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

by Laszlo Bock

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.

If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them

The way we solve the “backstabbing” problem, for example, is that if you write a nasty email about someone, you shouldn’t be surprised if they are added to the email thread. I remember the first time I complained about somebody in an email and my manager promptly copied that person, which forced us to quickly resolve the issue. It was a stark lesson in the importance of having a direct conversation with my colleagues!

mission, transparency, voice

“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.’”

“Micromanagement is mismanagement. … [P]eople micromanage to assuage their anxieties about organizational performance: they feel better if they are continuously directing and controlling the actions of others—at heart, this reveals emotional insecurity on their part. It gives micromanagers the illusion of control (or usefulness). Another motive is lack of trust in the abilities of staff—micromanagers do not believe that their colleagues will successfully complete a task or discharge a responsibility even when they say they will.”108 Instead, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of an organization. The only questions that should rise up the org chart are ones where, Serrat continues, “given the same data and information,” more senior leaders would make a different decision than the rank and file.

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.

Pick an area where your people are frustrated, and let them fix it. If there are constraints, limited time or money, tell them what they are. Be transparent with your people and give them a voice in shaping your team or company. You’ll be stunned by what they accomplish.

Our first twenty years are spent being compared to others. It’s no wonder, then, that as adults we re-create those same conditions when we design our work environments. It’s what we know.

the soul of performance assessment is calibration. It’s fair to say that without calibration, our rating process would be far less fair, trusted, and effective.

A manager assigns a draft rating to an employee—say, “exceeds expectations”—based on nailing OKRs but tempered by other activities, like the volume of interviews completed, or extenuating circumstances such as a shift in the economy that might have affected ad revenues.xlivBefore this draft rating becomes final, groups of managers sit down together and review all of their employees’ draft ratings together in a process we call calibration.

A manager’s assessments are compared to those of managers leading similar teams, and they review their employees collectively:

This allows us to remove the pressure managers may feel from employees to inflate ratings. It also ensures that the end results reflect a shared expectation of performance, since managers often have different expectations for their people and interpret performance standards in their own idiosyncratic manner

Calibration diminishes bias by forcing managers to justify their decisions to one another. It also increases perceptions of fairness among employees.

The power of calibration in assessing people for ratings is not that different from the power of having people compare notes after interviewing candidates. The goal is the same: to remove sources of individual bias.

As an employee, I want to be treated fairly. I don’t mind someone being paid more than me if they are contributing more. But if we’re doing the same work and they’re being paid way more, I’ll be mighty unhappy. A just rating system means I don’t have to worry about that. It also means that if someone does exceptional work, they’ll be seen not just by their manager, but by lots of managers in the calibration meeting, who together create and promulgate a consistent standard across the company. Ratings also make it easier for people to move across the company.

once you have more than a few hundred people, employees are more comfortable trusting a reliable system than individual managers. Not because managers are necessarily bad or biased, but because a rating process that includes calibration actively weeds out badness and bias.

As a manager, you want to tell people not only how they did, but also how to do better in the future.

Do it in two distinct conversations.

the introduction of an extrinsic reward caused people to think of their work differently from that point on by reducing intrinsic motivation.

intrinsic motivation drives not just higher performance, but also better personal outcomes in terms of greater vitality, self-esteem, and well-being.

Evaluation is necessary to distribute finite resources, like salary increases or bonus dollars. Development is just as necessary so people grow and improve.”

Googlers are also free to solicit feedback on specific topics at any point in the year, rather than waiting for a single day.

developed a one-page handout for them to use during their performance conversation. Again, the goal was to make the conversation more specific and tangible. We distributed these handouts to employees just to be on the safe side; we hoped the managers would cover the right topics, but it didn’t hurt to have the employees ready to guide the discussion too.

First, set goals correctly. Make them public. Make them ambitious.

Second, gather peer feedback.

Third, for evaluation, adopt some kind of calibration process.

Fourth, split reward conversations from development conversations.

Focus instead on what does matter: a fair calibration of performance against goals, and earnest coaching on how to improve.

What most organizations miss is that people in the bottom tail represent the biggest opportunity to improve performance in your company, and the top tail will teach you exactly how to realize that opportunity.

this isn’t a “shape up or ship out” conversation; it’s a sensitive talk about how to help someone develop. A colleague once described it as “compassionate pragmatism.”

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 that there is something bigger wrong with the team that needs to be addressed.

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.

identifying the bottom 5 percent is not the same as “stack ranking” employees, a method of forcing all employees to fall into performance categories with a fixed distribution.

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.

top performers live in a virtuous cycle of great output, great feedback, more great output, and more great feedback.

Benchmarking and best practices tell you what worked elsewhere, but not what will work for you. In contrast, understanding precisely what makes your best people succeed in your unique environment is the natural extension of Groysberg’s findings. If success depends on specific, local conditions, then you are best served by studying the interplay of high performance and those local conditions.

overall manager-happiness score,

Career decisions were made fairly. Performance was fairly assessed and promotions were well deserved. Their personal career objectives could be met, and their manager was a helpful advocate and counselor. Work happened efficiently. Decisions were made quickly, resources were allocated well, and diverse perspectives were considered. Team members treated each other nonhierarchically and with respect, relied on data rather than politics to make decisions, and were transparent about their work and beliefs. They were appropriately involved in decision-making and empowered to get things done. They had the freedom to manage the balance between work and their personal lives.

make this a compassionate tool, focused on development rather than rewards and punishment.

Divorcing developmental and evaluative feedback is essential.

Care about upgrading your organization. Everyone says they do, but few really take action. As a team leader, a manager, or an executive, you have to be willing to act personally on the results you see, changing your own behavior if needed, and to be consistent over time in staying focused on these issues. 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. If you’re a small team or organization, simply ask people what they value in great managers. Or failing all that, start with our Oxygen checklist. Survey teams twice a year and see how managers are doing. A variety of companies provide survey applications. We rely of course on Google products, specifically Google Sheets, which can send out surveys called Forms and has the advantage of being easy to use, easy to export, and low cost. Have the people who are best at each attribute train everyone else. We ask our Great Manager Award recipients to train others as a condition of winning the award.

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 changes the character of your company. If you also are able to get those who struggle the most to be substantially better, you’ll have created a cycle of constant improvement.

so much invested in corporate learning, with so little return?

corporate learning is insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.