Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

had to anticipate changes and proactively strategize and prepare for them.

we evolved a new way of working through incremental adaptation: trying new things, making mistakes, beginning again, and seeing good results.

we found that inculcating a core set of behaviors in people, then giving them the latitude to practice those behaviors—well, actually, demanding that they practice them—makes teams astonishingly energized and proactive.

the elaborate, cumbersome system for managing people that was developed over the course of the twentieth century is just not up to the challenges companies face in the twenty-first.

We wanted all of our people to challenge us, and one another, vigorously.

We wanted them to speak up about ideas and problems; to freely push back, in front of one another and in front of us.

this: We made ourselves accessible, and we encouraged questions.

we would make whatever changes of plan, and of personnel, we thought necessary to forge ahead at high speed.

everyone, on every team, understands that all bets are off and everything is changing—and thinks that’s great.

not despite the challenges but because of them.

A company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it.

a business leader’s job is to create great teams that do amazing work on time.

But every company and every manager is free to institute the practices we used to instill the core set of behaviors that made the Netflix culture so limber.

When engineers start to whine about a process you’re trying to implement, you want to really dig into what’s bothering them, because they hate senseless bureaucracy and stupid process. But they don’t mind discipline at all.

It’s a matter of identifying the behaviors that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.

We wanted people to practice radical honesty: telling one another, and us, the truth in a timely fashion and ideally face to face.

We wanted people to have strong, fact-based opinions and to debate them avidly and test them rigorously.

The Greatest Motivation Is Contributing to Success

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.

Great teams are made when things are hard. Great teams are made when you have to dig deep.

Being given a great problem to tackle and the right colleagues to tackle it with is the best incentive of all.

Ask any very successful person what their fondest memories of their career are, and they will inevitably tell you about an early period of struggle or some remarkably difficult challenge they had to overcome.

to be able to come in and work with the right team of people— colleagues they trust and admire—and to focus like crazy on doing a great job together.

But my experiences at fast-growth companies that successfully scaled showed me that the leanest processes possible and a strong culture of discipline were far superior, if for no other reason than their speed.

the best thing you can do for employees is hire only high performers to work alongside them.

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

Most technologists will tell you that a small team of brilliant engineers will do better work than a large team of hardworking ones.

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 were to treat managing people the way you treat managing product, wouldn’t you also want to approach the entire system differently?

The strongest motivator is having great team members to work with, people who trust one another to do great work and to challenge one another.

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.

“You will take out of this day what you put into it. If you don’t ask questions, you won’t get answers.”

It’s ironic how little information about strategy, operations, and results is generally shared with employees throughout companies.

If your people aren’t informed by you, there’s a good chance they’ll be misinformed by others. If you don’t tell them about how the business is doing, what your strategy is, the challenges you’re facing, and what market analysts think of how you’re doing, then they will get that information elsewhere—either from colleagues, who will often be equally ill informed, or from the Web, which loves nothing

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.

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.

Companies sometimes even delay making important strategy and operations changes because of worry about how employees will react.

Trust is based on honest communication, and I find that employees become cynical when they hear half-truths.

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.

The style of delivery is important; leaders should practice giving critical feedback so that it is specific and constructive and comes across as well intentioned.

That respect for one another’s intelligence and genuine desire to discover the bases of colleagues’ views drove intense mutual questioning and kept it mostly productive and civil, if often quite colorful.

“Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?”

I often say to executives, “Have an opinion; take a stand; be right most of the time.”

Note that I say “fact driven,” not “data driven.”

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

Ted stresses that insights from data analysis complement his team’s decision making but certainly don’t dictate it.

While our debates at Netflix often got heated, they generally didn’t become mean-spirited or counterproductive, because we set a standard that they should all essentially be about serving the business and our customers.

“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.”

That story also highlights that even with avid, selfless debate, good ideas will sometimes get shot down.