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My Guest: Dan Coyle is a New York Times bestselling author who's spent the last two decades studying what makes great teams great. He wrote The Talent Code, The Culture Code, and now Flourish—books that have shaped how millions of people think about skill development, team culture, and meaningful connection. He works with the Cleveland Guardians as a special advisor on culture and performance. We recorded this one together in Cleveland.
Notes:
Find your yellow doors. Most of us go through life looking for green doors (clearly open paths) and red doors (obviously closed paths). But yellow doors are different. They're out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new. That's where life actually happens. We think life is a straight line from A to B to C, but it's not. Life isn't a game... It's complex, living, shifting. Yellow doors are opportunities to create meaningful connections and explore new paths. "Life deepens when we become aware of the yellow doors, the ones we glimpse out of the corner of our eye."
The craft journey always involves getting simpler. Simple is not easy. The great ones have their craft to where there's a simplicity to it. In this world of clutter and noise, it's easy to want to compete with energy and speed, but the stuff that really resonates is quieter and simpler. Be a beginner again in something. With climbing, Dan's at the very bottom of the craft mountain. With writing, he's somewhere in the middle. It's fun to have a couple of zones in your life where you're a beginner. It's liberating, but it also develops empathy. Some stuff looks very simple, but isn't.
Every good story has three elements. There's some desire (I want to get somewhere), there's some obstacle (this thing standing in my way), and there's some transformation on that journey. Teaching teaches you. Coaching Zoe's writing team helped Dan, and then Zoe ended up coaching Dan. It was never "let me transmit all my wisdom to my daughter." It was a rich two-way dialogue that helped both of them.
Suffering together is powerful. Doing hard things together with other people, untangling things together (literally and figuratively), and being vulnerable together. That's culture code stuff. Whether it's skiing with your kids, seeing them fall and get back up, or being trapped underground like the Chilean miners.
Behind every individual success is a community. Dan dedicates all his books to his wife, Jenny (except one). Growing up, he had this idea of individual success, individual greatness. But when you scratch one of those individual stories, what's revealed is a community of people. Jenny is the ecosystem that lets Dan do what he does. Going from writing project to writing project, hoping stuff works out, exploring... it's not efficient. It's not getting on the train to work and coming home at five o'clock. It's "I think I need to go to Russia" or "I need to dig into this." She's been more than a partner, an incredible teammate.
Great organizations aren't machines; they're rivers. The old model of leadership is the pilot of the boat, the person flipping levers who has all the answers. That's how most of us grew up thinking about leaders. But Indiana football, the SEALs, Pixar... when you get close to these organizations, they're not functioning like machines. Machines are controlled from the outside and produce predictable results. These organizations are more like energy channels that are exploring. They're like rivers. How do you make a river flow? Give it a horizon to flow toward (where are we going?), set up river banks (where we're not gonna go), but inside that space create energy and agency. Questions do that. Leaders who are good at lobbing questions in and then closing their mouth... that's the most powerful skill.
Great teams have peer leaders who sacrifice. Since Indiana football's fresh in our minds... Peer leaders who sacrifice for the team are really big. Fernando Mendoza got smoked, battered, hammered, and he kept going without complaint. In his interview afterward, he talks about his teammates. That's the DNA of great teams.
Adversity reveals everything. The litmus test: in moments of terrible adversity, what's the instinct? Are we turning toward each other or away from each other? You could see it in that game. The contrast between the two teams. When things went bad, they responded very differently.
The coach isn't as important as you think. Coaches can create the conditions for the team to emerge, but great teams sometimes pit themselves against the coach. The US Olympic hockey team of 1980 would be an example. They came together against Herb Brooks. So coaching sets the tone, but it's not as big a part of DNA as people think.
Curiosity keeps great teams from drinking their own Kool-Aid. The teams that consistently succeed don't get gassed up on their own stuff. They don't believe in their success. They're not buying into "now I'm at the top of the mountain, everything's fine." They get curious about that next mountain, curious about each other, curious about the situation. They're willing to let go of stuff that didn't work.
Honor the departed. When someone gets traded in pro sports, it's like death. Their locker's empty like a gravestone. What the coach at OKC does: on the day after somebody gets traded, he spends a minute of practice expressing his appreciation for that person who's gone. How simple and human is that? How powerful?
What makes people flourish is community. It's not a bunch of individuals that are individually together. Can they connect? Can they love their neighbor and support their neighbor? That's magical when it happens.
The Chilean miners created civilization through rituals. 33 men, 2,000 feet underground, trapped for 69 days. The first couple hours went as bad as it could. People eating all the food, scrambling, yelling. Then they circled up and paused. The boss took off his helmet and said, "There are no bosses and no employees. We're all one here." Their attention shifted from terror and survival to the larger connection they had with each other. They self-organized. Built sleeping areas, rationed food, created games with limited light. Each meal they'd share a flake of tuna at the same time. When they got contact with the surface, they sang the Chilean national anthem together. They created a little model civilization that functioned incredibly well.
Stopping and looking creates community. What let the miners flourish wasn't information or analysis. It was letting go. Having this moment of meaning, creating presence. All the groups Dan visited had this ability in all the busyness to stop and ask: What are we really about? What matters here? What is our community? Why are we here? What is bigger than us that we're connected to? They grounded themselves in those moments over and over.
Getting smart only gets you so far. There's a myth in our culture that individuals can flourish. You see someone successful and think "that individual's flourishing." But underneath them, invisibly, they're part of a larger community. We only become our best through other people. We have a pronoun problem: I, me, when actually it's we and us. Self-improvement isn't as powerful as shared improvement.
Ask energizing questions. "What's energizing you right now?" is a great question. "What do you want more of?" "What do you want to do differently?" (not "what are you doing poorly"). "Paint a picture five years from now, things go great, give me an average Tuesday." What you're trying to do is get people out of their narrow boredom, let go a little, surrender a little, open up and point out things in the corner of their eye.
When things go rough, go help somebody. Craig Counsell on how to bounce back when you're having a bad day: "I try to go help somebody." That's it.
Create presence conditions. The ski trips, the long drives, the shared meals, no phones. Schedule them. This is how connection happens, whether it's with your family or your people at work.
Leaders who sustain excellence are intensely curious. Dan walked into the Guardians office expecting to pepper them with questions. The opposite happened. Jay, Chris, and Josh kept asking him question after question, wanting to learn. Leaders who sustain excellence have this desire to learn, improve, get better. Ask better questions. Actually listen. Ask follow-up questions. Curiosity is also the ultimate way to show love.
Reflection Questions
- Dan says yellow doors are "out of the corner of your eye, things that make you uncomfortable or feel brand new." What's one yellow door you've been walking past lately? What's stopping you from opening it this week?The Chilean miners' boss took off his white helmet and said, "There are no bosses and no employees."
- Think about a moment of adversity your team is facing right now. Are you turning toward each other or away? What's one specific action you could take this week to help your team turn toward each other? Dan emphasizes we have a "pronoun problem" (I, me vs. we, us) and that "self-improvement isn't as powerful as shared improvement."
- Who are the 2-3 people you could invite into your growth journey right now? What would it look like to pursue excellence together instead of alone?