Why a good company culture is so important – and what you can do to build it.

Most of us have been there at some point: the deafening silence of a workplace where no one talks. If you’ve been in one of these stifling environments, you may have noticed (in between stealing glances at your LinkedIn feed) that they’re rarely the birthplace of creative greatness. On the other hand, you may have been lucky enough to be part of a company with “good culture” – somewhere you can be yourself, where your lamest ideas are listened to and given consideration by others, where people trust each other to do their jobs without scrutiny.

Put simply, “culture” is defined by the chemistry (or lack of it) that happens when members of any given team interact. Mr Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, is an expert in helping organisations make that chemistry great: and his new book, The Culture Code, shows that it takes more than foosball tables, bean bags and annoying HR buzzwords.

But why is good culture so important? “We’ve all experienced great culture and what it can do,” Mr Coyle says, “all companies are obsessed with how to improve it. But not all organisations know that good culture…[is] the most important thing by an insane amount. Some companies have good culture, some don’t, and the difference between them can be hundreds and hundreds of per cent on the bottom line, over a period of years.”

Mr Coyle argues that good culture consists of learnable behaviours that any company can adopt. You may have heard, for instance, of Google (trust us, they’re going to be big) – which empowers its employees to fix problems without waiting for the go-ahead. This “ask for permission later” culture led an engineer named Mr Jeff Dean to come in to work one weekend in 2002, casually fixing Google’s search algorithm and boosting its accuracy scores by double digits – along with its profits. Mr Coyle calls this “designing for belonging” – a culture of safety where everyone feels comfortable rolling their sleeves up and fixing things. But building belonging and trust is about more than going through the motions of teamwork. It requires deep bonds between people: bonds that are created by doing stuff, instead of talking about it.

Bonds between Navy Seals, with whom Mr Coyle spent a substantial amount of time, are pretty tight: As you might expect, the US Army’s primary special operations force needs everyone to trust his or her colleagues implicitly. (They do, after all, spend a fair amount of time risking their lives together.) But they’re not the first group you’d associate with vulnerability – a quality that The Culture Code argues is essential for effective teamwork. In one dreaded exercise called Log PT (physical training), teams of six manipulate a 10ft-long, 250lb telephone pole together. Each complex, delicate or gruelling manoeuvre requires every team member to be hyper-aware of every other team member: taking up slack when they tire, making minute compensations for their every move (see the relevance here?). This intense teamwork leads to a state where vulnerability and interconnectedness meet, which builds an intense, powerful sense of trust.

There’s also plenty any aspiring team leader can learn from the way the Navy Seals deal with failure. As Mr Coyle says, “the commander of the team who led the raid on Osama Bin Laden told me something interesting. He said, ‘The most memorable words a leader can say are, “I screwed that up.’”

Good cultures become tireless at this continual, brutal self-examination in the face of failure. They’re willing to experience the pain of exposing weakness: knowing that difficult conversations strengthen bonds and intensify trust. But being part of a culture like this is not an experience that happens to everyone passively. It takes continual effort. It’s not easy. Tellingly, Mr Coyle refers to members of good cultures as “communication athletes”. If all that sounds like too much hard work, then it’s worth remembering one more piece of advice from Mr Coyle: “Culture isn’t something you simply are. It’s something you have to do.”

When leaders expose their failings, this gives others permission to show their fallibility, too. When a group shares weakness it shares truth. And the bonds this creates make a group invincible.

Get used to asking one simple question that the best leaders ask a lot: “Tell me more about that”. Being a real, active, true listener involves digging beneath the first response to get more from your subject.

The first five seconds of any interaction decide whether we’re in or out, safe or not. It’s where someone either connects with us, or doesn’t. To really connect with someone, the gateway to any relationship is in the way we’re introduced.

The Culture Code (Penguin) by Mr Dan Coyle is out on 1 February