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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Laszlo Bock
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August 17 - September 26, 2017
So how do you create your own self-replicating staffing machine? Set a high bar for quality. Before you start recruiting, decide what attributes you want and define as a group what great looks like. A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you. Do not compromise. Ever. Find your own candidates. LinkedIn, Google+, alumni databases, and professional associations make it easy. Assess candidates objectively. Include subordinates and peers in the interviews, make sure interviewers write good notes, and have an unbiased group of people make the actual hiring decision.
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There’s one other beneficial effect of hiring this way: In most organizations, you join and then have to prove yourself. At Google, there’s such faith in the quality of the hiring process that people join and on their first day are trusted and full members of their teams.
we are profoundly suspicious of power, and the way managers historically have abused it.
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?
If you believe people are fundamentally good, and if your organization is able to hire well, there is nothing to fear from giving your people freedom.
“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.’
At the same time, Barksdale highlights the tremendous opportunity for all of us as individuals. 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
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There are free survey tools, including one built into Google Sheets, that let you ask employees how they are feeling and what they’d like to do differently.
If you expect little, that’s what you’ll get. Richard Bach, the author of the 1970s bestselling novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, later wrote in Illusions, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”109 Managers find many reasons not to trust their people.
WORK RULES…FOR MASS EMPOWERMENT Eliminate status symbols. Make decisions based on data, not based on managers’ opinions. Find ways for people to shape their work and the company. Expect a lot.
Workplaces that permit employees more freedom tap into that natural intrinsic motivation, which in turn helps employees feel even more autonomous and capable.
We do our best to hire people who have a proven aptitude for learning, and then do everything we can to help them grow as fast as they can. Making sure our people are developing is not a luxury. It’s essential for our survival. But the fundamental concepts we’ve had to evolve make up a language that translates to just about any company. First, set goals correctly. Make them public. Make them ambitious.
Second, gather peer feedback.
Third, for evaluation, adopt some kind of calibration process. We prefer meetings where managers sit together and review people as a group.
Fourth, split reward conversations from development conversations. Combining the two kills learning.
The Lisa Simpson in all of us wants to be evaluated because she wants to be the best. She wants to grow. All you have to do is tell her how.
WORK RULES…FOR PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT Set goals correctly. Gather peer feedback. Use a calibration process to finalize ratings. Split rewards conversations from development conversations.
I wrote in chapter 2, 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. But having a mission-driven, purposeful workplace also requires that you approach people with sensitivity. Most people who are performing poorly know it and want to get better. It’s important to give them that chance.
Every company has the seeds of its future success in its best people, yet most fail to study them closely.
So managers did matter. And not only that, but amazing managers mattered a lot.
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.
Divorcing developmental and evaluative feedback is essential.
WORK RULES…FOR MANAGING YOUR TWO TAILS Help those in need. Put your best people under a microscope. Use surveys and checklists to find the truth and nudge people to improve. Set a personal example by sharing and acting on your own feedback.
Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.
Simple practice, without feedback and experimentation, is insufficient.
“You can automate a lot of things, but you can’t automate relationships.”
Only invest in courses that change behavior
From the moment we are born, human beings are designed to learn.
“the best way to learn is to teach.”
WORK RULES…FOR BUILDING A LEARNING INSTITUTION Engage in deliberate practice: Break lessons down into small, digestible pieces with clear feedback and do them again and again. Have your best people teach. Invest only in courses that you can prove change people’s behavior.
The joy of money is fleeting, but memories last forever.
We’ve found that trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing.
WORK RULES…FOR PAYING UNFAIRLY Swallow hard and pay unfairly. Have wide variations in pay that reflect the power law distribution of performance. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation. Make it easy to spread the love. Reward thoughtful failure.
People can exist, indeed did exist for thousands of years, without companies. But companies can’t exist without people.
efficiency, community, and innovation.
Encouraging efficiency in your professional and personal lives
WORK RULES…FOR EFFICIENCY, COMMUNITY, AND INNOVATION Make life easier for employees. Find ways to say yes. The bad stuff in life happens rarely… be there for your people when it does.
Know thyself.
Kent was unusually humble, curious, and self-aware.
WORK RULES…FOR NUDGING TOWARD HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS Recognize the difference between what is and what ought to be. Run lots of small experiments. Nudge, don’t shove.
Any idea carried to an extreme becomes foolishness.
I’m advocating in this book, is not whether it delivers perfection. It’s whether we stay true to our values and continue to do the right thing even when tested.
Entitlement, the creeping belief that just because you receive something you deserve it, is another risk in our approach.
Shutting it down served as a reminder that we provide our benefits and perquisites for specific reasons, and when the reasons are no longer valid we change our programs.
No single person could have created Google Search. Even at the beginning, it was Sergey together with Larry.
The key to balancing individual freedom with overall direction is to be transparent.
the more central your values are to how you operate, the more you need to explain.
Not one of us is perfect, and a few of us are bad actors.
WORK RULES…FOR SCREWING UP Admit your mistake. Be transparent about it. Take counsel from all directions.
Fix whatever broke. Find the moral in the mistake, and teach it.
