Make Managers Better

Here are my notes on creating better conditions for good management, from Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules, former HR Manager at Google.

Status Symbols and Managers

Cannot agree more with the author when he suggests eliminating all kinds of status symbols can do a load of good both to the Team and to the Manager herself (eventually).

To mitigate our innate human tendency to seek hierarchy, at Google, we try to remove the signifiers of power and status.

De-emphasise Titles

As a practical matter there are only four meaningful, visible levels at Google: individual contributor, manager, director, and vice president. There’s also a parallel track for technical people who remain individual contributors throughout their careers. Progression through these levels is a function of a person’s scope, impact, and leadership. People of course care about promotions, and promotions to director and executive are very big deals.

When the company was smaller, we drew a public distinction between two levels of director, where the more junior role would be titled as Director, Engineering, and the more senior role would be Engineering Director. We found that even such a subtle distinction as the word order of the title caused our people to fixate on the difference between the levels. So we eliminated the difference.

It’s become harder to hold this line as we’ve gotten bigger. Titles that we used to ban outright, like those containing the words “global” and “strategy,” have crept into the company. We have banned “global” because it’s both self-evident and self-aggrandizing. Isn’t every job global, unless it specifically says it isn’t? “Strategy” is similar grandiose. Putting the word strategy in a title is a great way to get people to apply for a job, but it does little to change the nature of the work.

We policed the titles as people were hired, but failed to consistently scrub our employee database to catch the titles people gave themselves after joining. We just hope our efforts make them matter less than in most other places.

Randy Knaflic: While at Jawbone, I hired an HR business partner from another technology company. I explained how title should follow leadership. It was a red flag within the first few weeks when he asked, ‘But how can I get them to do what I want them to do if I don’t have the title?’ He lasted less than six months.

Other Signifiers and Reinforcers of Hierarchy

Our more senior executives receive only the same benefits, perquisites, and resources as our newest hires. There are no executive dining rooms, parking spots, or pensions.

In Europe, where it’s common for executives to receive car allowances, we offered them to all employees and kept the offering cost neutral by limiting the size of the benefit our more senior people received. Some grumbled, but it was more important to be inclusive than to confirm to our industry’s practices.

We need Visible Reminders of our Values

If you want a nonhierarchical environment, you need visible reminders of your values. Otherwise, your human nature inevitably reasserts itself. Symbols and stories matter.

Ron Nessen (Press Secretary for President Gerald Ford) shares this story about his boss: He had a dog, Liberty. Liberty has an accident on the rug in the oval office and one of the Navy stewards rushes in to clean it up. Jerry Ford says, “I’ll do that. Get out of the way, I’ll do that. No man ought to have to clean up after another man’s dog.”

What makes this vignette so compelling is that the most powerful man in the US not only understands personal responsibility, but also appreciated the symbolic value of demonstrating it.

That’s why it matters that Patrick Pichette wears jeans and an orange backpack instead of a suit and briefcase. Yes, he’s the CFO of Google. When he rockets around our campus on a bicycle, he’s showing that even our most senior leaders are just people.

Take Power from Managers and Trust People

One really hopes to see what is written below is not for some distant future but happens TODAY in all Organizations, Governments and even Military?

Does your Manager trust you? If you thought you were ready for a promotion, could you promote yourself? If you wanted to spend one day a week working on a side project or organizing lectures for other employees, and you figured out a way to still get your job done, could you? Is there a limit to how many sick days you can take?

Just as important, do you trust your manager? Does she sponsor and fight for you and help you get work done? If you’re thinking about taking another job, can you talk to her about it?

This is the kind of manager we’d love to have, but few of us have actually enjoyed. At Google we have always had a deep skepticism about management. Managers are a Dilbertian layer that at best protects the people doing the actual work from the even more poorly informed people higher up the org chart

But our research showed that managers in fact do many good things. It turns out that we are not skeptical about managers per se. Rather, we are profoundly suspicious of power, and the way managers historically have abused it.

A traditional manager controls your pay, your promotions, your workload, your coming and going, whether you have a job or nit, and these days even reaches into your evenings and weekends. While a manager doesn’t necessarily abuse any of these sources of power, potential for abuse exists.

Those in authority must be held to even higher standards than the rest.

Managers aren’t bad people. But each of us is susceptible to the convenience and small thrills of power. At the same time, responsibility for creating (and fighting!) hierarchy doesn’t fall solely on the shoulders of managers. We employees often create our own hierarchies.

One of the challenges we face at Google is that we want people to feel, think, and act like owners rather than employees. But human beings are wired to defer to authority, seek hierarchy, and focus on their local interest. Watch closely to the meeting you go next time. As attendees file in, they leave the head set vacant. It illustrates the subtle and insidious nature of how we create hierarchy. Without instruction, discussion, or even conscious thought, we make room for our superiors.

I see this even at Google, but with a twist. Some of our most senior leaders are attuned to this dynamic, and have tried to break it by sitting at the center of a conference table, along one of the sides. Makes it less hierarchical and more calculated to draw people into a conversation with each other rather than a series of back-and-forth exchanges with the manager. Invariably, within a few meetings, that’s the seat that ends up left open.

