A Practical Guide To Building Team Culture (Including Remote-Team Culture)

"Success is the strongest narcotic ever created; it tends to blind us toward danger, as well as opportunities to get better."

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If you work in the world of elite teams, you've probably heard of Dan

iel Coyle. His writing has plumbed the depths of human performance, whether that be on the basketball court with the San Antonio Spurs, or in the office with Pixar.

Along the way, Dan has compiled a vault of insights about organizational culture. His most recent book, The Culture Playbook, is basically a workbook that packages many of those insights into quickly digestible and applicable form.

Dan also happens to be one of my favorite conversation partners — and that's true even when I disagree with him! Below is our Q&A about team culture (with a "lightning round" at bottom):

David Epstein: I saw in a talk you gave once that you had audience members turn to a neighbor and share an embarrassing or vulnerable story. That made an impression on me. Can you explain why you’re a fan of formal icebreakers even though they can provoke eye-rolls from participants?


Dan Coyle: Ah, icebreakers! (Is this one??) They are fascinating because they encapsulate so many dynamics of group life. Every icebreaker begins with terror and avoidance — do we have to do this? And then when people take the leap, things shift. The room comes alive. When they’re done well (i.e., not for inauthentic or manipulative reasons, but with curiosity and good will), people don’t merely tolerate the experience, they are lit up by it. Why? Because that moment of shared vulnerability creates a profound burst of connection and trust. All our lives, we’re taught that you have to build up trust before you can be vulnerable. Icebreakers are proof that we’ve got it exactly backwards. Moments of vulnerability, when shared, ignite connection.

For readers who want to go deeper, check out Arthur Aron’s interpersonal closeness questionnaire — it’s basically a series of icebreakers, questions like, “Is there something in your life you’ve always dreamed of doing — why haven’t you done it?” Or, “Tell me about the last time you sang in the shower.” Full disclosure: After doing Aron’s questionnaire, two of the original participants ended up getting married! Which goes to show you: when you’re melting ice, things can heat up pretty fast ;-)

DE: Haha. In that case, give us your personal favorite icebreaker.

DC: One of my favorites comes from Brent Bell, a University of New Hampshire professor who became concerned about the increasing number of freshmen who were struggling with the transition from high school. So, he set up a “Fear in a Hat” exercise where he had a group of incoming students write down their fears anonymously on slips of paper, and then take turns pulling each fear out and reading them aloud. Finally, they coached each other on how to navigate their fears. The exercise illuminated the fact that they all shared the same small set of fears. Which, as it turns out, weren’t academic, but more about making friends. Bringing those fears to the surface not only reframed those fears in a positive way, it created a cohort where they could navigate them together.

This captures so much of what makes a great icebreaker: surfacing shared experiences, creating a space for developmental conversations, and, above all, being creative and entrepreneurial in developing the icebreaker.

Another one I love is called the 4-Hs, and it goes like this: get in groups of 4-6, and ask everybody to take a few minutes to reflect silently on four questions: 1) Who is your biggest hero? 2) What was your biggest heartbreak? 3) What is your family history? 4) What is your hope for the coming year? Then have each person share their answers with the group, spending about 5 minutes each. You’ll be impressed and moved at the stories that emerge, and how those stories add depth and dimension to your sense of each other.

DE: This reminds me of a term you use in The Culture Playbook: “belonging cues.” Can you explain what that means, and give an example?

DC: You know that warm, energizing feeling you get when you’re in a good group? That buzz of connection, creativity, and possibility? What you’re actually feeling is psychological safety (big shout-out to Amy Edmondson, who pioneered this work). And psychological safety doesn’t just happen — it’s built through the continual exchange of belonging cues. Belonging cues are small, repeated behaviors that send a clear signal: You matter. I hear you. We care. We share a future.

