Work Rules! – Laszlo Bock

Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

You are a Founder

It is within anyone’s grasp to be the founder and culture creator of their own team.

Take responsibility for your environment.
Choose to think of yourself as a founder.
Now act like one.
Trust Your employees.
Give your work meaning.

The Rules Of Hiring

Hiring is the most important human resource activity in any organization.

If you recruit like everyone else, place ads, sift resumes, interview, and then hire, you will get the same results as everyone else who is “average.”

Work rules for hiring differently:

Hire slowly.
Given limited resources invest your HR dollars first in recruiting.
Only hire people that are better than you.

Attributes Of A Good Candidate

General cognitive ability. Smart people that can learn and adapt to situations.
Leadership. Emergent leadership.
Enjoys fun, intellectual humility.
Role related knowledge(the least important attribute).
Uses ‘We’ rather than ‘I’.

Good Managerial Attributes

Be a good coach.
Empower the team and do not micromanage.
Express interest and concern for team member success and personal well being.
Be very productive and results-oriented.
Be a good communicator, listen, share information.
Help the team with career development.
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.
Have important technical skills that help advise the team.

Company Culture

If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.

A group’s culture can be studied in three ways:

By looking at its artefacts such as physical spaces and behaviours.
By surveying the beliefs and values espoused by group members.
By digging deeper into the underlying assumptions behind those values.

Learn From Employees

Engage in deliberate practice. Lessons in small digestible pieces with clear feedback.
Have your best people teach.
Invest only in courses you can prove to be effective in changing people’s behaviour.behavior

Great Company Culture

Three defining aspects of good company culture:

Mission
Transparency
Voice

Work rules for building a great culture:

Think of your work as a calling with a mission that matters.
Give people slightly more trust, freedom and authority than you are comfortable giving. If you are not nervous, you haven’t given them enough.

Performance Management

Intrinsic motivation is the key to growth, while extrinsic motivations can start to shut down the willingness and ability to learn.
Improve performance by focusing on personal growth instead of ratings and rewards.
Avoid defensiveness and promote learning.
Set goals correctly and make them public.
Gather peer feedback.
Adopt a calibration process for evaluations.
Split reward conversations from development conversations.

It is okay to pay two people in the same job completely different amounts. The power-law distribution should be based on performance.

Making Life Easy for All

Make life easier for employees.
Find ways to say yes.
The bad stuff in life happens rarely, be there when it does.
Recognize the difference between what is and what ought to be.
Run lots of small experiments.
Nudge, don’t shove.

Recommended actions for New joiners

Ask lots of questions.
Schedule regular one-on-one meetings with your manager.
Get to know your team.
Actively solicit feedback, don’t wait for it.
Accept the challenge. Take risks and don’t be afraid to fail.

Finding exceptional candidates

Get the best referrals by being excruciatingly specific in describing what you are looking for.
Make recruiting part of everyone’s job. Turn every employee into a recruiter by soliciting referrals.
Don’t be afraid to try crazy things to get the attention of the best people.
Ask your best-networked people to spend even more time sourcing great hires.
Be willing to experiment.

The Principles Of Quality Hiring

Set a high bar for quality. Before you start, decide what attributes you want and decide as a group what great looks like.
A good rule of thumb: hire only people better than you.
Find your own candidates.
Assess candidates’ objectively. Include subordinates and peers in the interviews. Take good notes.
Give candidates a reason to join.