directions to the checkpoints along the way. Ways to do that include: •  Fill the group’s windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. •  Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. •  Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). •  Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill. Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before. Generating purpose in these areas is like supplying an expedition: You need to provide support, fuel, and tools and to serve as a protective presence that empowers the team doing the work. Some ways to do that include: •  Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. •  Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team’s creative autonomy. •  Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. •  Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative. Most groups, of course, consist of a combination of these skill types, as they aim for proficiency in certain areas and creativity in others. The key is to clearly identify these areas and tailor leadership accordingly.
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Embrace the Use of Catchphrases: When you look at successful groups, a lot of their internal language features catchphrases that often sound obvious, rah-rah, or corny. Many of us instinctively dismiss them as cultish jargon. But this is a mistake. Their occasionally cheesy obviousness is not a bug—it’s a feature. Their clarity, grating to the outsider’s ear, is precisely what helps them function. The trick to building effective catchphrases is to keep them simple, action-oriented, and forthright: “Create fun and a little weirdness” (Zappos), “Talk less, do more” (IDEO), “Work hard, be nice” (KIPP), “Pound the rock” (San Antonio Spurs), “Leave the jersey in a better place” (New Zealand All-Blacks), “Create raves for guests” (Danny Meyer’s restaurants). They’re hardly poetry, but they share an action-based clarity. They aren’t gentle suggestions so much as clear reminders, crisp nudges in the direction the group wants to go.
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Measure What Really Matters: The main challenge to building a clear sense of purpose is that the world is cluttered with noise, distractions, and endless alternative purposes. One solution is to create simple universal measures that place focus on what matters. A good example happened in the early days of Zappos, when Tony Hsieh noticed that call center workers were measured by the number of calls they handled per hour. He realized that this traditional measure was at odds with the group’s purpose and that it was driving unwanted behaviors (haste and brevity, for starters). So he banished that metric and replaced it with Personal Emotional Connections (PECs), or creating a bond outside the conversation about the product. It’s impossible, of course, to measure PECs precisely, but the goal here is not precision; it is to create awareness and alignment and to direct behavior toward the group’s mission. So when a customer service agent spent a company-record 10 hours and 29 minutes on a call, Zappos celebrated and sent out a press release.*
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Focus on Bar-Setting Behaviors: One challenge of building purpose is to translate abstract ideas (values, mission) into concrete terms. One way successful groups do this is by spotlighting a single task and using it to define their identity and set the bar for their expectations.
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