Belonging cues come in a ton of forms, but the most powerful ones are habits. For instance, Pixar shows early versions of their movies to their entire organization, and asks everybody to offer improvements. I met a software engineer who, on seeing an early version of “Up,” had made a suggestion about the Boy Scout merit badges that one of the main characters wore — his idea was to sneak an “easter egg” into the badges. And here’s the thing: the director did it! Talk about impact: not just for that engineer but everybody else in the organization who witnessed this exchange. That’s the power of belonging cues — they are connective tissue for the group brain.

All of which spotlights something important: safety is not about wrapping people in fleece and making them comfortable. Rather it’s about creating conditions where you can be uncomfortable together. Where minority viewpoints are unafraid to speak up and be heard. So on a deeper level it’s really about curiosity and humility. In great groups, people aren’t behaving like rugged individualists; to the contrary, they’re always looking for opportunities to give and receive help.

DE: I’m guessing building that kind of psychologically safe culture might be more difficult remotely — or at least more unfamiliar. Is that the case? Do you have any suggestions for, or examples of building psychologically safe culture with remote teams?

DC: It would be easy to say “Here are 5 sure-fire ways to create strong psychological safety with remote teams.” But I think that’s wrong. The truth is, we’re not wired to build authentic relationships through tiny glass windows. It’s really hard to create a sense of togetherness when we can’t be, you know, together.

The good news is, there are ways to optimize remote interactions to strengthen culture. Here are a few:

First, take the toggling approach. That is, try to start in-person, and then alternate between remote and in-person, treating in-person work as a booster shot. Toggling keeps the relationships real. I know a couple of companies who are taking this approach, meeting up every few months to rekindle connection.

Second, divide your work into two buckets: productive and creative. For productive work, it’s fine to work remotely. After all, you’re just cranking away. For creative work, however, studies show that it’s more effective to be in person. One study showed that engineers who were co-located talked about ideas eight times more often than engineers who were not.

Third, start each meeting with a 5-minute warmup that has nothing to do with the work. That can be movement, music, or even everybody tasting a lemon at the same time. What matters is creating a shared space. For some methods, I’d recommend Rituals for Virtual Meetings, by Kursat Ozenc and Glenn Fajardo.

Finally, think in experiments. Because we’re all learning how to work remotely together, and one of the most powerful things you can do is get people out of an evaluative mindset and into an exploring one. Try stuff and see what works. Then co-create habits and structures that work for your group.

DE: In an intriguing footnote in the book, you write: 


“Some may ask: What about brilliant-jerk leaders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Michael Jordan, and Thomas Edison? The answer is that brilliant jerks are indeed effective in rare cases, such as when they lead a group that holds a strategic advantage over the rest of the market. For the vast majority of groups, it works less well, because their people will simply leave for a competitor rather than endure jerk behavior. Even Steve Jobs stopped being a jerk when he realized how much it hurt the group.”

I have two questions here. First: is that type of brash leader especially effective in those situations when there’s a strategic advantage, or successful in spite of their behavior because the strategic advantage is so large?

DC: I would say it’s more often the first case. Because it’s clear that brashness creates an advantage (or, just as important, the perception of an advantage) in winner-take-all environments. Perhaps the supreme example of this is somebody we’ve both written about: Lance Armstrong. In that pharma-enhanced era of the early 2000s, Armstrong’s brashness functioned as a kind of force field that kept rivals afraid and allies in line. And I think it’s possible to draw a straight line from Armstrong to the brashness of Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, and others who made their brands (and billions of dollars) by generating the same mythos: I am different. I am smarter and hungrier than the rest… I am destined to succeed. And they all ended up, like Armstrong, taking the long fall and proving that they were, in fact, destined to fail.

All of which speak to a larger point: that the heroic-genius model of leadership is outdated. The world today is so complex and fast-changing. Believing that a single human can be massively smarter and hungrier and more creative than everyone else is sort of like believing in Bigfoot. Accordingly, most of the great groups I’ve studied aren’t led by heroic geniuses, but rather by teams of humble leaders who collaborate, listen, and, above all, learn from their mistakes.

