Perhaps the Best Book Ever Written on Team Culture

Healthy, thriving workplace culture is a huge passion of mine, and not just for the humanitarian aspects of kindness and wellbeing for our teams (although that’s compelling enough in and of itself), but healthy culture is just plain good for business. Look at Intuit, as an example (disclosure: I’m a Product Design Manager for Intuit)… we consistently rank among the Best Places to Work for having such a healthy culture, and also were named to Forbes Future 50 list for the top 50 companies most likely to provide long-term high growth.

These two accolades are no coincidence, because when people feel psychologically/emotionally safe in the workplace they don’t have to waste brain power on self-preservation and fear. I’ve been in toxic workplace cultures where no matter how highly I was performing it still felt like at any moment I may be attacked with cutting words from colleagues or leaders. I remember almost everyday thinking, “I hope I don’t get fired today,” even though I was the highest performing person in the department. In fact, while working in one toxic culture my doctor diagnosed me with severely high blood pressure, even though I had never had it previously (and have never had it since leaving that toxic workplace). Now that I lead a team I’m so passionate about making everyone on my team always feel safe, valued, and set free to truly do the best work of their life.

This past year I had the incredible pleasure of reading perhaps the best book ever written on healthy culture, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle. The book is based in tons of research, and so well-written. Not to ruin it for you, but essentially Coyle details through research and anecdotal evidence how the world’s highest performing group all have team cultures that share the following three traits:

1) Psychological/Emotional Safety

2) Vulnerability

3) Connected to Purpose

Give it a read or an audiobook listen—it gave me clarity, hard evidence and a framework for what myself and so many others have long observed in real life. I love it when books do that.