Book Review(s): The Culture Code vs. The Captain Class
How do you build a great team? Two reviews for the price of one
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, by Daniel Coyle, published in 2018.
The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams, by Sam Walker, published in 2017.
Two books about building great teams. Both published within a couple years of the other. Both titles follow a pattern of "The C C ". Both subtitles promise something "hidden" or "secret" (though, in fairness, what subtitle doesn't?).
This review is longer than usual, but you're getting two for the price of one. In my opinion it's worth reading because building the right culture is important if you care about winning.
The main ideas
In The Captain Class, Sam Walker didn't originally set out to analyze captains. Instead, he says he set out to analyze the teams who were the best of all time. He spends all of Chapter 1 explaining to us the methodology he used to select the sixteen best teams of all time—what he calls "Tier One". He tries to use objective data to avoid selection bias (I'm not convinced he succeeds). Only after selecting these teams and researching them does he decide there's only one factor they all shared: "the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it", adding later that "it’s not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself."
He devotes one chapter to each of his "seven traits of elite captains":
Extreme doggedness and focus in competition.
Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules.
A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows.
A low-key, practical, and democratic communication style.
Motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays.
Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart.
Ironclad emotional control.
We'll talk more about a number of these traits in the coming sections.
The Culture Code also believes that great teams are built from a prime number of key concepts—but here the prime number is three, not seven. The Culture Code's key concepts are:
Build Safety
Share Vulnerability
Establish Purpose
Building safety is about making people feel comfortable and valued within the group. It's about building a place where people are "focusing on the task, [not] navigating their uncertainty about one another." The author highlights a leader who excels at building safety, saying he "radiates an idea that is something like, Hey, this is all really comfortable and engaging, and I’m curious about what everybody else has to say."
Here's how he puts it in another section:
“For hundreds of thousands of years, we needed ways to develop cohesion because we depended so much on each other. We used signals long before we used language, and our unconscious brains are incredibly attuned to certain types of behaviors.” [says a researcher he interviews]
Belonging cues possess three basic qualities:
1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring
2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued
3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue
These cues add up to a message that can be described with a single phrase: You are safe here. They seek to notify our ever-vigilant brains that they can stop worrying about dangers and shift into connection mode, a condition called psychological safety.
Sharing vulnerability, the next key concept, is about admitting that we don't individually have all the answers. Leaders should:
model this behavior themselves...: "I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say."
...and encourage it in their team members: “So here’s how we’ll know if you had a good day,” [a manager tells his employee] “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.
Here's how Daniel Coyle puts it:
a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? [or] Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform. The key, as we’re about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability. [Another exchange used later in the chapter is: Hey, I’m doing this crazy [...] project and I need your help.]
It means being open to criticism, and facing challenges head-on:
A BrainTrust meeting [at Pixar Studios] 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.”
In rhythm and tone, BrainTrust meetings resemble the atmosphere inside the cockpit of Flight 232. They consist of a steady stream of here’s-the-bad-news notifications accompanied by a few big, scary questions—Does anybody know how to land this thing? Participants spend most of the time in a state of brow-furrowing struggle as they grapple with the fact that the movie, at the moment, isn’t working. “All our movies suck at first,” Catmull says. “The BrainTrust is where we figure out why they suck, and it’s also where they start to not suck.”
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.
It's mentioned later in the book that these After-Action Reviews are "led not by commanders but by enlisted men. There are no agendas, and no minutes are kept. The goal is to create a flat landscape without rank..."—perhaps a point in favor of the "it's captains, not coaches" theory of The Captain Class.
The author's first example of how teams build shared vulnerability is...Navy SEALs Hell Week. The SEALs team leader he interviews says "One of the best things I’ve found to improve a team’s cohesion is to send them to do some hard, hard training. There’s something about hanging off a cliff together, and being wet and cold and miserable together, that makes a team come together.". Although I agree doing hard things together is a great way to build a team, most people in everyday life aren't going to volunteer themselves for a Hell Week.
The Culture Code's final key to great teams is Establish purpose. It means pretty much what it sounds like it means: have a set of meaningful guiding principles that everyone is aware of. Coyle says many of these high-performing teams he researched use catchphrases, even though they may sound corny at first:
At first encounter, a heuristic-dense culture feels slightly off-putting. “For the first few days I worked here, I heard all the language, and it was like, ‘Are we in summer camp?’ ...It’s totally hokey and corny. And then you start to see how they work, and you start using them in regular life. Then all of a sudden they’re not corny—they’re just part of the oxygen.”
