1: What if we worked backwards?

What if we did the year in review? But at the beginning of the year?  

“With slides and a full presentation about how we hit our sales numbers.”

That’s how Google productivity expert Laura Mae Martin describes “one of the greatest leaders I’ve worked with” in her book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing.

This leader conducted an annual “pre-postmortem” … continue reading

1: Author and entrepreneur Geoff Woods was a senior in college.

“I was interning at a startup technology company, and I asked the CEO what job I should get after graduation,” Geoff Woods writes in The AI-Driven Leader.

The CEO paused for a moment and looked at him.  

“Geoff, you’re asking the wrong question! You should be asking, ‘What are the skills I can master that are so valuable … continue reading

1: “Google is famously viewed as a bottom-up company,” Kim Scott writes in her book Radical Candor, “one that empowers even very young employees to drive decision-making.”

Management at Google is often viewed as a necessary evil.

“The managers’ role is mostly to stay out of the way,” Kim notes, “sometimes to help, but never to interfere too much.”

After working at Google for six years in the … continue reading

1: Imagine it’s 9:30 am on a Wednesday morning. We are sitting at our desk. We receive an email from a colleague: “The waves are good!”

We stop what we are doing. We close our laptop. We stand up. We go change into our surfing gear. And we run to the beach.

This happens regularly at the outdoor retailer Patagonia, where the corporate headquarters sits on the Pacific Ocean, and … continue reading

Think about last five people you interviewed for a job, Laszlo Bock suggests in his terrific book Work Rules!, about his time as Chief of People Operations at Google.

Did you give them similar questions or did each person get different questions?

Did you write up detailed notes so that other interviewers could benefit from your insights?

Did you hold them to exactly the same standard?

Did you cover … continue reading

The first 10 seconds of a job interview predict the outcome.

What?!?

In his book Work Rules!, longtime Google executive Laszlo Bock shares the results from a year 2000 study which showed initial impressions of a candidate based on a handshake and brief introduction correlated strongly to whom was recommended for hire and who wasn’t.

In the study, researchers videotaped real interviews.  “Slices were extracted from each interview, beginning … continue reading

Google’s hiring philosophy begins with this simple but powerful insight: the best talent is not looking for a job.  

The odds of hiring a great performer on an inbound application are low.

This week we’re exploring Google’s impressive hiring and recruiting practices, as outlined in Laszlo Bock’s terrific book Work Rules!

Job boards like Indeed and Monster produce many applicants but almost no hires.  So, in 2008, Google stopped … continue reading

If we want to transform our teams or our organizations, improving our hiring practices is the single best way to do it, writes longtime Google Chief People Operations Officer Laszlo Bock.

It takes will and patience.  But it works.

Google intentionally front loads their investment in people by focusing on hiring right.  Period.  Hard stop.

Yesterday we looked at how Google spends money up front to identify and hire … continue reading

There are two strategies to assemble phenomenal talent in our organizations writes longtime Google Chief People Operations Officer Laszlo Bock:

1:  Find a way to hire the very best talent. Hire 90th percentile performers who will start performing right away.

2: Hire average performers and through training, coaching, hard work, and deep insight into motivation and human nature turn them into 90th percentile performers.  Lazslo refers to this as … continue reading

Early in his tenure at Google, longtime Chief People Officer Laszlo Bock recounts in his book Work Rules!, he wrote an email to his manager complaining about someone else on the team.  

Laszlo’s boss added the person to the email string.

Laszlo quickly reached out directly to the person and together they resolved the issue.

When someone writes a nasty email about someone else, the practice of adding the … continue reading