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

by Laszlo Bock

Sending your salespeople to the most expensive sales seminars, led by someone who sold products for someone else, is unlikely to revolutionize your sales performance,

because the specifics of what your compan...

individual performance scales linearly, while teaching scales geometrically.

If you break selling down into discrete skills, there may be different people who are best at cold-calling, negotiation, closing deals, or maintaining relationships.

The best at each skill should be teaching it.

For the learner, having actual practitioners teaching is far more effective than listening to academics, professional trainers, or consultants.

Too often, though, training is outsourced wholesale to outside companies.

It is generally far better to learn from people who are doing the work today, who can answer deeper questions and draw on current, real-life examples.

They understand your context better, they are always available to provide immediate feedback...

mindfulness.

“paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

A simple exercise to instill mindfulness is to sit quietly and focus on your breathing for two minutes. It’s also been shown to improve cognitive functioning and decision-making.

The first week was just listening to our breathing, the next was observing the thoughts that ran through our heads as we breathed, working up to paying attention to our current emotions and how they felt in our bodies.

We have a broader program, called G2G or Googler2Googler, where Googlers enlist en masse to teach one another.

Though teaching takes the G2G faculty away from their day jobs, many courses are just a few hours long and offered only quarterly, so the time commitment for faculty and students is modest. The classes offer a refreshing change of mental scenery, making people more productive when they return to work. And like 20 percent time, G2G makes for a more creative, fun, generative work environment, where people feel deeply invested in what the company does and is.

It’s a small investment of company resources, with huge dividends.

You don’t need to create something as formal or widespread as G2G to tap into your teachers.

in addition to benefiting the person being advised, the advisors themselves benefit as well.

Through repeated experience, our company’s leaders are building their listening and empathy skills and their own self-awareness.

It sounds simple, but the benefits they experience in these sessions have a cascading influence. They claim to be better managers, leaders, and even spo...

“We learned of Google’s Career Guru program at a Career Development Summit that they hosted and thought it might be a simple, scalable answer to the challenge [of offering 1:1 career advice globally].

If you want to unlock your organization’s tremendous potential for teaching and learning, you need to create the right conditions.

Organizations always seem to have more demand for people development than they can satisfy, and Google is no different.

Only invest in courses that change behavior

asserting that 70 percent of learning should happen through on-the-job experiences, 20 percent through coaching and mentoring, and 10 percent through classroom instruction.

the 70/20/10 rule used by most learning professionals doesn’t work.

First, it doesn’t tell you what to do.

Second, even if you know what you’re supposed to do, how do you measure it?

Third, there’s no rigorous evidence that allocating learning resources or experiences in this way even works.

a model that prescribed four levels of measurement in learning programs: reaction, learning, behavior, and results.

Level one—reaction—asks the student for her reaction to the training.

It feels great to teach a course and get positive feedback from the students at the end of it. If you’re a consultant or professor, people who have a good time and report feeling like they learned are terrific advocates for your class, ensuring future enrollment and revenue.

But how students feel about your class tells you nothing about whether they have learned anything.

Moreover, the students themselves are often unqualified to provide feedback on the quality of the course.

Level two—learning—assesses the change in the student’s knowledge or attitude, typically through a test or survey at the end of the program.

The drawback is that it’s hard to retain newly acquired lessons over time.

Worse, if the environment you are returning to is unchanged, the new knowledge will be extinguished.

third level of assessment—behavior—is where his framework becomes powerful.

to what extent participants changed their behavior as a result of the training.

Assessing behavioral change requires waiting for some time after the learning experience, ensuring lessons have been integrated into long-term memory, rather than hastily memorized for tomorrow’s exam and then fo...

The ideal way of assessing behavioral change is not just to ask the student, but to ...

Seeking external perspectives both provides a more comprehensive view of the student’s behavior and subtly encourages him to assess ...

Finally, level four looks at the actual results of the training program.

Do you sell more? Are you a better leader? Is the code you write more elegant?

It’s much more difficult to measure the impact of training on less structured jobs or more general skills.

But for most organizations, there’s a shortcut.

Skip the graduate-school math and just compare how identical groups perform after only one has received training.

If the two groups are truly comparable and the only difference between them has been the training,

then any difference in sales results is because of the training.

What can be counterintuitive and frustrating about this experimental approach is that if you have a problem, you ...