He suggests "A simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviors ... [this set of priorities can] function as a lighthouse, orienting behavior and providing a path toward a goal." His other top suggestions for establishing purpose:
Name and Rank Your Priorities: ...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.
Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be: ....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.
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.
[An example of this is Pixar's shorts...] The shorts lose money, but they pay off in other ways. They invest in the studio’s young talent, create experimentation, and most important, showcase the attention and excellence they channel into every task.
The Captain Class was too toxic for me
If you want my personal opinion on what book to read and model your teams on, I have an easy answer for you: I liked The Culture Code better. The Captain Class condones too many behaviors that are, for me, toxic. (The Culture Code perhaps swings too far in the other direction for some people, with its first two priorities being "safety" and "vulnerability". But that feels like a more forgivable imperfection, and he exemplifies those concepts using very "macho" cultures like the SEALs and NBA basketball.)
Let's start with trait #1, "Extreme doggedness and focus in competition." In theory, I agree this is an important quality of an elite athlete and leader. But the book takes it too far when multiple "Tier One" captains are lauded for playing through concussions.
First there's Buck Shelford of the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team:
Before the break, during a defensive ruck, Shelford grabbed the ball from a French player and ripped it free. Just then he saw a French prop named Jean-Pierre Garuet-Lempirou diving at him, headfirst, in full horizontal flight. The Frenchman rammed Shelford in the middle of the forehead. “He knocked me out cold,” Shelford remembered. “It took me two minutes to come around.” As Shelford regained consciousness, a teammate, Jock Hobbs, told him he had to stay in the game because there was no one left on the bench to replace him. Everyone else was injured.
Shelford had no intention of quitting.
Maurice Richards of the Montreal Canadiens is also approved of for returning after a concussion:
After leaving the ice during a 1952 playoff game with a concussion and a bloody gash on his forehead, for instance, Maurice Richard of the Montreal Canadiens returned in the third period, his leaking wound wrapped in bandages, to skate past three Boston defenders and score the game-winning goal.
I think working hard and being extremely focused are obviously good qualities of a captain. But at some point, a great captain should be able to stop, and preserve their health while still having effectively inspired their team. Walker draws that line much further towards recklessness than I'm willing to.
Trait #2 isn't any better: "Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules." I don't think intentional fouls are necessarily immoral, in sports that allow intentional fouls. But there are lines I'm not interested in crossing.
My goal is to build a great team that's free of the stereotypical toxic bullshit. Perhaps cheating really is something that's required to be one of the sixteen-best teams of all time across sports. If so, I'd be happy with a normal amount of greatness achieved without assholery. Our small cultures are all contained within the larger culture of humanity, and preventing that culture from becoming more zero-sum comes before winning a sports game.
Interestingly, he only actually shares stories of aggressive rule testing from two of the sixteen captains (then he switches to the world of business, and discusses how Steve Jobs was an asshole, too). Does he actually have examples of all his captains behaving this way? This being the trait of great captains that was sure to be the most controversial, I wish he would have provided more examples if he really wanted to convince me. I watched Tim Duncan play basketball for pretty much his entire career and never thought of him as a rule-breaker.
Where the books agree
Moving past the parts of The Captain Class that didn't work for me, the rest of the traits of great leaders generally matched up with ideas in The Culture Code.
Both books believe great leaders work hard on unglamorous tasks. In The Captain Class, Sam Walker calls this "carrying water", based on a story about French soccer legend Didier Deschamps. He also talks about former US soccer captain Carla Overbeck, who was known to carry her teammates' bags off the bus when arriving at a hotel:
Her work ethic in training, combined with her bag-schlepping humility on and off the field, allowed her to amass a form of currency she could spend however she saw fit. She didn’t use it to dominate play on the field. She used it to ride her teammates when they needed to be woken up, knowing that it wouldn’t create resentment. Anson Dorrance, who coached the team from 1986 to 1994, said he believed Overbeck carried the team’s luggage so that when she got on the field, “she could say anything she wanted.”
...The great captains lowered themselves in relation to the group whenever possible in order to earn the moral authority to drive them forward in tough moments.
