How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

Similarly, deciding who gets promoted should also be via a committee rather than a top-down management decision. Our managers can nominate their people for promotion and act as advocates throughout the process, but the decision itself is out of their hands.

The reasons are the same as they are for hiring: Promotions have a company-wide impact, so they are too important to be left in the hands of individual managers.

there is a golden rule to hiring that cannot be violated:

The urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.

Once you get your smart creatives on board, you need to pay them;

exceptional people deserve exceptional pay.

Smart creatives today may not share many characteristics with professional athletes, but they do share one important thing:

the potential for disproportionate impact.

If you want better performance from the best, celebrate and reward i...

You can attract the best smart creatives with factors beyond money: the great things they can do, the people they’ll work with, the responsibility and opportunities they’ll be given, the inspiring company culture and values, and yes, maybe even free food and happy dogs sitting desk-side.

But when those smart creatives become employees and start performing, pay them appropriately.

The bigger the impact, the bigger the comp.

At the opposite end of the scale, managers should reward people greatly only w...

big rewards should be given to the people who are closest to great products and innovations.

Pay outrageously good people outrageously well, regardless of their title or tenure. What counts is their impact.

The best way to retain smart creatives is to not let them get too comfortable, to always come up with ways to make their jobs interesting.

But often it takes more than interesting side projects to keep people engaged and prevent them from leaving.

You need to prioritize the interests of the highly valued individual over the constraints of the organization.

smart creatives need or want to do something new and the company figures out a way to make it happen.

Do the best thing for the person and make the organization adjust.

Encouraging people to take on new roles can be institutionalized in the form of rotations, but it needs to be do...

our approach has always been to encourage job movement, to make it as easy as possible, and to make it a standard part of the management discussion.

focus your retention efforts on the stars, the leaders, and the innovators

and do whatever it takes to keep them around.

Because people seldom leave over compensation,

the first step to keeping them is to listen. They want to be heard, to be relevant and valued.

In these conversations, the leader’s role is not to be the advocate of the organ...

but the advocate of the smart creative who is thinki...

The best smart creatives often want to leave so they can go start something on their own. Don’t discourage this, but do ask them for their elevator pitch.

“Just because a job ends, your relationship with your employee doesn’t have to….

All the factors that make the right smart creatives great hires can make the wrong ones hell to fire:

their intensity, their confidence, their fearlessness.