Work Rules!
Laszlo Bock has been the VP of People Operations at Google since 2006 and is a thought-leader in the HR space. I picked up Bock’s Work Rules for ideas on how, as a leader, I can make the best out of new tools and processes being implemented at Expedient.
If Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg’s How Google Works is about Google’s history, management strategy and corporate culture, Work Rules! is an HR executive’s perspective on how leaders can learn from and implement ideas and practices that Google has developed. Bock characterizes Google’s culture as one that empowers their people, treats them very well and utilizes data to make decisions related to performance, promotion and compensation. While all leaders may not have the mechanisms to collect the volume of data from their people that Google does (or the PhD’s to make sense of it all), there are many ideas and practices that we as leaders can learn from high-performing organizations such as Google. Here are a few that stuck with me:
- When hiring, set a high bar for quality and hire only people who are better than you, assess candidates objectively, hire “smart generalists” rather than experts and give candidates a reason to join.
- Divorce developmental and evaluative feedback — this can lead to more honest conversations about growth, and anyway it’s too easy to game the system
- Performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs (not a bell curve). As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. The biggest opportunities lie in your absolute worst and best employees.
- Hire smart people, set goals, give them freedom, show them that you trust them to make decisions. Gather feedback from all angles and utilize that data to help your people (and you) become better. Structure feedback in a way that enables behavior change.
