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

by Laszlo Bock

unexpectedly, we found that technical expertise was actually the least important of the eight behaviors across great managers.

Make no mistake, it is essential. An engineering manager who can’t code is not going to be ab...

But of the behaviors that differentiated the very best, technical input made the smal...

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.

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

For Google, the result has been a steady improvement in manager quality.

our bottom quartile managers have become almost as good as our average was just two years prior.

It’s actually become harder to be a bad manager.

And since we know that manager quality drives performance, retention, and happiness, it means the company...

Looking at average managers didn’t help, nor did benchmarking.

Comparing the extremes allowed us to see meaningful differences in behavior and outcomes, which then formed a basis for unceasing improvements in how people experience Google.

Letting those who are at the bottom of the performance distribution know it, without tying that directly to pay or career outcomes, alerted and motiva...

Care about upgrading your organization.

Everyone says they do, but few really take action.

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.

Survey teams twice a year and see how managers are doing.

Have the people who are best at each attribute train everyone else.

Focusing on the two tails is more than anything a result of having constraints:

Moreover, addressing the two tails is where you’ll see the biggest performance improvements:

There’s little benefit in moving a 40th percentile performer to be a 50th percentile performer, but going from the 5th percentile to the 50th is major.

Studying your strongest people closely and then building programs to measure and reinforce their best attributes for the entire company ...

If you also are able to get those who struggle the most to be substantially better, you’ll have created a...

American companies spent $156,200,000,000 on learning programs in 2011,141 a staggering sum. A hundred and thirty-five countries have GDPs below that amount.

The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year, which works out to more than thirty minutes each week.

Most of that money and time is wasted.

Not because the training is necessarily bad, but because there’s no measure of what is actually learned and wh...

If I look at my years in large and small professional environments, I’d be hard pressed to point to anything I do differently today as a result of training.

Put another way, the United States spent $638 billion on public education for pre-kindergarten through secondary schools in the 2009–2010 school year,142 roughly four times what corporations spend on training their people.

And yet public schools provide more than ten times as many hours of instruction per learner per year,

they learned more in ten years of school than they did from ten years of corporate training programs.

Why then is so much invested in corporate learning, with so little return? Because most corporate learning is insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.

The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert.

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

deliberate practice:

intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.

Simple practice, without feedback and experimentation...

Building this kind of repetition and focus into training might seem costly, but it’s not.

As we’ll discuss later, 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 “lea...

Unless your job is changing rapidly, this is a universal trap that we all fall into.

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 simp...

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?”

Every meeting ended with immediate feedback and a plan for what to continue to do or change for next time.

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.

in your organization there are people who are expert on every facet of what you do, or at least expert eno...

Remember that Groysberg found that exceptional success rarely follows an individual from company to company.