Humans turn out to be awfully good rule followers. Introduction of simple rules can cause large changes in behavior. How could the holocaust have happened? How was it possible that millions of people were murdered not in spite of society, but with the passive and active support? Are human beings so susceptible to authority that they would commit the most unconscionable acts?

Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power. Employees have a tendency to follow orders. What’s mind-blowing is that many of us play both roles, manager and employee, at the same time. We each have experienced the fristration of a controlling manager, and we have experienced the frustration of managing people who just won’t listen.

There is hope.

“Does your manager trust you?” is a profound question.

If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people freedom. One of the noble aspirations of a workplace should be that it’s a place of refuge where people are free to create, build and grow. Why not let the inmates run the asylum?

The first step to mass empowerment is making it safe for people to speak up. This is why we take as much power from managers as we can. The less formal authority they have, the fewer carrots and sticks they have to lord over their teams, and the more latitude the teams have to innovate.

Nudge Managers to Improve: Upward Feedback

How many Organizations research what their best managers do? And how many of them create systems that nudge or reinforce signals to let bad managers be good? One hopes the ideas in this blog are not ignored as “This can happen only at Google. We are different!”

Project Oxygen initially set out to prove that managers don’t matter and ended up demonstrating that good managers were crucial. Having a good manager is essential, like breathing. And if we make managers better, it would be like a breath of fresh air.

Everyone has an idea of what a good or bad manager is, but it’s a subjective standard. We relied on performance ratings and Googlegeist results (which asked everyone in the company what they thought of their manager’s performance, conduct and support). The key was to really understand the best of the best and the worst of the worst. What were those managers doing to get such different results?

Googlers with the best managers did 5 to 18% better on a dozen Googlegeist dimensions when compared to those managed by the worst manager. Among other things, they ere significantly more certain that

Career decisions were made fairly. Performance was fairly assessed and promotions were well deserved
Their personal career objectives could be met, and their manager was a helpful advocate and counselor
Work happened efficiently. Decisions were made quickly, resources were allocated well, and diverse perspectives were considered
Team members treated each other nonhierarchically and with respect, relied on data rather than politics to make decisions, and were transparent about their work and beliefs
They were appropriately involved in decision making and empowered to get things done
They had the freedom to manage the balance between work and their personal lives

Teams working for the best managers also performed better and had lower turnover. In fact, manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers.

Maybe some managers just ended up with stronger, happier teams by chance? The author explains in the book how this possibility is also tested with data over couple of years.

How could we figure out what the best managers were doing differently from the worst, and how could we then turn that into an engine that would continuously improve the quality of managers at Google? We took a simple approach. We asked them. A sample of managers was interviewed by Googlers who had been given interview guides to follow, but who didn’t know whether the managers they were interviewing were good, bad, or mediocre. This is is called double-blind interview methodology.

The research showed eight common attributes shared by high-scoring managers and not exhibited by low-scoring managers.

Be a good coach
Empower the team and do not micromanage
Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being
Be very productive/results oriented
Be a good communicator — listen and share information
Help the team with career development
Have a clear vision/strategy for the team
Have important technical skills that help advice the team

Unexpectedly, we found out that technical expertise was actually the least important of the eight behaviors across great managers. Make no mistake, it is essential. An engineering manager who can’t code is not going to be able to lead a team at Google.

But this list, quite frankly, are pretty dull and noncontroversial statements. To make it meaningful and, more important, something that would improve the performance of the company, we had to be more specific.

So we created a system of reinforcing signals to improve the quality of management at Google. The most visible, a semiannual Upward Feedback Survey, asks teams to give anonymous feedback on their managers.

Sample UFS Feedback Questionnaire

My manager gives me actionable feedback that helps me improve my performance
My manager does not micromanage
My manager shows consideration to me as a person
My manager keeps the team focused on our priority results/deliverables
My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leadership
My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months
My manager communicates clear goals for our team
My manager has the technical expertise required to effectively manage me
I would recommend my manager to other googlers

Results are reported to every manager to provide for manager’s development. They don’t directly influence their performance rating or compensation. If we did that, people would start gaming the survey, either pressuring their teams to give higher scores or preemptively firing people who seemed unhappy and likely to give lower scores. If we want people to be open-minded and change their behaviors, we had to make this a compassionate tool, focused on development rather than rewards and punishment. Divorcing development and evaluative feedback is essential.

If managers need help getting better in a specific area, and the checklist isn’t doing the trick, they can sign up for the courses we have developed over time for each of the attributes. Taking “Manager as Coach” improves coaching scores. Taking “Career Conversations” improves career development ratings.

Today, most of our managers share their results with their teams. We don’t require it, but we do periodically insert questions into our surveys asking employees if managers have done so. Between our norm of transparency and those small nudges, most managers choose to share. They distribute their reports and then lead a discussion about how to improve their performance, getting advice from their teams. It’s a beautiful inversion of the typical manager-employee relationship. The best way to improve is by talking to those providing feedback and asking them exactly what they hope you would do differently. Instead of a transactional exchange, it’s a problem-solving exercise that ends with shared responsibility. There’s work for both the manager and the Googler to do.

Now, it’s actually become harder to be a bad manager. Since we know that manager quality drives performance, retention, and happiness, it means the company will perform better over time.