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

by Laszlo Bock

Welch and Conaty had implemented a 20-70-10 performance ranking system, where GE employees were sorted into three groups: the top 20 percent, the middle 70 percent, and the bottom 10 percent. The top workers were lionized and rewarded with choice assignments, leadership training programs, and stock options. The bottom 10 percent were fired. Under Immelt, the forced distribution was softened and the crisp labels of “top 20 percent,” “middle 70 percent,” and “bottom 10 percent” were replaced with euphemisms: “top talent,” “highly valued,” and “needs improvement.”

I didn’t have the benefit of having worked under both CEOs, but it dawned on me how deeply a CEO’s persona and focus can shape an institution. Most CEOs are very good at many things, but they become CEOs for being superbly distinctive at one or two, which tend to be matched to a company’s needs at that time. Even CEOs need to declare a major. Welch is best known for Six Sigma—a set of tools to improve quality and efficiency—and his focus on people. Immelt instead emphasized sales and marketing, most visibly through GE’s branded “ecomagination” efforts to make and be perceived as a maker of greener products.

they had this wildly ambitious mission to organize the world’s information—all of it!—and make it universally accessible and useful.

Jack explained that Wegmans adheres to virtually the same principles as Google: “Our CEO, Danny Wegman, says that ‘leading with your heart can make a successful business.’ Our employees are empowered around this vision to give their best and let no customer leave unhappy. And we use it to always make our decisions to do the right thing with our people, regardless of cost.”

Command-oriented, low-freedom management is common because it’s profitable, it requires less effort, and most managers are terrified of the alternative. It’s easy to run a team that does what they are told.

The most talented people on the planet are increasingly physically mobile, increasingly connected through technology, and—importantly—increasingly discoverable by employers. This global cadre want to be in high-freedom companies, and talent will flow to those companies. And leaders who build the right kind of environments will be magnets for the most talented people on the planet.

Google’s approach is to cleave the knot. We deliberately take power and authority over employees away from managers. Here is a sample of the decisions managers at Google cannot make unilaterally: Whom to hire Whom to fire How someone’s performance is rated How much of a salary increase, bonus, or stock grant to give someone Who is selected to win an award for great management Whom to promote When code is of sufficient quality to be incorporated into our software code base The final design of a product and when to launch it Each of these decisions is instead made either by a group of peers, a committee, or a dedicated, independent team. Many newly hired managers hate this! Even once they get their heads around the way hiring works, promotion time comes around and they are dumbfounded that they can’t unilaterally promote those whom they believe to be their best people. The problem is that you and I might define our “best people” differently. Or it might be possible that your worst person is better than my best person, in which case you should promote everyone and I should promote no one. If you’re solving for what is most fair across the entire organization, which in turn helps employees have greater trust in the company and makes rewards more meaningful, managers must give up this power and allow outcomes to be calibrated across groups.

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. These factors “accounted for a 9% increase in value added per employee in our study.” In short, only when companies took steps to give their people more freedom did performance improve.16

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.

wanted people to be treated. Quixotic as it sounds, they both wanted to create a company where work was meaningful, employees felt free to pursue their passions, and people and their families were cared for.

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.”

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.37 It’s natural to look at Google and focus on the physical spaces: the nap pods for catching a quick snooze or the slides connecting floors. 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.”

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.”40 How does our mission compare to those of other companies? Here are a few excerpts from other companies in 2013 (emphasis added):

But two things are immediately obvious from reading these. First, I owe you an apology for making you slog through corporate mission statements, perhaps the worst form of literature known to man. Second, Google’s mission is distinctive both in its simplicity and in what it doesn’t talk about. There’s no mention of profit or market. No mention of customers, shareholders, or users. No mention of why this is our mission or to what end we pursue these goals. Instead, it’s taken to be self-evident that organizing information and making it accessible and useful is a good thing.

This kind of mission gives individuals’ work meaning, because it is a moral rather than a business goal. The most powerful movements in history have had moral motivations, whether they were quests for independence or equal rights. And while I don’t want to push this notion too far, it’s fair to say that there’s a reason that revolutions tend to be about ideas and not profits or market share. Crucially, we can never achieve our mission, as there will always be more information to organize and more ways to make it useful. This creates motivation to constantly innovate and push into new areas. A mission that is about being “the market leader,” once accomplished, offers little more inspiration. The broad scope of our mission allows Google to move forward by steering with a compass rather than a speedometer. While there are always disagreements—and we’ll get to a few of those in chapter 13—the underlying shared belief in this mission unites most Googlers. It provided a touchstone for keeping the culture strong, even as we grew from dozens of people to tens of thousands.

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.

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”).

If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them Transparency is the second cornerstone of our culture. “Default to open” is a phrase sometimes heard in the open-source technology community. Chris DiBona, leader of Google’s open-source efforts, defines it like this: “Assume that all information can be shared with the team, instead of assuming that no information can be shared. Restricting information should be a conscious effort, and you’d better have a good reason for doing so. In open source, it’s countercultural to hide information.” Google didn’t create this concept, but it’s safe to say we ran with it.

Voice is the third cornerstone of Google’s culture. Voice means giving employees a real say in how the company is run.

He launched Bureaucracy Busters, a now-annual program where Googlers identify their biggest frustrations and help fix them. In the first round, Googlers submitted 570 ideas and voted more than 55,000 times. Most of the frustrations came from small, readily addressable issues:

budget approval thresholds were annoyingly low, requiring managers to review even the smallest transactions; time-saving tools were too hard to find (ironic).

