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

by Laszlo Bock

Poor performance is rarely because the person is incompetent or a bad person. It’s typically a result of a gap in skill (which is either fixable or not) or will (where the person is not motivated to do the work). In the latter case, it could be a personal issue or a useful sign tha...

In fact, the way we de-emphasize role-related knowledge in hiring leaves us a bit ...

because we like to hire people who may not know ...

We have faith that almost all of them will figure it out, and along the way are more likely...

Our interventions here are for the small handful of people who struggle most, rather than for everyone. If that doesn’t work, we then help the person find another role within Google.

Typically, this results in the person’s performance improving to average levels.

This may not sound like much, but think about it this way: Out of a group of a hundred people, Jim was on...

After this intervention, Jim was about the fiftieth-best performer.132 Not a superstar, but Jim is now contributing more than forty-nine other people, where before he h...

What would your company be like if all the worst people got that much better? And if even the bottom forty-nine were ...

For the remaining people, some choose to leave and others we need to fire. It sounds harsh, but they tend to end up happier because we’ve shown sensitivity to their ...

This cycle of investing in the bottom tail of the distribution means your teams improve… a lot. People either improve dramatically or they leave and succeed elsewhere.

if you believe people are fundamentally good and worthy of trust, you must be honest and transparent with them.

That includes telling them when they are lagging behind in their performance.

Most people who are performing poorly know it and want to get better. It’s important to give them that chance.

the very best performers, experience a company differently than average or mediocre performers do.

Our data show us that they find it easier to get things done, feel more valued, feel that their work is more meaningful, and leave the company at one-fifth the rate that our lowest performers do.

Why? Because top performers live in a virtuous cycle of great output, great feedback, more great out...

Every company has the seeds of its future success in its best people, yet most fail to study them closely. This is a missed opportunity,

high performance is highly context dependent. Benchmarking and best practices tell you what worked elsewhere, but not what will work for you.

If success depends on specific, local conditions, then you are best served by studying the interplay of high performance and those local conditions.

As you might expect, we study our best people very closely at Google.

Project Oxygen initially set out to prove that managers don’t matter and ended up demonstrating that good managers were crucial.

Project Gifted Youngsters was targeted at explaining what people who sustain the highest performance for long periods of time do differently from everyone else.

The Honeydew Enterprise (named for Bunsen Honeydew, the intrepid innovator from the Muppets) strove to understand the behaviors and practices that most foster and inhibit innovation among software engineers.

Project Milgram explored the most effective ways to mine social networks for knowledge within Google.

Project Oxygen has had the most profound impact on Google.

“What if everyone at Google had an amazing manager? Not a fine one or a good one, but one that really understood them and made them excited to come to work each day. What would Google feel like then?”

Engineers at Google deeply believed that managers don’t matter.

within six weeks the managers were reinstated.

we’d added over nineteen thousand employees, most of whom came from traditional environments where managers were largely unhelpful, if not downright destructive.

Our hiring credo was that an engineering manager had to be at least as technically capable as her team.xlviii When that wasn’t the case, the manager wasn’t respected

Everyone has an idea of what a good or bad manager is, but it’s a subjective standard.

Googlers with the best managers did 5 to 18 percent better on a dozen Googlegeist dimensions when compared to those managed by the worst manager.

Among other things, they were significantly more certain that

Career decisions were ma...

Their personal career objectives ...

Work happened eff...

Team members treated each other nonhierarchically and with respect,

involved in decision-making

freedom to manage the balance between work and their personal lives.

Teams working for the best managers also performed better and...

In fact, manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employe...

The sixty-five people who moved to worse managers scored significantly lower on thirty-four of forty-two Googlegeist items. The next year, those moving to better managers saw significant improvements on six of the forty-two items.

Switching to a worse manager was—by itself—enough to transform someone’s experience of Google, chipping away at their trust in the company and causing them to consider quitting.

So managers did matter.

And not only that, but amazing managers m...

we took a very simple approach to finding out what the best and worst managers did differently: We asked them.

double-blind interview methodology,

because it prevents the interviewer from biasing the interviewee, and the interviewee doesn’t know which category they are in either. In other words, both the interviewer and interviewee are “blind” to the experimental condition.

The specific prescription for managers is to prepare for meetings by thinking hard about employees’ individual strengths and the unique circumstances they face, and then use the meeting to ask questions rather than dictate answers.