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.

All it takes is a belief that people are fundamentally good—and enough courage to treat your people like owners instead of machines. Machines do their jobs; owners do whatever is needed to make their companies and teams successful.

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.

My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.

“People interpret strong cultures based on the artifacts, because they’re the most visible, but the values and assumptions underneath matter much more.”

three defining aspects of our culture: mission, transparency, and voice.

mission that matters

Mission must be simple, self-explanatory, relatable; a moral, not legaleze. It must be big and not possible to complete to make you creative. Let employees meet customers or at least understand the benefit they get from your work.

Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money.

“Assume that all information can be shared with the team, instead of assuming that no information can be shared. Restricting information should be a conscious effort, and you’d better have a good reason for doing so.

The benefit of so much openness is that everyone in the company knows what’s going on.

At Google, we sometimes offer similar products. We minimize unhealthy competition by letting Googlers know about them and explaining why we allow this competition to persist.

that it can be valuable to wait to make a decision.

“dogfooding,” where Googlers are the first to try new products and provide feedback.ix

One of the serendipitous benefits of transparency is that simply by sharing data, performance improves.

you write a nasty email about someone, you shouldn’t be surprised if they are added to the email thread.

Openness demonstrates to your employees that you believe they are trustworthy and have good judgment.

Voice means giving employees a real say in how the company is run.

We enjoy a constant paranoia about losing the culture, and a constant, creeping sense of dissatisfaction with the current culture. This is a good sign! This feeling of teetering on the brink of losing our culture causes people to be vigilant about threats to it. I’d be concerned if people stopped worrying.

How can you tell if you have found someone exceptional? My simple rule of thumb—and the second big change to make in how you hire—is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”

blindly hiring for brains and giving them unbounded freedom to do what they will is a recipe for sudden and catastrophic failure.

finding the very best people who will be successful in the context of your organization, and who will make everyone around them more successful.

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).

Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews (26 percent), where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses.

combinations of assessment techniques are better

four distinct attributes that predicted whether someone would be successful at Google:

General Cognitive Ability.

Leadership.

“emergent leadership.” This is a form of leadership that ignores formal designations—

enjoying fun (who doesn’t?), a certain dose of intellectual humility (it’s hard to learn if you can’t admit that you might be wrong), a strong measure of conscientiousness (we want owners, not employees), comfort with ambiguity (we don’t know how our business will evolve, and navigating Google internally requires dealing with a lot of ambiguity), and evidence that you’ve taken some courageous or interesting paths in your life.

Role-Related Knowledge.

curious people who are open to learning will figure out the right answers in almost all cases, and have a much greater chance of creating a truly novel solution.xxix

written feedback include the attribute being assessed, the question asked, the candidate’s answer, and the interviewer’s assessment of that answer.

anything we’re doing, we can do better.

Set a high bar for quality.

Find your own candidates.

Assess candidates objectively.

Give candidates a reason to join.

Fight for quality.

If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it.

Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance.

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

Second, gather peer feedback.

People don’t like being labeled, unless they are labeled as extraordinary. But they love useful information that helps them do their jobs better.

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

Fourth, split reward conversations from development conversations.

“What are your goals for this meeting?” “How do you think each client will respond?” “How do you plan to introduce a difficult topic?”

“How did your approach work out?” “What did you learn?” “What do you want to try differently next time?”