The problem is, as a society we absolutely LOVE the heroic-genius story. We love talking about it, writing about it, believing it — as the swirl around Elon Musk continues to prove. Maybe Musk really is smarter than everybody — I met someone last month who had worked with him and claimed that it was true. But I’m going to put myself in the “seriously doubtful” category for the time being.

DE: Ok, my second question: I worked in a place that included a leader who I thought was, shall we say, counterproductive. An example: when I was a new, low-level employee, I sent an idea to a boss, who showed it to that leader. That leader then CC’ed a bunch of other people in the office on an email lambasting the idea. You can imagine how eager that made me to share ideas. The attitude in the office toward this leader was basically, “Yeah, that’s bad behavior, but he keeps the trains running on time.” (As if that adage worked out so well in history!) I’m curious how you think that sort of situation, in which people justify a jerk-leader tradeoff, should be dealt with.

DC: I feel like we’re living through a shift, where we are tuning into the deeper consequences of jerk behavior — and realizing that those kinds of rationales (he keeps the trains running) are not just short-sighted but also misguided. Think about the consequences of your old boss’s action: not only did he damage your motivation (in such a way that you’re remembering it years later), he also damaged that of everyone around you who received his email. And he likely did that all the time, continually diminishing voices, dampening creativity. Which ensured that, in the long run, the trains will not run on time.

This evolution is captured in one of my favorite sayings: What efficiency was to the Industrial Revolution, relationships are to the present era. The types of questions we face now are less about making trains run on time, and more about creating the most effective set of relationships — the biggest, smartest group brain — that we can create.

DE: So in terms of creating that smart group, how important (or unimportant) is a new team member's first day or week?


DC: Massively important. Because that’s when our brains decide if we’re in or out. We’re not built to live in the gray areas — when it comes to belonging, we’re like a light switch — completely off or completely on. That’s why smart groups approach the first day with a huge amount of intentionality, flooding the zone with belonging cues.

My favorite study on this comes from Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats, who did a one-hour intervention with new hires at a call center. Group A got a standard hour of training, learned the history of the company, met a star performer. For Group B, they flipped it. Instead of telling the group about the company, they asked Group B a series of questions that served as belonging cues — questions like, What happens on your best day? What happens on your worst day? If we were marooned on a desert island, what skills would you bring to our survival? Seven months later, retention in Group B was 270% higher than in Group A. That is, Group B felt more connected, more in sync. Group chemistry feels like magic, but it’s not magic — it’s belonging cues, delivered at the right time. And there’s no time better than Day One.

DE: In chapter 11 of Range, I write about “healthy tension” as part of a learning organization. I think this resonates with your suggestion to “call out smoothness as a negative,” even though that sounds counterintuitive. Can you explain what you mean?

DC: When I started studying culture, I assumed that smoothness was a good thing. I thought that great cultures are tension-free places where people rarely disagree, where everybody’s aligned all of the time.

The truth is exactly the opposite. Great cultures actually contain more tension. Because people aren’t afraid to disagree, to argue energetically about big issues — then go out for a beer. Because the relationships are strong enough to explore hard problems together. In weak cultures, you get what I call Smoothness Disease — that tendency to want to pretend that everything is good. To walk past disagreements. To pretend that everything is good when it really isn’t.

The feeling of being in a great culture isn’t smoothness — it’s the feeling of solving hard problems with people you admire. That’s a special feeling, and it’s the reason that people inside great cultures love it so much.

DE: I also mentioned in Range engineer Bill Gore, who started the company that created GoreTex, and fashioned it after his observation that organizations often do their most impactful work in times of crisis, because disciplinary boundaries fly out the window and people start learning how they can work together. Or, as he said, “Real communication happens in the carpool.” Given that we don’t have carpools in remote work, how can we create that sort of connection and exchange?

DC: I’m going to offer a slight amendment to Gore’s maxim: “Real communication happens in the carpool — especially after you find yourself stuck in a ditch.” Crisis is the best engine ever created to generate clarity — which is why so many great cultures (Pixar, San Antonio Spurs, New Zealand All-Blacks, to name a few) can trace their origin to a specific crisis that created new norms, habits, and structures that became the foundation of their success.

