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

by Laszlo Bock

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.

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.

In short, only when companies took steps to give their people more freedom did performance improve.16

The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families resemble one another.”v All successful organizations resemble one another as well. They possess a shared sense not just of what they produce, but of who they are and want to be. In their vision (and perhaps hubris), they’ve thought through not just their origin, but also their destiny.

The most talented people on the planet want an aspiration that is also inspiring. The challenge for leaders is to craft such a goal.

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”).

The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent).

The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent).

One of the challenges we face at Google is that we want people to feel, think, and act like owners rather than employees. But human beings are wired to defer to authority, seek hierarchy, and focus on their local interest. Think about meetings that you go to. I’d wager that the most senior person always ends up sitting at the head of the table. Is that because they race from office to office, scurrying to be there first so they can seize the best seat? Watch closely next time. As attendees file in, they leave the head seat vacant. It illustrates the subtle and insidious nature of how we create hierarchy. Without instruction, discussion, or even conscious thought, we make room for our “superiors.”

Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power. Employees have a tendency to follow orders.

“Jim Barksdale, the legendary CEO of Netscape, in one of these management meetings said, ‘If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.’ ”

Relying on data—indeed, expecting every conversation to be rooted in data—upends the traditional role of managers. It transforms them from being providers of intuition to facilitators in a search for truth, with the most useful facts being brought to bear on each decision. In a sense, every meeting becomes a Hegelian dialectic, with presenters providing a thesis and the folks in the room providing an antithesis, spurning opinion, questioning facts, and testing which decision is correct. The result is synthesis, a closer approximation of truth than if we had relied on mere pronouncements. One of the core principles of Google has always been “Don’t politick. Use data.”

We use data—evidence—to guard against rumor, bias, and plain old wrongheadedness.

“but the virtue of big is that we can run hundreds of experiments to see what really makes Googlers happier.” Every office, every team, every project is an opportunity to run an experiment and learn from it. This is one of the biggest missed opportunities that large organizations have, and it holds just as true for companies made up of hundreds, not thousands.

In 1999 we were serving a financial services company and doing one of the first e-commerce projects our firm had ever done. (Remember “e-commerce”?) I brought a draft report to him and instead of editing it, he asked, “Do I need to review this?” I knew deep down that while my report was good, he would surely find some room for improvement. Realizing this, I told him it wasn’t ready and went back to refine it further. I came back to him a second time, and a second time he asked, “Do I need to review this?” I went away again. On my fourth try, he asked the same question and I told him, “No. You don’t need to review it. It’s ready for the client.” He answered, “Terrific. Nice work.” And sent it to the client without even glancing at it.

You just need to fight the petty seductions of management and the command-and-control impulses that accompany seniority. Organizations put tremendous effort into finding great people but then restrict their ability to have impact on any area but their own tasks.

What managers miss is that every time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for new challenges.

The 8 Project Oxygen Attributes Be a good coach. Empower the team and do not micromanage. Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being. Be very productive/results-oriented. Be a good communicator—listen and share information. Help the team with career development. Have a clear vision/strategy for the team. Have important technical skills that help advise the team.

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.

I’d argue that’s a shortsighted move, because individual performance scales linearly, while teaching scales geometrically.

Fortunately, there’s a much better approach to measuring the results of learning programs, and like many great people-management ideas, it’s not a new one. In 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick, who was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and past president of the American Society for Training and Development, came up with a model that prescribed four levels of measurement in learning programs: reaction, learning, behavior, and results.

In fact, economist Edward Lazear of Stanford University has argued that people are on average underpaid relative to their contribution early in their careers, and overpaid later in their careers.

To make these kinds of extreme rewards work, you need two capabilities. One is a very clear understanding of what impact is derived from the role in question (which requires a complementary awareness of how much is due to context: Did the market move in a lucky way? How much of this was a result of a team effort or the brand of the company? Is the achievement a short- or long-term win?). Once you can assess impact, you can look at your available budget and decide what the shape of your reward curve ought to be. If the best performer is generating ten times as much impact as an average performer, they shouldn’t necessarily get ten times the reward, but I’d wager they should get at least five times the reward.180 If you’re adopting a system like this, the only way to stay within budget is to give smaller rewards to the poorer performers, or even the average ones. That won’t feel good initially, but take comfort in knowing that you’ve now given your best people a reason to stay with you, and everyone else a reason to aim higher. The other capability is having managers who understand the reward system well enough that they can explain to the recipient, and to others who might ask if word were to get out, exactly why a reward was so high and what any employee can do to achieve a similar reward.

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine]

At the same time, when you do reward people, make sure to sprinkle in experiences, not just cash. Few people look back on their lives as a series of paychecks. They remember the conversations, lunches, and events with colleagues and friends. Celebrate success with actions, not dollars.

People can exist, indeed did exist for thousands of years, without companies. But companies can’t exist without people. In tough economic times we lose sight of that fact. Companies struggle to maintain their profit margins or even to keep their doors open, cutting working hours and benefits. People take what jobs they can. Work becomes ever more miserable. Then companies are surprised that attrition leaps as soon as the economy improves.

“People who stand near the holes in a social structure are at higher risk of having good ideas.”

We decided to prompt managers with a reminder about the very small tasks they could perform that would have the biggest impact on their Nooglers, and therefore the highest return on an investment of their valuable time. In the pilot, managers received just-in-time emails the Sunday before a new hire started. Like the Project Oxygen checklist, which showcased the eight behaviors of successful managers, the five actions were almost embarrassing in their simplicity:

It turns out checklists really do work, even when the list is almost patronizingly simple.

Development conversations can more safely happen along the way to achieving a goal. Separate in space and time conversations about whether a goal has been achieved. Once a performance period has ended, then have a direct discussion about the goals that were set and what was achieved, and how rewards are tied to performance. But that conversation should be entirely about outcomes, not about process. Goals were either missed, met, or exceeded, and each of those states carries different rewards or encouragements.

Put your best people under a microscope. Through a combination of circumstance, skill, and grit they have figured out how to excel. Identify not just your best all-around athletes, but the best specialists. Don’t find the best salesperson; find the person who sells best to new accounts of a certain size. Find the person who excels at hitting golf balls at night in the rain. The more specific you can be in slicing expertise, the easier it will be to study your stars and discern why they are more successful than others.