Mirroring the comments on toxicity above, I don't love that he frames it as explicitly transactional—carrying water earns moral authority to spend later. In The Culture Code, the idea is less transactional, and more like "modeling this behavior subtly influences the team in a better direction". The Culture Code's version of carrying water is "picking up trash":
Back in the mid-1960s, UCLA’s men’s basketball team was in the midst of one of the most successful eras in sports history, winning ten titles in twelve years. Franklin Adler, the team’s student manager, saw something odd: John Wooden, the team’s legendary head coach, was picking up trash in the locker room. “Here was a man who had already won three national championships,” Adler said, “a man who was already enshrined in the Hall of Fame as a player, a man who had created and was in the middle of a dynasty—bending down and picking up scraps from the locker room floor.”...
I kept seeing that pattern...The leaders of the All-Blacks rugby team...do the menial work, cleaning and tidying the locker rooms—and along the way vividly model the team’s ethic of togetherness and teamwork.
This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group....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.
Another way to signal togetherness is to shun hierarchy. A teammate of one leader profiled in The Culture Code said of them:
He wasn’t one of those people who moved up the leadership chain just to move up. He’s one of us.
Likewise, The Captain Class says:
[The best leaders] are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute.
Both books agree that leaders don't need to be "charismatic", at least by traditional standards. Says The Captain Class:
To prepare a group to meet some prodigious challenge, a leader is supposed to draw its members together and talk to them [according to stereotypes/Hollywood].
But it was here, in this regard, that the captains of the sixteen teams in Tier One deviated the furthest from our image of what makes an eminent leader. These men and women were not silver-tongued orators or fiery motivators. They didn’t like giving speeches.
In fact, they made a point of avoiding them.
When I asked Jérôme Fernandez, the captain of the French national handball team, whether he ever gave inspirational talks, he said he’d tried it only once—and it had been a miserable failure. Carles Puyol told me he couldn’t remember ever formally addressing his Barcelona teammates. “It’s not something I liked,” he said.
One of the leaders profiled in The Culture Code says of herself:
“Socially, I’m not the chattiest person. I love stories, but I’m not the person in the middle of the room telling the story. I’m the person on the side listening and asking questions. They’re usually questions that might seem obvious or simple or unnecessary. But I love asking them because I’m trying to understand what’s really going on.”
Author Daniel Coyle also writes that former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is "anticharismatic" and "he does not communicate particularly well".
Can we trust the science?
[Edit (2024-02-09): The next two paragraphs were revised slightly to make the meaning clearer.]
In The Captain Class, Sam Walker use the first chapter to explain how he generated an "empirical" list of the best teams ever. But it's not clear it is all that empirical. A Negro Leagues team that won "eight titles in nine seasons" (1937–45) is kept off the list because "racial segregation prevented them from taking on the top all-white teams of the major leagues". But then how did the 1949-53 Yankees make the list when there were only a handful of black players in the entire MLB at that time?
The same question could be asked of Hungary's 1950-1955 soccer team. They made the list without even winning a World Cup—while competing against European teams that often didn't have black players. They made it without a World Cup, but Michael Jordan's 6-championships-in-8-seasons Chicago Bulls didn't make the list.
There was one other, unrelated, line in The Captain Class that made me question its integrity. He says the following about San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan:
Off the court, Duncan did something else that was unheard-of—he agreed to be paid less than his market value so the team would have more space under the NBA’s salary cap to sign better players. In 2015, Duncan’s two-year, $10.4 million deal was shockingly far below what he could have demanded on the open market
But the author is trying to put one over on us. In 2015, Duncan was in his age-39 season and had clearly declined significantly. He wasn't "shockingly" underpaid. Not to mention his career earnings were already at about $230 million. When the author is only being semi-honest about the one thing I do know about, I'm much less inclined to trust him about the things I don't know about. (I suppose he's taking his own advice at least — "testing the limits of the rules" in journalism as he suggests great captains should do in sports.)
Let me give a little credit where it's due, though. There was one sentence I was sure must be false, but it turns out is actually true. One of the captains he profiles is Cuban volleyball legend Mireya Luis. He reports:
A teammate, Marlenis Costa, said Luis once jumped so high that her toes brushed the bottom of the net. “She got scared because she thought her feet might get tangled on the way down,” Costa remembered. “Her leaping ability was supernatural.”
I thought for sure this was exaggeration, but YouTube has convinced me that it's believable. What an incredible athlete:
The Culture Code worried me in a different way. Daniel Coyle cites lots of studies...and a lot of them feel like exactly the kind of science that wouldn't replicate.
Here's an example:
SCENARIO 1: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “Can I borrow your cellphone?”
SCENARIO 2: You are standing in the rain at a train station. A stranger approaches and politely says, “I’m so sorry about the rain. Can I borrow your cellphone?”