Rather than intentionally driving into a ditch, here is a shortcut called a pre-mortem exercise. Ask your group: “Let’s imagine it’s one year from now and our organization is in a really bad spot. Nothing worked out. What caused that to happen?” Naming those factors will help illuminate the hidden barriers and opportunities of the landscape you’re in, and help you to navigate.

Also: don’t be afraid to question your group’s values and assumptions. I’ve met a lot of good leaders who do that by cultivating what I call “productive disgruntlement.” They remain curious and questioning; they don’t drink the Kool-Aid. They are always asking: Do we really believe this? Does this still work? Where do we need to evolve? This is particularly important to do when you’re successful. Because success is the strongest narcotic ever created; it tends to blind us toward danger, as well as opportunities to get better.

DE: Wow, starkly put! From interacting with team and organizational leaders, I’ve learned that there’s often a “lonely at the top” sort of phenomenon, where they have few people to share problems with, and they get little honest feedback. How can executives or team leaders get useful feedback?

DC: Man, that is absolutely true. It’s funny, when everybody is starting out on their leadership journey, we presume that everybody needs help, feedback, development. But when someone gets to the top of their organization, we assume they suddenly know it all. This could not be more wrong — in fact, the people at the top need more feedback and development, not less. That’s why so many leaders I’ve talked with are doing everything they can to keep learning, seeking feedback from their networks, through coaches, in books, in the counsel of others.

One quick feedback generator is the Three-Line Email, an idea from Laszlo Bock, CEO and founder of Humu. In it, you send an email to your group with these questions:

• What is one thing 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?

That’s it. It’s a small email, but it creates a big development opportunity, giving you a clear sense of where to put energy and focus. You might find that this method is contagious, creating an atmosphere where everybody gets curious about getting more feedback on their skills.

DE: You write that leaders in effective cultures sometimes “disappear.” That reminded me of this clip in which Coach K recounts joining the Dream Team as an assistant coach, and Chuck Daly tells him to put away his notebook, because he needs to learn to ignore things. Can you give an example of a leader helpfully disappearing?

DC: Gregg Popovich is famous for vanishing during a timeout. It’s awesome: the players circle up like normal, waiting for him to appear and tell them what to do. And he … doesn’t show up. The players look around — and slowly realize, Hey, we gotta figure this out ourselves. And then they do.

A similar thing happens with Navy SEALs teams. Dave Cooper, who was command master chief of the team that killed Bin Laden, told me that he could tell his best teams because they barely needed him. They’d check in every so often, and Cooper’s role was mostly to say yes to their ideas for training. So I guess you could say that they were disappearing on him! All of which goes to underline the easy-to-forget truth that a leader’s true job is to make themselves unneeded.

⚡⚡LIGHTNING ROUND⚡⚡

DE: What is flash mentoring?

DC: Quick, on-the-fly developmental conversations. Like: “Can you tell me about how you prepared for that presentation?”

DE: What is “shrinking-circle syndrome,” and what can I do about it?

DC: Virtual work reduces the overall number of people we regularly connect with — especially loose ties. The cure? Make one old-fashioned phone call per week to someone on the outskirts of your network.

DE: How should I react when a colleague brings me a problem?

DC: First, resist that overwhelming temptation to add value, to share wisdom, to fix things. Then, say the most magical culture-building words ever invented: TELL ME MORE.

DE: What is the “subtraction game”?

DC: Modern work is nightmarishly insidious about adding stuff to our plates. The cure is to get your group together and ask: What do we still do that is adding needless friction, or is no longer useful — and then stop doing those things.

DE: What is “filling the bleachers” in remote work?

DC: Making room for learners at senior-leader meetings, so they can observe how leaders think, communicate, and share. Learning isn’t something you do on the side; it’s continual.

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And if you want more detail, Dan’s The Culture Playbook came out in May.

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Thanks for reading. Until next time…

David