More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Laszlo Bock
Read between
January 3 - January 16, 2021
A billion hours ago, modern Homo sapiens emerged. A billion minutes ago, Christianity began. A billion seconds ago, the IBM personal computer was released. A billion Google searches ago… was this morning. —HAL VARIAN, GOOGLE’S CHIEF ECONOMIST, DECEMBER 20, 2013
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 be—a better Googler and trademark lawyer and person!”
Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees
Becoming a Founder Just as Larry and Sergey laid the foundation for how Google treats its people, you can lay the foundation for how your team works and lives
But being a founder doesn’t mean starting a new company. It is within anyone’s grasp to be the founder and culture-creator of their own team, whether you are the first employee or joining a company that has existed for decades.
One of my hopes in writing this book is that anyone reading it starts thinking of themselves as a founder. Maybe not of an entire company, but the founder of a team, a family, a culture. The fundamental lesson from Google’s experience is that you must first choose whether you want to be a founder or an employee. It’s not a question of literal ownership. It’s a question of attitude. In Larry’s words: “I think about how far we’ve come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company. My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” If you give people freedom, they will amaze you
three defining aspects of our culture: mission, transparency, and voice.
Google’s mission is distinctive both in its simplicity and in what it doesn’t talk about. 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. Instead, it’s taken to be self-evident that organizing information and making it accessible and useful is a good thing. This kind of mission gives individuals’ work meaning, because it is a moral rather than a business goal.
So 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.
Deep down, every human being wants to find meaning in his or her work.
We all want our work to matter. 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
But rather than announcing top-down corporate initiatives, our CFO, Patrick Pichette, put the power in Googlers’ hands. He launched Bureaucracy Busters, a now-annual program where Googlers identify their biggest frustrations and help fix them.
WORK RULES…FOR BUILDING A GREAT CULTURE Think of your work as a calling, with a mission that matters. 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.
The first change is to hire more slowly. Only 10 percent of your applicants (at best!) will be top performers, so you go through far more applicants and interviews. I say at best, because in fact the top performers in most industries aren’t actually looking for work, precisely because they are top performers who are enjoying their success right where they are. So your odds of hiring a great person based on inbound applications are low.
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.”
I’ll detail how we do this at Google by looking for a wide range of attributes, among the most important of which are humility and conscientiousness.
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.
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.
Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance.xxiii This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent), and well ahead of “graphology,” or handwriting analysis (0.04 percent), which I’m stunned that anyone actually uses. Maybe some hospitals test the legibility of doctors’ handwriting.…
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).
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. Structured interviews are used all the time in survey research. The idea is that any variation in candidate assessment is a result of the candidate’s performance, not because an interviewer has higher or lower standards, or asks easier or harder questions.
There are two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. Behavioral interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time…?”). Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What would you do if…?”). A diligent interviewer will probe deeply to assess the veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate.
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
Examples of interview questions include: Tell me about a time your behavior had a positive impact on your team. (Follow-ups: What was your primary goal and why? How did your teammates respond? Moving forward, what’s your plan?) Tell me about a time when you effectively managed your team to achieve a goal. What did your approach look like? (Follow-ups: What were your targets and how did you meet them as an individual and as a team? How did you adapt your leadership approach to different individuals? What was the key takeaway from this specific situation?) Tell me about a time you had difficulty
...more
For example, 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.
In addition to testing technical hires on their engineering ability, we realized that there were four distinct attributes that predicted whether someone would be successful at Google:
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. Periodically return to those notes and compare them to how the new
...more
“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.’ ”
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.
WORK RULES…FOR PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT Set goals correctly. Gather peer feedback. Use a calibration process to finalize ratings. Split rewards conversations from development conversations.
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.
Sample UFS Feedback Questionnaire My manager gives me actionable feedback that helps me improve my performance. My manager does not “micromanage” (i.e., get involved in details that should be handled at other levels). My manager shows consideration for me as a person. My manager keeps the team focused on our priority results/deliverables. My manager regularly shares relevant information from his/her manager and senior leadership. My manager has had a meaningful discussion with me about my career development in the past six months. My manager communicates clear goals for our team. My manager
...more
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.
“What are your goals for this meeting?” “How do you think each client will respond?” “How do you plan to introduce a difficult topic?” We’d conduct the meeting, and on the drive back to our office he would again ask questions that forced me to learn: “How did your approach work out?” “What did you learn?” “What do you want to try differently next time?” I would also ask Frank questions about the interpersonal dynamic in the room and why he pushed on one issue but not another. I shared responsibility with him for ensuring I was improving.
“Tell lots of jokes and lots of stories. Grad students love stories.”
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.
To underscore his point, he concluded: “If after we go public I see any lamborghinis in our parking lot, you better buy two of them because I’m going to take a baseball bat to the windshield of any parked here.”
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
...more
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.
There are many stores you’ll never enter. But there’s something for everyone:
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.
You either believe people are fundamentally good or you don’t. If you do believe they’re good, then as an entrepreneur, team member, team leader, manager, or CEO, you should act in a way that’s consistent with your beliefs. If people are good, they should be free.
Throughout this book I’ve offered short lists of “work rules” in each chapter, in case you want to focus on one area or another. But if you want to become a high-freedom environment, here are the ten steps that will transform your team or workplace: Give your work meaning. Trust your people. Hire only people who are better than you. Don’t confuse development with managing performance. Focus on the two tails. Be frugal and generous. Pay unfairly. Nudge. Manage the rising expectations. Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.
Work consumes at least one-third of your life, and half your waking hours. It can and ought to be more than a means to an end.
Whatever you’re doing, it matters to someone. And it should matter to you. As a manager, your job is to help your people find that meaning.
WORK RULES Give your work meaning. Trust your people. Hire only people who are better than you. Don’t confuse development with managing performance. Focus on the two tails. Be frugal and generous. Pay unfairly. Nudge. Manage the rising expectations. Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.
Since then, we’ve built People Operations around four underlying principles: Strive for nirvana. Use data to predict and shape the future. Improve relentlessly. Field an unconventional team.
