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by
Laszlo Bock
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August 17 - September 26, 2017
Frustrated because even the best-designed business plans fell apart when people didn’t believe in them.
Frustrated because leaders always spoke of putting people first, and then treated them like replaceable gears.
People mattered to Jack Welch, GE’s chairman and CEO from 1981 to 2001. He spent more than 50 percent of his time on people issues,2 and together with Bill Conaty, his chief human resources officer, built an acclaimed people management system by stringently ranking employees based on performance, choreographing job changes for top talent every twelve to eighteen months, and building a global training center in Crotonville, New York.
ambitious mission to organize the world’s information—all of it!—and make it universally accessible and useful.
‘leading with your heart can make a successful business.’
“When employees trust the leadership, they become brand ambassadors and in turn cause progressive change in their families, society, and environment.
The return on investment to business is automatic, with greater productivity, business growth, and inspired customers.”
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. One of our lawyers described his manager, Terri Chen, this way: “You know that killer line from As Good As It Gets where Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt: ‘You make me want to be a better man’? That is how I feel about Terri as a manager. She makes me want to—and helps me try to
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only when companies took steps to give their people more freedom did performance improve.
Indeed, it’s when the economy is at its worst that treating people well matters most.
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.
There’s no mention of profit or market. No mention of customers, shareholders, or users. No mention of why this is our mission or to what end we pursue these goals.
The most powerful movements in history have had moral motivations,
Adam Grant has an answer. In Give and Take, he writes about the power of purpose to improve not just happiness, but also productivity.
what is Adam’s insight? 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.
Nothing is a more powerful motivator than to know that you are making a difference in the world.
If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them
Fundamentally, if you’re an organization that says “Our people are our greatest asset” (as most do), and you mean it, you must default to open.
mission, transparency, voice—were
we consistently made decisions based not on economics, but on what supported our values.
Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them. If you’re not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.
His success came because his day job didn’t require much of his intellect,73 so he was free to explore a completely unrelated field.
The first change is to hire more slowly.
“Only hire people who are better than you.”
So we started seeking out candidates who had shown resilience and an ability to overcome hardship.
The pedigree of your college education matters far less than what you have accomplished.
So making sure someone will thrive in your environment becomes critical.
among the most important of which are humility and conscientiousness.
It’s about finding the very best people who will be successful in the context of your organization, and who will make everyone around them more successful.
WORK RULES…FOR HIRING (THE SHORT VERSION) Given limited resources, invest your HR dollars first in recruiting. Hire only the best by taking your time, hiring only people who are better than you in some meaningful way, and not letting managers make hiring decisions for their own teams.
If you start a company or team, you know exactly what you are looking for in a new hire: someone just as motivated, clever, interesting, and passionate as you are about the new venture.
Bad performers and political people have a toxic effect on an entire team and require substantial management time to coach or exit.
“The reality is, there are some employees you should get rid of, but the goal of recruitment should be to have no such employees!”
WORK RULES…FOR FINDING EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES Get the best referrals by being excruciatingly specific in describing what you’re looking for. Make recruiting part of everyone’s job. Don’t be afraid to try crazy things to get the attention of the best people.
Why our instincts keep us from being good interviewers, and what you can do to hire better
The problem is, these predictions from the first ten seconds are useless.
Without realizing it, we then shift from assessing a candidate to hunting for evidence that confirms our initial impression.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.
The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent).
They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs.
Structured interviews are predictive even for jobs that are themselves unstructured. We’ve also found that they cause both candidates and interviewers to have a better experience and are perceived to be most fair.89 So why don’t more companies use them?
The goal of our interview process is to predict how candidates will perform once they join the team. We achieve that goal by doing what the science says: combining behavioral and situational structured interviews with assessments of cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and leadership.xxvi
the US Department of Veterans Affairs has a site with almost a hundred sample questions at www.va.gov/pbi/questions.asp. Use them. You’ll do better at hiring immediately.
After all, companies have many employees, but a person has only one job.
General Cognitive Ability.
Leadership.
This is a form of leadership that ignores formal designations—at
We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accomplished, rather than how.
“Googleyness.” We want people who will thrive at Google. This isn’t a neatly defined box, but includes attributes like 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.
While Googlers possess the gamut of political views, the cultural values of transparency and voice are widely held and core to how we operate.
