Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

Most companies are clinging to the established command-and-control system of top-down decision making but trying to jazz it up by fostering “employee engagement” and by “empowering” people. Compelling but misguided ideas about “best practices” prevail: bonuses and pay tied to annual performance reviews; big HR initiatives like the recent craze for lifelong learning programs; celebrations to build camaraderie and make sure people have some fun; and, for employees who are struggling, performance improvement plans. These foster empowerment, and with that comes engagement, which leads to job satisfaction and employee happiness, and that leads to high performance, or so the thinking goes.

Here is my radical proposition: a business leader’s job is to create great teams that do amazing work on time. That’s it. That’s the job of management.

Great teams are made when every single member knows where they’re going and will do anything to get there. Great teams are not created with incentives, procedures, and perks. They are created by hiring talented people who are adults and want nothing more than to tackle a challenge, and then communicating to them, clearly and continuously, about what the challenge is.

“Oh, I’d want to come to work every day and solve these problems with these people.”

Excellent colleagues, a clear purpose, and well-understood deliverables: that’s the powerful combination.

had been creating an annual road map and doing annual budgeting, but those processes took so much time, and the effort wasn’t worthwhile because we were wrong all the time. I mean, really, we were making it up. Whatever our projections were, we knew they would be wrong in six months, if not three. So we just stopped doing annual planning. All the time we saved gave us more time to do quarterly planning, and then we went to rolling three-quarter budgets, because that was as far out as we thought we could ostensibly predict.

Clear, continuous communication about the context of the work to be done. Telling people, “Here’s exactly where we are, and here’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

People need to see the view from the C suite in order to feel truly connected to the problem solving that must be done at all levels and on all teams, so that the company is spotting issues and opportunities in every corner of the business and effectively acting on them. The irony is that companies have invested so much in training programs of all sorts and spent so much time and effort to incentivize and measure performance, but they’ve failed to actually explain to all of their employees how their business runs.

We planned serious agendas and had people present lots of data, pose really tough questions, and debate like crazy about the company’s future and the competitive landscape.

How do you know when people are well enough informed? Here’s my measure. If you stop any employee, at any level of the company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and, if they’re really good, in the same order. If not, the heartbeat isn’t strong enough yet.

Employees at all levels want and need to understand not only the particular work they are assigned and their team’s mission, but also the larger story of the way the business works, the challenges the company faces, and the competitive landscape.

Perhaps the worst problem with anonymous surveys, though, is that they send the message that it’s best to be most honest when people don’t know who you are.

People can handle being told the truth, about both the business and their performance. The truth is not only what they need but also what they intensely want.

Telling the truth about perceived problems, in a timely fashion and face to face, is the single most effective way to solve problems.

Radical honesty also leads to the sharing of opposing views, which are so often withheld and which can lead to vital insights.

Failing to tell people the truth about problems in their performance leads to an undue burden being shouldered by managers and other team members.

The style of delivery is important; leaders should practice giving critical feedback so that it is specific and constructive a...

Consider setting up a system for colleagues to offer one another critiques. We created a successful one at Netflix and instituted an annual feedback day for the whole company to ...

Are people free to disagree with a point made by someone in authority during a team meeting? Have they seen it done openly, in front of the whole team?

data informed rather than data driven.

I look for people for the team who are smart enough to read the data and intuitive enough to know how to ignore it.”

The hypothesis was that we could boost the number of people who signed up for a free trial, and then ultimately subscribed, if we removed friction from the initial sign-up by not requiring people to input their credit card information. Steve was adamant that subscriptions would dramatically increase, yet the results were abysmal: they plummeted by half. He was so stunned that he really wanted to run the test again. Debating the result, we realized that, ironically, in trying to remove friction we had introduced more by effectively forcing people to go through a sign-up process twice.

You can orchestrate great conversations if you take a little time to set them up right and make it clear that everyone is seeking the best answer for the customer and the company, that no one is arguing simply to win. The way to do that is to set the context: to be clear about what the group is going to decide and the reason for the conversation. If the discussion digresses, or if someone is stubbornly digging in, you can always interject, “What problem are we trying to solve here?” or “What leads you to believe that’s true?”

Set terms of debate explicitly. People should formulate strong views and be prepared to back them up, and their arguments should be based primarily on facts, not conjecture.

Instruct people to ask one another for explanations of their views and of the problems being debated, rather than making assumptions about these things.

Debates among smaller groups are often best because everyone feels freer to contribute—and it’s more noticeable if they don’t. Smaller groups also aren’t as prone to groupthink as large groups are.

Can you establish a regular forum for the presentation of arguments about key decisions and the best ways to solve problems your team is working on?

Successful sports teams are the best model for managers; they are constantly scouting for new talent and culling their current roster. You’re building a team, not raising a family.