Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

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.

Policies and Structure Can’t Anticipate Needs and Opportunities

They were all built upon the realization that the most important job of management is to focus really intently on the building of great teams. If you hire the talented people you need, and you provide them with the tools and information they need to get you where you need to go, they will want nothing more than to do stellar work for you and keep you limber.

If you started not with best practices but with what it takes to deliver a fabulous end product to your customers, what system would you invent?

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.

Ensure That Communication Flows Both Up and Down

If your people aren’t informed by you, there’s a good chance they’ll be misinformed by others.

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.

being transparent and telling people what they need to hear is the only way to ensure they both trust you and understand you.

this desire to make people feel good is often as much a desire to make ourselves feel good as to do the right thing. It often leads to people actually feeling worse, because they’re not correcting a problem in the way they’re working, and that eventually comes home to roost.

Part of being an adult is being able hear the truth.

“What’s your HR philosophy?”

“Have you told her yet?”

when managers weren’t willing to give their people tough feedback: that it puts undue pressure on the boss to provide cover and cheats the employee of the chance to improve.

“I was too kind,” he told me, “and that means you’re a bad manager in a lot of ways. You end up sugarcoating things, and that’s doing them a disservice.”

Practice Your Delivery

the importance of giving specific examples of the problematic behavior and proposing solutions.

It’s also important to think about your body language, which can speak louder than words.

The most important thing about giving feedback is that it must be about behavior, rather than some essentializing characterization of a person, like “You’re unfocused.” It also must be actionable. The person receiving it has to understand the specific changes in their actions that are being requested.

One was to conduct an exercise we called “Start, Stop, Continue” in our team meetings. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they’re doing really well and should keep doing.

If you institute a process like this, you will probably have to hold people accountable to step up and avidly participate.

Everyone Deserves to Know About Problems with the Business Too

At Netflix we learned that preparing people for changes to come led to a sense of trust around the company: trust that we would proactively take the company where it needed to go and that we wouldn’t mislead anyone about the changes that would require.

Too often upper management thinks that sharing about problems confronting the business will heighten anxiety among staff, but what’s much more anxiety provoking is not knowing. You can’t protect your people from hard truths anyway.

Admit When You’re Wrong and You’ll Get Better Input

Anonymous Surveys Send a Mixed Message

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.

if you rely on anonymous surveys and prescribed questions, you will not get quality information.

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

Is there someone on your team who is underper-forming but with whom you haven’t seriously discussed the problem? What impact do you think that person’s performance issues have on the rest of the team?

“How do you know that’s true?” Or my favorite variant, “Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?”

Much more common was that people learned to appreciate the ethic of asking.

people’s opinions should always be fact based.

Opinions aren’t helpful unless the people who hold them are willing to take a stand in their defense by making a fact-based case.

being fact driven and scientific

Hard data is absolutely vital, of course, but you also need qualitative insight and well-formulated opinions, and you need your team to debate those insights and opinions openly and with gusto.

the basis of good questions.

the decision making of his content team was data informed rather than data driven.

data can be used as an accountability shield, deflecting responsibility for a judgment call.

Beware of Data That Looks Great but Doesn’t Matter

the way to keep employees committed is to hire people who are really interested in a problem like the one you’re hiring for and who have a track record of or proclivity for working on things for a very long time.

Another big mistake made with metrics is thinking that they’re fixed. They must be fluid; they must be continuously revisited and questioned.

One of the worst ways that companies fail to serve their customers, and therefore their own profitability, is neglecting to interrogate intensively enough what the data is really telling them.

“you learn how to come in and think about things in a structured way, anticipate the kind of questions you’re going to get, and have your argument as buttoned up as you can.”

brand builder and driver of customer loyalty.

fighting for the good of the company, defined as doing the right thing for the customer,

“And how does this help the customer exactly?”

tough issues are never one-sided.”

cut down on the group-think that tends to prevail in larger groups, and it forced everyone to speak up,

“The downside of experts is that they are all too aware of the current constraints. Someone with fresh eyes can sometimes find their way around constraints, almost out of ignorance.”