Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

by Laszlo Bock

The survey itself is the checklist. If you perform every behavior on the list, you’ll be an amazing manager.

these results are provided for a manager’s development. They don’t directly influence the manager’s performance ratings or compensation.

Divorcing developmental 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’ve developed over time for each of the attributes.

Today, most of our managers share their results with their teams.

They distribute their reports and then lead a discussion about how to improve their performance, getting advice from their teams.

The best way to improve is by talking to those providing feedback and asking them exactly what they hope you would do differently.

Care about upgrading your organization.

As a team leader, a manager, or an executive, you have to be willing to act personally on the results you see, changing your own behavior if needed, and to be consistent over time in staying focused on these issues.

Gather the data. Group your managers by performance and employee survey results, and see if there are differences. Then interview them and their teams to find out why. If you’re a small team or organization, simply ask people what they value in gre...

Survey teams twice a year and see how managers are doing. A variety of companies provide survey applications. We rely of course on Google products, specifically Google Sheets, which can send out surveys called Forms and has the advantage of being easy to use, easy to export, and low cost. Have the people who are best at each attribute train everyone else. ...

Studying your strongest people closely and then building programs to measure and reinforce their best attributes for the entire company changes the character of your company. If you also are able to get those who struggle the most to be substantially better, you’ll have created a cycle of constant improvement.

Use surveys and checklists to find the truth and nudge people to improve. Set a personal example by sharing and acting on your own feedback.

Your best teachers already work for you.… Let them teach!

most corporate learning is insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.

You learn the best when you learn the least

it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time.

approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.

Simple practice, without feedback and experimentation, is insufficient.

First, the instructors gave us the principles (don’t panic, give them time to vent their emotions, etc.), then we role-played the situation, and then we discussed it. Afterward, they gave us a videotape of the role play so we could see exactly what we had done. And we repeated the process again and again. It was a very labor-intensive way of providing the training, but it worked.

How much more would you have internalized the content if you’d been given specific feedback and then had to repeat the task three more times? Building this kind of repetition and focus into training might seem costly, but it’s not.

most organizations measure training based on the time spent, not on the behaviors changed. It’s a better investment to deliver less content and have people retain it, than it is to deliver more hours of “learning” that is quickly forgotten.

It’s difficult to keep learning and stay motivated when the road stretching ahead of you looks exactly like the road behind you. You can keep your team members’ learning from shutting down with a very simple but practical habit.

In the minutes before every client meeting, he would take me aside and ask me questions: “What are your goals for this meeting?” “How do you think each client will respond?” “How do you plan to introduce a difficult topic?” We’d conduct the meeting, and on the drive back to our office he would again ask questions that forced me to learn: “How did your approach work out?” “What did you learn?” “What do you want to try differently next time?” I would also ask Frank questions about the interpersonal dynamic in the room and why he pushed on one issue but not another. I shared responsibility with him for ensuring I was improving. Every meeting ended with immediate feedback and a plan for what to continue to do or change for next time.

It’s an almost magical way to continuously improve your team’s performance, and it takes just a few minutes and no preparation. It also trains your people to use themselves as their own experiments, asking questions, trying new approaches, observing what happens, and then trying again.

where to find the best teachers. They are sitting right next to you. I promise you that in your organization there are people who are expert on every facet of what you do, or at least expert enough that they can teach others.

In your company, there is certainly a best salesperson in terms of total sales. By turning to that person to teach others rather than bringing in someone from the outside, you not only have a teacher who is better than your other salespeople, but also someone who understands the specific context of your company and customers.

Sending your salespeople to the most expensive sales seminars, led by someone who sold products for someone else, is unlikely to revolutionize your sales performance, because the specifics of what your company does matter.

individual performance scales linearly, while teaching scales geometrically.

The gains among the lower performers more than make up the loss of sales from the top performers.

The best at each skill should be teaching it.

Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform.

For the learner, having actual practitioners teaching is far more effective than listening to academics, professional trainers, or consultants.