QUESTION: To which stranger are you more likely to respond?
...
When Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School performed the experiment, she discovered that the second scenario caused the response rate to jump 422 percent. Those six words—I’m so sorry about the rain—transformed people’s behavior.
This is a little hard to believe. Although I understand why he didn't do it, I would've trusted The Culture Code more if he added "(yes, this result has been replicated)" after discussing the result of this study or that study. This "social cues"/"culture building" type stuff is exactly the type of study hit hardest by the replication crisis.
I have mixed feelings about this criticism, though. Although I know lots of these studies don't replicate, I also know from personal experience that the right mindset change at the right moment of your life can totally change the direction your life takes. Certain interventions can change a life by more than 400%—it's just that the same intervention won't work for a different person who's going through something different in their life.
Overall, I like the suggestions offered in The Culture Code. But I like them because they match up with things I've already started to believe due to life experiences and other books. I'm convinced because it feels right to me, not because the studies he cites makes his conclusions incontrovertibly true.
Small, consistent signals
Throughout The Culture Code, Coyle reminds us that culture is built not through big, one-time gestures, but through "consistent little signals." Sometimes, the same felt true of the book itself: the small moments—like people explaining how they interacted in positive ways—were as interesting as the big ideas.
Here are a few quotes I highlighted:
“He delivers two things over and over: He’ll tell you the truth, with no bullshit, and then he’ll love you to death.” [said of Greg Popovich]
The [best type of feedback, according to researchers] 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.
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.
“One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say: ‘Say more about that.’ ” says [a leader of an industry-best design team]. [Another employee says about her:] “She doesn’t let things stay unclear, even when they’re uncomfortable. Especially when they’re uncomfortable.”
Part-time cultures?
There was one large disconnect between the cultures in these books and the cultures in my life. All of the teams examined in these books are made up of world-class performers. Pixar is hiring the best animators. Everyone playing for the San Antonio Spurs is one of the 500-or-so best basketball players in the world. Navy SEALs are all highly trained.
In other words, the examples in these books are "turning a group of world-class individuals into a world-class team". But that's not really a relevant category in my life. The question that I'm facing is something more like "how do I inspire team members to care enough to put in the work to get a little closer to being world-class?"
Perhaps many of the same suggestions will help me solve my slightly different problem. But it's hard to know for sure. It's worth trying—it's not like I have other, better ideas tailor-made for my situation.
To put it a slightly different way: the cultures I'm currently part of are "part-time" cultures. The team I coach meets three times a week for two hours. If I was spending 40 hours per week with the players I coach (like Greg Popovich does, or any manager of a high-performing corporate team), of course I would set aside time for having lots of good conversations where we discuss purpose and share vulnerability.
But with a team like mine that's together for at most 6 hours per week, and with players who are much less invested, it's harder to figure out how to work in the right amount of culture building.
To come at the same question from one final direction, one of The Culture Code's top suggestions for building safety in a team is:
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, and performance.
Ironically, I coach a team that allows anyone to join. I still think it's possible to build a culture on a team like this—people who notice they don't fit can self-select by not coming to practice. But building a culture this way will be harder without access to "the most powerful signal any group sends".
What I'll do differently
In my role as a coach, the conclusions of The Captain Class are a bit awkward—most coaches don't actually provide much value. He shares research that purports to show "77 percent [of coaches in a study's sample] had impacts that ranged from neutral to negative". However, the lessons of the book suggest one strategy for a coach—inspire one player to become an elite captain. Doing that is equivalent to inspiring a whole team.
A few of the suggestions from The Culture Code were already on my radar, and I'll continue to commit to doing them well. The importance of candid feedback has been drilled into me by a number of books, and I'll continue working to build environments where candid feedback can be shared. I like the book's idea to be loud/effusive/public with praise while offering constructive criticism only after getting consent in dedicated, one-on-one sessions. I think I've also done well at exemplifying the "pick up trash" mindset, and will continue to do so.
I'd like to do a better job of building purpose and making it explicit on my teams. Using catchphrases as consistent reminders of purpose is an idea I can get behind.
Another purpose/"family building" suggestion that didn't make it into the review elsewhere is being great at welcoming people on their first day. Studies have shown that new members are much more likely to stick around when they're exposed to a team's togetherness and purpose right from the first day. It's another research finding I'm not sure I fully trust, but it's logical enough that I'm happy to try it.
I really liked this summary! Thanks for putting it together