Here are my notes from Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules, former HR Manager at Google.
Expect a lot when you give up command-and-control management. Isn’t that the best reward!
Some will argue that mass empowerment leads to anarchy, or to a situation where, since everyone’s opinion is valued, anyone can object and derail an effort. The reality is that every issue needs a decision maker. Managed properly, the result of these approaches is not some transcendent moment of unanimity. Rather, It is a robust, data driven discussions that bring the best ideas to light, so that when a decision is made, it leaves the dissenters with enough context to understand and respect the rationale for the decision even if they disagree with the outcome. This approach almost always works. When it fails, there’s a simple rule to follow: Escalate to the next layer of the company and present the facts. If they can’t decide, escalate again. This advice may seem out of place, given that I have devoted to explaining why managers should not have authority. But hierarchy in decision making is important. It’s the only way to break ties and is ultimately one of the primary responsibilities of management.
This mistake leaders make is that they manage too much. Micromanagement is mismanagement. People micromanage to assuage their anxieties about organizational performance: they feel better if they are continuously directing and controlling the actions of others — at heart, this reveals emotional insecurity on their part. It gives micromanagers the illusion of control (or usefulness). Another motive is lack of trust in the abilities of the staff — micromanagers do not believe that their colleagues will successfully complete a task or discharge a responsibility even when they say they will.
Instead, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of an organization. THe only questions that should rise up the org chart are ones where, given the same data and information, more senior leaders would make a different decision than the rank and file.
You don’t need to have Google’s size or analytical horsepower to unleash creativity of your people. As a leader, giving up status symbols is the most powerful message you can send that you care about what your teams have to say.
Using small pilots allows the most vocal employees to grapple with the complexities of a situation. It’s easy to complain from the sidelines. Being charged with implementing your ideas is often much harder and can moderate more extreme and unrealistic perspectives.
All this adds up to happier people generating better ideas. The truth is that people usually live up to your expectations, whether those expectations are high or low. Difficult, specific goals (Try to get more than 90% correct) were not only more motivating than vague exhortations or low expectations (“Try your best”) but they actually result in superior performance. It therefore makes sense to expect a lot of people.
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they are yours.Richard Bach in Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
Managers find many reasons not to trust their people. Most organizations are designed to resist change and enfeeble employees. When I tell CEOs that many Googlers can nominate themselves for promotion, or that they can ask our CEO any question, the most common response is that it sounds great in theory but would never work at their company: People won’t focus on their real work; gathering all those facts would just slow us down (!); the lawyers wont let us do it; people (the very ones that are their “most important asset”) wont make good decisions; I like my special parking space ….
But it does work. You just need to fight the petty seductions of management and the command-and-control impulse that accompany seniority. Organizations put tremendous effort into finding great people but then restrict their ability to have impact on any area but their own tasks.
As a manager, it can be terrifying to let go of the reins. After all, your career is on the line if something goes wrong. And you were put in this job because you’re supposedly the best suited to lead.
It’s been hard for me to let go as well. In letting go, I have given up a little bit of control. But I got back valuable time to focus on other pressing issues. What managers miss is that every time they give up a little control. it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for nee challenges.
Pick an area where your people are frustrated, and let them fix it. If there are constraints, limited time or money, tell them what they are. Be transparent with your people and give them a voice in shaping your team or company. You’ll be stunned by what they accomplish.
Find ways for people to shape their work and the company
Loved Googlegeist for it not being just another employee annual survey but for it’s focus on very actionable outcomes. And for it’s radical transparency!
In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn’t the first to do so. For over 65 years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore:”A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom.”.
At Google, Engineers have 20% of their week to focus on projects that interest them, outside of their day jobs. The use of 20 percent time has waxed and waned over the years, humming along at about 10 percent utilization when we last measured it. In some ways, the idea of 20% time is more important than the reality of it. It operates somewhat outside the lines of formal management oversight, and always will, because the most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work.
Googlers don’t restrict themselves to creating products. They also involve themselves in deciding how we run the company. A few years back, we gave a group of thirty engineers anonymous performance and pay data for everyone in engineering, and allowed them to shape how bonuses would be allocated. Based on their study, we changed the basis for bonus calculation from actual salaries to the median salary of all people in that job. The issue of average salary difference between men and women was also addressed.
Googlegeist, which means “the spirit of Google” is an annual survey of our 50k+ Googlers. It is our most powerful single mechanism for enabling our employees to shape the company. Googlegeist asks about 100 questions each year, scored on a five-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. We change 30 to 50 percent of the questions each year, based on what issues are most pressing, but retain the rest so we can track changes in the company over time. Because we want Googlers to be honest, there are two ways to submit your responses: confidentially or anonymously. “Confidentially” means that your name is stripped out, but other data that helps us — location, job level, product area — is retained. An anonymous submission goes a step further, including no personally identifiable information.