It is generally far better to learn from people who are doing the work today, who can answer deeper questions and draw on current, real-life examples. They understand your context better, they are always available to provide immediate feedback, and they are mostly free.

“paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”148 A simple exercise to instill mindfulness is to sit quietly and focus on your breathing for two minutes. It’s also been shown to improve cognitive functioning and decision-making.

Mindfulness Guru, to start my weekly staff meetings with the exercise.

The first week was just listening to our breathing, the next was observing the thoughts that ran through our heads as we breathed, working up to paying attention to our current emotions and how they felt in our bodies. After a month, I asked my team if we should continue. They insisted that we did. They told me our meetings seemed more focused, more thoughtful, and less acrimonious. And even though we were spending time on meditation, we were more efficient and were finishing our agenda early each week.

describes business as a “machine made out of people” and mindfulness as “WD-40 for the company, lubricating the rough spots among driven Googlers.”

We have a broader program, called G2G or Googler2Googler, where Googlers enlist en masse to teach one another.

Though teaching takes the G2G faculty away from their day jobs, many courses are just a few hours long and offered only quarterly, so the time commitment for faculty and students is modest. The classes offer a refreshing change of mental scenery, making people more productive when they return to work. And like 20 percent time, G2G makes for a more creative, fun, generative work environment, where people feel deeply invested in what the company does and is. It’s a small investment of company resources, with huge dividends. The content ranges from the highly technical (search algorithm design; a seven-week mini-MBA) to the simply entertaining (tightrope walking; fire breathing; history of the bicycle). Some of the most popular:

“If you find yourself always fiddling with your hands or keeping them in your pockets, try standing behind a chair or podium and planting your hands on the podium so you appear confident. Planting your hands displaces the nervous energy.” Another tip: “To rid yourself of saying ‘umm’ during a presentation, use physical displacement. Every time you are transitioning, do something small but physical, like moving your pen. Making a conscious effort to move your pen will turn your brain off from using a verbal filler instead.”

There are over thirty Tech Advisors, for example, experienced leaders who offer confidential, one-to-one sessions to support Googlers in our technical organizations. These volunteers are selected for their breadth of experience and understanding of Google, and are tasked principally with listening.

having a safe, objective person to turn to is sometimes just what people need. Chee continues:

We talked for two and a half hours. She was able to work through a bunch of stuff. I didn’t give a ton of advice. I really listened to her and brainstormed with her, bounced things off her. She came to her own solutions and solved her own problems. She didn’t need someone to tell her what to do, only to help encourage her and listen. She’s

in addition to benefiting the person being advised, the advisors themselves benefit as well. Through repeated experience, our company’s leaders are building their listening and empathy skills and their own self-awareness. It sounds simple, but the benefits they experience in these sessions have a cascading influence. They claim to be better managers, leaders, and even spouses as a result of building these skills. Note that this is not an HR program, though we manage the administration of it. As Shannon Mahon, the program manager, points out: “The secret sauce is that engineers really own this, not People Operations.” Googlers created this for one another.

there are volunteers who serve as Gurus, focusing less on individual issues and more on issues of leadership and management across the company.

“You can automate a lot of things, but you can’t automate relationships.”

If you want to unlock your organization’s tremendous potential for teaching and learning, you need to create the right conditions. Organizations always seem to have more demand for people development than they can satisfy,

one of our sales trainers asked if they would be getting more resources. I told her: You won’t. Demand for what you can do will always outstrip what you can deliver, because you’re doing something that helps people learn and makes them better. You’ll always want to do more, since you’re a thoughtful, conscientious person. So you’ll always be a bit frustrated that you can’t do more. Worse, Googlers will always want more from you. Even worse than that, as we grow you’ll need to stop doing things that you and your Googlers love, because there will be other, more important things you need to do. You are a precious resource. Our challenge is to figure out together how to help our Googlers teach themselves.

Only invest in courses that cha...