If you give people freedom, they will amaze you So, to my astonishment, the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” was pretty spot-on. I realized this only after I’d been at Google five years and was asked to write an article about our culture for Think Quarterly.61

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.

Buying companies and then shutting down their products is a recent Silicon Valley phenomenon, awkwardly known as acqui-hiring. The ostensible purpose is to obtain people who have demonstrated their capabilities by building great products and who otherwise would not join you as employees. It’s not clear yet whether acqui-hiring is a good way to build successful organizations.

Given that over two-thirds of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value when the products and businesses are kept alive,69 there would have to be something special about acqui-hired employees to make this strategy work. This isn’t to say that acqui-hires are a bad idea. Just that they’re not obviously a great idea.

The presence of a huge training budget is not evidence that you’re investing in your people. It’s evidence that you failed to hire the right people to begin with.

“Only hire people who are better than you.” Every person I’ve hired is better than me in some meaningful way.

I learn from them every week. And I waited a long time to hire each one. Karen turned me down for four years before I eventually hired her. It takes longer to find these exceptional people, but it’s always worth the wait.

blindly hiring for brains and giving them unbounded freedom to do what they will is a recipe for sudden and catastrophic failure.

being a star in one environment doesn’t make you a star in a new one. So making sure someone will thrive in your environment becomes critical.

Like everyone else, we did reference checks, but we also built an applicant tracking system that would check a candidate’s resume against the resumes of existing Googlers. If there was overlap—say you went to the same school in the same years as a Googler, or worked at Microsoft at the same time—the Googler would often get an automated email asking if they knew you and what they thought of you. The idea was that since references the candidate provides are almost always glowing, these “backdoor” references, we thought, would be more honest. And this approach would screen out people who “kiss up and kick down.”xiv

Corporate job sites are awful. They are difficult to search, filled with generic job descriptions that don’t tell you anything about what the job really is or what the team you’ll be part of is like, and provide no feedback on whether you’d be good for a role or not. We started addressing this in 2012. For example, a candidate can now submit not only a resume but also develop a personal skill profile. Using Google+ “circles” (a group you select and which has access only to what you want to share… no more sharing the pics of your friend’s wild bachelor party with your boss), they can choose to share those skills with Google, other employers, or any subset of people and organizations they wish. They can get in touch with current Googlers to find out what it’s really like to work here. With an applicant’s permission, we’re then able to stay in touch with people who have skills we don’t need today but may in the future, and reach out to them as our needs change.

selecting the individual search consultants you work with is more crucial than selecting the company.

The last source of candidates that we, and most organizations, have used is job boards. These are websites where for a fee an employer can post a job and then receive a flood of applicants. Popular examples are Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, and Indeed. The Google experience has been that job boards generate many, many applicants and vanishingly few actual hires.

The first step to building a recruiting machine is to turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals. But you need to temper the natural bias we all have toward our friends by having someone objective make the hiring decision. As your organization grows, the second step is to ask your best-networked people to spend even more time sourcing great hires. For some, that may turn into a full-time job.

Finally, be willing to experiment. We learned billboards don’t work because we tried one.

They create a situation where an interview is spent trying to confirm what we think of someone, rather than truly assessing them. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.”

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.

The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs. The problem, however, is that most standardized tests of this type discriminate against non-white, non-male test

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…?”).

The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.

Examples of interview questions include: Tell me about a time your behavior had a positive impact on your team. (Follow-ups: What was your primary goal and why? How did your teammates respond? Moving forward, what’s your plan?) Tell me about a time when you effectively managed your team to achieve a goal. What did your approach look like? (Follow-ups: What were your targets and how did you meet them as an individual and as a team? How did you adapt your leadership approach to different individuals? What was the key takeaway from this specific situation?) Tell me about a time you had difficulty working with someone (can be a coworker, classmate, client). What made this person difficult to work with for you? (Follow-ups: What steps did you take to resolve the problem? What was the outcome? What could you have done differently?)

If you don’t want to build all this yourself, it’s easy enough to find online examples of structured interview questions that you can adapt and use in your environments. 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.

After all, companies have many employees, but a person has only one job. I make a point of always asking candidates how the recruiting process has been so far, and leaving at least ten minutes for their questions.

In addition to testing technical hires on their engineering ability, we realized that there were four distinct attributes that predicted whether someone would be successful at Google: General Cognitive Ability. Not surprisingly, we want smart people who can learn and adapt to new situations. Remember that this is about understanding how candidates have solved hard problems in real life and how they learn, not checking GPAs and SATs. Leadership. Also not surprising, right? Every company wants leaders. But Google looks for a particular type of leadership, called “emergent leadership.” This is a form of leadership that ignores formal designations—at Google there is rarely a formal leader of any effort. I recall being asked what it meant that I was the “executive sponsor” for a project that culminated in 10 percent salary increases for everyone in the company. I explained that not only did I not know, but that within Google it was a meaningless designation. In all likelihood, a relatively new hire had put those words next to my name because my title was Senior Vice President, but my role on the project was the same as anyone else’s: Provide an opinion, do some analysis, and help get the right outcome. At Google we expect that over a team’s life, different skills will be needed at different times, so various people will need to step into leadership roles, contribute, and—just as important—recede back into the team once the need for their specific skills has passed. We have a st...

when someone applies to a job at your company, they don’t know everything your company does. In fact, most large companies have distinct recruiting teams for different divisions. Someone rejected for a product management job in one division might have been great for a marketing job in another division, but won’t be considered for that job because the