Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

Openly sharing criticism was one of the hardest parts of the Netflix culture for new employees to get used to, but most quickly came to appreciate how valuable the openness was. When I talked about this with one of our great team leaders, Eric Colson, he told me the giving and taking of honest feedback was central to how well his teams worked, and his teams worked beautifully. That’s why Eric rose to the position of VP of data science and engineering in less than three years at the company, having begun as an individual contributor. He’d been managing a small data analytics team at Yahoo! before coming to Netflix, and he recalled that the culture there was to be super supportive of people and not to criticize them. He told me that when he started getting critical feedback from colleagues at Netflix, “It hurt. People told me, ‘Colson, you’re not good with communication; when you need to get a message out to a wide audience, you take too long to make the point and it’s unclear.’” His initial reaction was to think, Oh yeah? Well, I’ve got a lot of things to say about you too! But before long, he realized that “when you reflect on what they’ve said, you see it from their point of view, and you learn how to improve on those things. That directness was really helpful.” Again and again at Netflix I saw that people rebounded quickly from the initial shock of receiving negative feedback and learned not only to appreciate it but to deliver it themselves much more consistently and th...