Googlegiest is distinctive because it is written not by consultants but by Googlers with PhD-level expertise in everything from survey design to organizational psychology. All results (both good and bad) are shared back with the entire company within one month. Every manager with more than three respondents gets a report, dubbed MyGeist. Whether their team is three or thirty Googlers strong, managers get a clear sense of how they’re doing according to their teams. With one click, managers can choose to share with just their direct teams, with their broader organisations, with a customised list of Googlers, or even with all of Google. And most do.
The reports of any vice president with a hundred or more respondents are automatically published to the entire company.
At the same time, results are not factored into performance ratings or pay decisions. We want employees to be scathingly honest, and managers to be open to improvement rather than defensive.
Critically, Googlegeist focuses on outcome measures than matter. Most employee surveys focus on engagement. If your employees are 80% engaged, what does that even mean? Engagement doesn’t tell you where to invest your finite people dollars and time. Do you increase it by focusing on health programs? On manager quality? On job content?
Googlegeist instead focuses on the most important outcome variables we have: innovation, execution, and retention. For example, we have five questions that predict whether employees are likely to quit. If scores fall below 70% for just one of the 5 questions, for example, the issue is identified and we work with that Team to improve their experience. Above all, we want to ensure that the people we’ve worked so hard to hire remain at Google for a long time.
At the same time, survey reveals we have work to do in some areas of well-being, specifically in Googler’s ability to detach from work during nonwork times.And so we’re trying to get better.
Check the book for “Dublin goes Dark” experiment. And how Googlegeist improved “code health” within the Organisation!
Make decisions based on data, not Manager’s opinions
This is valuable advice.
In addition to minimizing the trappings and affectations of power, we rely on data to make decisions. Relying on data — indeed, expecting every conversation to be rooted in data — upends the traditional role of managers. It transforms them from being providers of intuition to facilitators in a search for truth, with the most useful facts being brought to bear on each decision.
Done well, every meeting becomes a Hegelian dialectic, with presenters providing a thesis and the folks in the room providing an antithesis, spurning opinion, questioning facts, and testing which decision is correct. The result is synthesis, a closer approximation of truth than if we had relied on mere pronouncements.
One of the core principles of Google has always been “Don’t Politick. Use data.”
Relying on data helps out everyone. Senior executives shouldn’t be wasting time debating whether the best background color for an ad is yellow or blue. Just run an experiment. This leaves management free to worry about the stuff that is hard to quantify, which is usually a much better use of their time.
We use data — evidence — to guard against rumor, bias, and plain old wrongheadedness. One way is my myth busting.We try to test myths within the company and debunk them wherever we can.
People make all kinds of assumptions — guesses, really — about how things work in organizations. Most of these guesses are rooted in sample bias.
Promotions are an area where myths arise. Each year, when we surveyed Googlers they told us that the promotion process wasn’t fair because of all the favoritism shown to certain offices, projects, and jobs. All of these would be legitimate concerns, if they were correct inferences. But they’re not. When a Googler takes the time to check with People Operations, we walk them through the data. But most Googlers don’t ask. Enter People Analytics Team. They decided that a more effective and long-lasting approach would be simply to share all the promotion data with Googlers. They crunched the numbers, organised a series of talks, recorded them so people could watch them later, and built a site to share all the data. It turns out:
- Working with much more senior people has only a small effect on promotions
- The product area doesn’t matter
- Bad feedback doesn’t hurt you
- Where your project is based doesn’t affect your ability to get promoted
The site periodically gets updated with the latest facts and any new analyses that have been requested. It’s a lot of work, but essential to demonstrate that our processes are unbiased. It would have been easy to keep asserting that the process worked. But far better to bust the myths once and for all with facts, and then make those facts freely available to anyone.
Almost any major program we roll out is first tested with a subgroup. I remember when we crossed 20000 employees and I was first asked if it bothered me that Google was now indisputably a big company. “We always worry about culture,” I responded, “but the virtue of big is that we can run hundreds of experiments to see what really makes Googlers happier.” Every office, every team, every project is an opportunity to run an experiment and learn from it. This is one of the biggest missed opportunities that large organizations have, and it holds just as true for companies make up of hundreds, not thousands. Too often, management makes a decision that applies unilaterally to the entire organization. What is management is wrong? What if someone has a better idea? What if the decision works in one country but not another? It’s crazy to me that companies don’t experiment more in this way!
Why not carve out ten or fifty or a hundred people and try something different? Or try something first with a small group? As they used to say, “If you’re not careful, you may learn something before you’re done.”
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