Powerful Quotes

“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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“True and abiding happiness in work comes from being deeply engaged in solving a problem with talented people you know are also deeply engaged in solving it, and from knowing that the customer loves the product or service you all have worked so hard to make.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Excellent colleagues, a clear purpose, and well-understood deliverables: that’s the powerful combination.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Trust is based on honest communication, and I find that employees become cynical when they hear half-truths. Cynicism is a cancer. It creates a metastasizing discontent that feeds on itself, leading to smarminess and fueling backstabbing.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Part of being an adult is being able hear the truth. And the corollary is that you owe the adults you hire the truth. That is actually what they want most from you.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER • As you survey your company-wide policies and procedures, ask: What is the purpose of this policy or procedure? Does it achieve that result? • Are there any approval mechanisms you can eliminate? • What percentage of its time does management spend on problem solving and team building? • Have you done a cost-benefit analysis of the incentives and perks you offer employees? • Could you replace approvals and permissions with analysis of spending patterns and a focus on accuracy and predictability? • Is your decision-making system clear and communicated widely?”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“The Greatest Motivation Is Contributing to Success”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“My mantra is: problem finders are cheap.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“trying new things, making mistakes, beginning again, and seeing good results.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“There’s a dangerous fallacy that data constitutes the facts you need to know to run your business.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“The Netflix culture wasn’t built by developing an elaborate new system for managing people; we did the opposite. We kept stripping away policies”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“understood that part of the reason large teams are crippled in their ability to innovate and move fast is that because it’s hard work to manage them, companies build infrastructure to make sure people are doing the right things. But the teams I saw that accomplished great stuff just knew what they most needed to accomplish; they didn’t need elaborate procedures, and certainly not incentives.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“what people most want from work: 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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Trusting people to be responsible with their time was one of the early steps in giving them back their power.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“The Netflix culture wasn’t built by developing an elaborate new system for managing people; we did the opposite. We kept stripping away policies and procedures.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“People should hear frequently about how well they’re performing. Even if doing away with the annual performance process is not feasible for you, institute much more frequent meetings to discuss performance.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Retention is not a good measure of team-building success; having a great person in every single position on the team is the best measure.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“In my experience, one of the most important questions business leaders must regularly ask is “Are we limited by the team we have not being the team we should have?”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Many people feel hesitant to speak so openly, but the truth is that most people really appreciate the opportunity to get a better understanding of their behavior and how it’s being perceived, as long as the tone of delivery isn’t hostile or condescending.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“It’s ironic how little information about strategy, operations, and results is generally shared with employees throughout companies”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Better yet, don’t assume that people are stupid. Assume instead that if they are doing stupid things, they are either uninformed or misinformed.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Great teams are made when every single member knows where they’re going and will do anything to get there.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“The typical approach to growth in business is to add more people and structure and to impose more fixed budgetary goals and restraints. 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.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“An appreciation of the core elements of a company's early succes is so important, and it can be retained as companies adapt and grow. But nostalgia that inspires resistance to change will fuel discontent and often undermine growth.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“We decided to use the metaphor that the company was like a sports team, not a family. Just as a great sports teams are constantly scouting for new players and culling others from their lineups, our team leaders would need to continually look for talent and reconfigure team makeup.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

“Most of us feel that we can't tell the people who work for us or with us the truth because (a) they're not smart enough to understand it, (b) they're not mature enough to understand it, or (c) it wouldn't be nice. We want to treat one another well, and we think that means making one another feel good. But 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 eventually come home to roost. Part of being an adult is being able to hear the truth.”
― Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility