More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 7 - May 19, 2024
He didn’t create rules or nag. He just modeled the behavior and communicated expectations.
Giving employees more freedom led them to take more ownership and behave more responsibly.
even if your employees spend a little more when you give them freedom, the cost is still less than having a workplace where they can’t fly. If you limit their choices by making them check boxes and ask for permission, you won’t just frustrate your people, you’ll lose out on the speed and flexibility that comes from a low-rule environment.
Processes provide management with a sense of control, but they slow everything way down.
we had, without much thought, dummy-proofed the work environment. The result was that only dummies wanted to work there
Since then I have come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add ten times the value. She adds more like a hundred times.
for all creative jobs we would pay one incredible employee at the top of her personal market, instead of using that same money to hire a dozen or more adequate performers.
I’ve also found having a lean workforce has side advantages. Managing people well is hard and takes a lot of effort. Managing mediocre-performing employees is harder and more time consuming. By keeping our organization small and our teams lean, each manager has fewer people to manage and can therefore do a better job at it.
Contingent pay works for routine tasks but actually decreases performance for creative work.
The company uses your ignorance to hire you at the lowest salary possible.
You’ll get more money if you change companies than if you stay put.
It costs a lot more to lose people and to recruit replacements than to overpay a little in the first place.
To retain your top employees, it’s always better to give them the raise before they get the offers.
This ignites feelings of passion, responsibility, and ownership in the workforce beyond what he could have hoped for.
If a manager doesn’t know how many customers the company has signed on in the past weeks and months, and what strategy discussions are in the works, how does he know how many people he can afford to hire? He has to ask his boss. If his boss doesn’t know the details of the company’s growth, she can’t make a good decision either, so she has to go to her own boss.
We announce these numbers at a quarterly business review meeting with our top seven hundred or so managers.
But when one employee abuses your trust, deal with the individual case and double your commitment to continue transparency with the others. Do not punish the majority for the poor behavior of a few.
Spinning the truth is one of the most common ways leaders erode trust.
Speak plainly, without trying to make bad situations seem good, and your employees will learn you tell the truth.
when you speak openly about your errors it makes others trust you more.
a leader who has demonstrated competence and is liked by her team will build trust and prompt risk-taking when she widely sunshines her own mistakes. Her company benefits. The one exception is for a leader considered unproven or untrusted. In these cases you’ll want to build trust in your competency before shouting your mistakes.
As long as you’ve already shown yourself to be competent, talking openly and extensively about your own mistakes—and encouraging all your leaders to do the same—will increase trust, goodwill, and innovation throughout the organization.
DON’T SEEK TO PLEASE YOUR BOSS. SEEK TO DO WHAT IS BEST FOR THE COMPANY.
Dispersed decision-making can only work with high talent density and unusual amounts of organizational transparency.
if you share all the context of your decision, you’ve done the groundwork. You don’t need approval. It’s up to you. You decide.
If you make a big deal about a bet that didn’t work out, you’ll shut down all future risk-taking.
When a bet fails, the manager must be careful to express interest in the takeaways but no condemnation.
When you sunshine your failed bets, everyone wins. You win because people learn they can trust you to tell the truth and to take responsibility for your actions. The team wins because it learns from the lessons that came out of the project. And the company wins because everyone sees clearly that failed bets are an inherent part of an innovative success wheel.
In a fast and innovative company, ownership of critical, big-ticket decisions should be dispersed across the workforce at all different levels, not allocated according to hierarchical status.
“Don’t seek to please your boss.”
A worker’s performance will be judged on the collective outcome of his bets, not on the results from one single instance.
To help your workforce make good bets, encourage them to farm for dissent, socialize the idea, and for big bets, test it out.
Teach your employees that when a bet fails, they should s...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If you’re serious about talent density, you have to get in the habit of doing something a lot harder: firing a good employee when you think you can get a great one.
But a high-talent-density work environment is not a family.
we realized family is not a good metaphor for a high-talent-density workforce.
we think of Netflix as a professional sports team.
WE ARE A TEAM, NOT A FAMILY
For people who value job security over winning championships, Netflix is not the right choice, and we try to be clear and nonjudgmental about that.
IF A PERSON ON YOUR TEAM WERE TO QUIT TOMORROW, WOULD YOU TRY TO CHANGE THEIR MIND? OR WOULD YOU ACCEPT THEIR RESIGNATION, PERHAPS WITH A LITTLE RELIEF? IF THE LATTER, YOU SHOULD GIVE THEM A SEVERANCE PACKAGE NOW, AND LOOK FOR A STAR, SOMEONE YOU WOULD FIGHT TO KEEP.
It’s clear that the Keeper Test increases talent density, but it also creates worry.
There is nothing more ominous than people on your team disappearing from the roster with no word about how the decision was made or how much warning that person received.
The biggest worry people have when they learn a colleague has been let go is whether that person had feedback or whether the termination came out of the blue.
In order to encourage your managers to be tough on performance, teach them to use the Keeper Test: “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving for a similar job at another company, would I fight hard to keep?”
Avoid stack-ranking systems, as they create internal competition and discourage collaboration.
Coach your managers to create strong feelings of commitment, cohesion, and camaraderie on the team, while continually making tough decisions to ensure the best player is manning each post.
To reduce fear, encourage employees to use the Keeper Test Prompt with their managers: “How hard would you work to change my mind if I were thinking of leaving?”
When an employee is let go, speak openly about what happened with your staff and answer their questions candidly.
Candor is like going to the dentist: a lot of people will avoid it if they can.
We no longer have employees rate each other on a scale of 1 to 5, since we don’t link the process to raises, promotions, or firings. The goal is to help everyone get better, not to categorize them into boxes.
