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

by Laszlo Bock

This book is the story of how we think about our people, what we’ve learned over the past fifteen years, and what you can do to put people first and transform how you live and lead.

Command-oriented, low-freedom management is common because it’s profitable, it requires less effort, and most managers are terrified of the alternative.

the power dynamic at the heart of management pulls against freedom.

What’s a manager to do without these traditional sticks and carrots? The only thing that’s left. “Managers serve the team,” according to our executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. Like any place, we of course have exceptions and failures, but 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.

The good news is that any team can be built around the principles that Google has used.

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.

Building an exceptional team or institution starts with a founder. But being a founder doesn’t mean starting a new company. It is within anyone’s grasp to be the founder and culture-creator of their own team, whether you are the first employee or joining a company that has existed for decades.

In Larry’s words: “I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company. My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we’re doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow.”

for. Think about what stories people will tell about you, your work, your team. Today you have the opportunity to become the architect of that story.

Ed Schein, now retired from the MIT School of Management, taught that a group’s culture can be studied in three ways: by looking at its “artifacts,” such as physical space and behaviors; by surveying the beliefs and values espoused by group members; or by digging deeper into the underlying assumptions behind those values.

As Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and its youngest-ever tenured professor told me: “People interpret strong cultures based on the artifacts, because they’re the most visible, but the values and assumptions underneath matter much more.”

Yet fun is an outcome of who we are, rather than the defining characteristic. It doesn’t explain how Google works or why we choose to operate the way we do. To understand that, you have to explore the three defining aspects of our culture: mission, transparency, and voice.

Google’s mission is the first cornerstone of our culture. Our mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

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.

We all want our work to matter. Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know that you are making a difference in the world. Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University told me people see their work as just a job (“a necessity that’s not a major positive in their lives”), a career (something to “win” or “advance”), or a calling (“a source of enjoyment and fulfillment where you’re doing socially useful work”).

Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund with $145 billion in assets,56 takes one such approach: Every meeting is recorded and made available to all employees. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, explains: “My most important principle is that getting at the truth… is essential for getting better. We get at truth through radical transparency and putting aside our ego barriers in order to explore our mistakes and personal weaknesses so that we can improve.”

our CFO, Patrick Pichette, put the power in Googlers’ hands. He launched Bureaucracy Busters, a now-annual program where Googlers identify their biggest frustrations and help fix them.

Culture matters most when it is tested

WORK RULES…FOR BUILDING A GREAT CULTURE Think of your work as a calling, with a mission that matters. Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.

People approach hiring the way Garrison Keillor describes the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” We all think we are great at it, but we never go back to check if we are, and so we never get better. There’s ample data showing that most assessment occurs in the first three to five minutes of an interview (or even more quickly),70 with the remaining time being spent confirming that bias; that interviewers are subconsciously biased toward people like themselves; and that most interview techniques are worthless.

It’s almost impossibly difficult to take an average performer and through training turn them into a superstar.

There are examples of people who were mediocre performers and went on to greatness, though most of those successes are a result of changing the context and type of work, rather than a benefit of training.

At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires.

Our greatest single constraint on growth has always, always been our ability to find great people.

chapters. The good news is that it doesn’t have to cost more money, but you do have to make two big changes to how you think about hiring.

The first change is to hire more slowly.

as Alan Eustace, our SVP of Knowledge, often says, “A top-notch engineer is worth three hundred times or more than an average engineer.… I’d rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist.”

How can you tell if you have found someone exceptional? My simple rule of thumb—and the second big change to make in how you hire—is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”

The lesson of “The Talent Myth” was not “Don’t hire smart people.” It was “Don’t hire exclusively for smarts.”

WORK RULES…FOR HIRING (THE SHORT VERSION) Given limited resources, invest your HR dollars first in recruiting. Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way, and not letting managers make hiring decisions for their own teams.

there’s no correlation between fluid intelligence (which is predictive of job performance) and insight problems like brainteasers, and in part because there is no way to distinguish between someone who is innately bright and someone who has just practiced this skill.

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. Structured interviews are used all the time in survey research. The idea is that any variation in candidate assessment is a result of the candidate’s performance, not because an interviewer has higher or lower standards, or asks easier or harder questions.

There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time…?”). Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What would you do if…?”). A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate.

Research shows that combinations of assessment techniques are better than any single technique. For example, a test of general cognitive ability (predicts 26 percent of performance), when combined with an assessment of conscientiousness (10 percent), is better able to predict who will be successful in a job (36 percent).

My experience is that people who score high on conscientiousness “work to completion”—meaning they don’t stop until a job is done rather than quitting at good enough—and are more likely to feel responsibility for their teams and the environment around them.

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.

Managers aren’t bad people. But each of us is susceptible to the conveniences and small thrills of power.

But human beings are wired to defer to authority, seek hierarchy, and focus on their local interest.

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.

For example, as a practical matter there are really 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.

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, 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.’ ”

As Hal Varian told me, “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.”

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 adding more armor would help. According to the National WWII Museum,100 he created the diagram below.

Sample bias afflicts us all.

We also use one-percent tests, where we roll out a change to one percent of users to see what happens before implementing the change for billions of users.

“A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That’s why, since about 1948, we’ve encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects. To take our resources, to build up a unique team, and to follow their own insights in pursuit of problem-solving.”

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 discussion that brings 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.

Elaine Pulakos, a PhD psychologist from Michigan State University and now president of PDRI, a top consulting firm in this area, observed that “[a] significant part of the problem is that performance management has been reduced to prescribed, often discrete steps within formal administrative systems.… Although formal performance management systems are intended to drive… the day-to-day activities of communicating ongoing expectations, setting short-term objectives, and giving continual guidance… these behaviors seem to have become largely disconnected from the formal systems.”

Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance.

The focus on process rather than purpose creates an insidious opportunity for sly employee...