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by
Laszlo Bock
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August 3, 2019 - April 23, 2020
we receive more than two million applications every year, representing individuals from every background and part of the world. Of these, Google hires only several thousand per year,6 making Google twenty-five times more selective than Harvard,7 Yale,8 or Princeton.
the default leadership style at Google is one where a manager focuses not on punishments or rewards but on clearing roadblocks and inspiring her team.
Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams), provided learning opportunities that were outside what people needed to do their jobs, increased their reliance on teamwork (by giving teams more autonomy and allowing them to self-organize), or a combination of these.
All it takes is a belief that people are fundamentally good—and enough courage to treat your people like owners instead of machines. Machines do their jobs; owners do whatever is needed to make their companies and teams successful.
The most talented people on the planet want an aspiration that is also inspiring. The challenge for leaders is to craft such a goal.
Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money. Deep down, every human being wants to find meaning in his or her work.
If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them
Take Albert Einstein, who initially failed to be hired as a teacher and then failed to be promoted at the Swiss Patent Office. He didn’t attend a class that transformed him into the best patent clerk that Switzerland had ever seen. Nor did he get a degree in education and start winning teaching awards. His success came because his day job didn’t require much of his intellect,73 so he was free to explore a completely unrelated field.
The first change is to hire more slowly.
and the second big change to make in how you hire—is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”
Hiring is the most important people function you have, and most of us aren’t as good at it as we think. Refocusing your resources on hiring better will have a higher return than almost any training program you can develop.
we learned that doing well in solo competitions doesn’t always translate into being a team player.
we look for people who can not only solve today’s problems, but can also solve whatever unknown problems may come up in the future.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).
The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In
Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26 percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses.
For example, the US Department of Veterans Affairs has a site with almost a hundred sample questions at www.va.gov/pbi/questions.asp. Use them. You’ll do better at hiring immediately.
I’m often told: “I just want an administrative assistant who can answer the phone and schedule meetings—I don’t need someone brilliant, just someone who can do the work.” But that’s terrible logic. An outstanding administrative assistant provides powerful leverage to a manager, helping them better allocate their time, prioritizing and routing less critical tasks, and being the face of the manager to everyone who reaches out. These roles are important, and the difference between an average administrative assistant and an exceptional one is profound.
If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it. It takes will and patience, but it works. Be willing to concentrate your people investment on hiring. And never settle.
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 conveniences and small thrills of power.
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.
Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power. Employees have a tendency to follow orders.
“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.
The first step to mass empowerment is making it safe for people to speak up. In Japan there’s a saying: Deru kugi wa utareru. “The stake that sticks up gets hammered down.” It’s a warning to conform.
This is why we take as much power away 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.
only four meaningful, visible levels at Google: individual contributor, manager, director, and vice president.
When we introduced a deferred compensation program in 2011 (the Google Managed Investment Fund), which allows Googlers to invest their bonus money alongside our finance department, we decided to make it available to everyone rather than just to senior executives, in contrast to what most companies do. 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.
Symbols and stories matter. Ron Nessen, who served as press secretary for President Gerald Ford, shared a story about his boss’s leadership style: “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.’
“Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.’ ”
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 ...
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People make all kinds of assumptions—guesses, really—about how things work in organizations. Most of these guesses are rooted in sample bias. A textbook illustration of sample bias is Abraham Wald’s work in World War II. Wald, a Hungarian mathematician, was a member of the Statistical Research Group (a group based at Columbia University that took on statistical assignments from the US government during the war). He was asked what the military could do to improve the survival rates for bombers. Wald reviewed the location of bullet holes on planes returning from bombing runs to determine where
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Wald concluded, counterintuitively, that the cockpit and the tail needed the most reinforcement. The sample he was looking at included only bombers that survived and had been shot up throughout the wings, nose, and fuselage. Wald realized he was looking at a biased sample: The bombers that were shot in the cockpit and tail never made it back. That’s where the bulletproofing was most needed.xxxix
The truth is that people usually live up to your expectations, whether those expectations are high or low.
“If you want your car to get fifty miles per gallon, fine. You can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for five hundred miles, you have to start over.”
As Larry often points out, “If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.”
