The New York Times
Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
By ADAM BRYANT
Mountain View, Calif.
Excerpts:
Google... it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. They correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints.
Later that year, the “people analytics” teams at the company produced what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Mr. Bock and his team began ranking those eight directives by importance. And this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.... technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.
Project Oxygen is noteworthy for a few reasons, according to academics and experts in this field....
Project Oxygen is also unusual, Mr. Safferstone says, because it is based on Google’s own data, which means that it will feel more valid to those Google employees who like to scoff at conventional wisdom.
Many companies, he explained, adopt generic management models that tell people the roughly 20 things they should do as managers, without ranking those traits by importance. Those models often suffer “a lot of organ rejection” in companies, he added, because they are not presented with any evidence that they will make a difference, nor do they prioritize what matters. PROJECT OXYGEN started with some basic assumptions... People typically leave a company for one of three reasons, or a combination of them. [1] first is that they don’t feel a connection to the mission of the company, or sense that their work matters. [2] The second is that they don’t really like or respect their co-workers. [3] The third is they have a terrible boss — and this was the biggest variable. Google, where performance reviews are done quarterly, rather than annually, saw huge swings in the ratings that employees gave to their bosses.
Managers also had a much greater impact on employees’ performance and how they felt about their job than any other factor, Google found
“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”
In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns. Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.
“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.
“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information,” says Ms. Donovan, who was involved in the management effectiveness study and the effort to encourage healthier eating. “They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’ ”
For now, Mr. Bock says he is particularly struck by the simplicity of the rules, and the fact that applying them doesn’t require a personality transplant for a manager.
“You don’t actually need to change who the person is,” he says. “What it means is, if I’m a manager and I want to get better, and I want more out of my people and I want them to be happier, two of the most important things I can do is just make sure I have some time for them and to be consistent. And that’s more important than doing the rest of the stuff.”
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Google's Rules: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/11/business/20110313_sbn_GOOGLE-HIRES-graphic.html?ref=business
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Access Content Source, Article Exhibits, And Other Great Stuff: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.
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