Work Rules
Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules offered 5 topics of precise and actionable value-add. Those topics are:
- How to see yourself relative to the organization
- How to treat your colleagues
- How to find, evaluate, and pay the best candidates
- How to provide feedback and growth and create a learning institution
- What works in interviews
1) How to see yourself relative to the organization
Choose to think of yourself like a founder … and then act like one.
Building an exceptional team or institution starts with a founder. But being a founder doesn’t mean starting a new company. It is within anyone’s grasp to be the founder and culture-creator of their own team, whether you are the first employee or joining a company that has existed for decades.
“Agency”, the concept of personally believing that you have the capacity to change things and make a difference, is critical to well-being in most realms of life.
Intentionally choosing “agency” at work, in essence, choosing to believe that your actions matter — can cause them to matter and make work better for you and others.
Founders care deeply about what kind of place they are creating for people to work; what values *their* company embodies. Every individual can and should consciously choose to feel and act similarly — believing that their actions and preferences are what creates the organization’s ethos, product, and success.
2) How to treat your colleagues
The Quote
Give people slightly more trust, freedom, and authority than you are comfortable giving them, If you aren’t nervous — you haven’t given them enough
Giving freedom empowers others, increases retention, fosters creativity, and pushes you to collaborative rather than authoritative.
3) How to find, evaluate, and pay the best candidates
Hiring the best:
- Includes not letting managers make hiring decisions (alone) for their own teams.
Given limited dollars:
- Invest first in Recruiting
Finding the best:
- Get the best referrals by being excruciatingly specific in describing what you’re looking for
- Make recruiting a part of everyone’s job
Evaluating Candidates
- Assess candidates objectively.
- Actually.
- This means data on a standardized, deeply understood, very specific rubric
4) How to provide feedback and growth and create a learning institution
Guidance
- Set a personal example by sharing and acting on your own feedback
- Build a learning institution
- Engage in deliberate practice. Break lessons down into small digestible pieces, with clear feedback and do them again and again and again
The quote:
“Recently I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000 USD. “No”, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want someone to hire his experience.
5) What works in interviews
True correlation with job performance (r^2 from .00 to .99)
- Years of work experience: r^2 == .03
- Reference Checks: r^2 == .07
- Typical unstructured job interviews: r^2 == 0.14
- General cognitive ability: r^2 == .26
- Work sample test: r^2 == .29
This doesn’t mean that none of these things are worthwhile. This means we should preference General Cognitive Ability and Work Sample test in combination they are the most predictive. They should be supplemented with checks for the candidates ability to:
- Collaborate well with others
- Adapt to uncertainty
- Demonstrate learning ability
Performance Based Interview Questions (PBI)
Types of Performance Based Interview Questions
Two kinds of interview questions: Behavioral and Situational
- Behavioral: describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job (i.e. tell me about a time)
- Situational: present a related hypothetical situation (i.e. what would you do if)
A diligent interviewer
- Will probe deeply to assess the veracity and thought process behind the stories told by the candidate
Build and use rubrics for evaluation
- If you do not have a clear, standardized, method of recording the quality of the answers, the organization will not have a reliable way of comparing and selecting the best
Examples of Behavioral Questions w/ Follow-ups
- Tell me about a time your behavior had a positive impact on your team?
Follow-ups:
- What was your primary goal and why?
- How did your teammates respond?
- Moving forward, what’s your plan?
Tell me about a time when you effectively managed your team to achieve a goal. What did your approach look like?
Follow-ups:
- What were your targets and how did you meet them as an individual and as a team?
- How did you adapt your leadership approach to different individuals?
- What was the key takeaway this specific situation?
Tell me about a time you had difficulty working with someone (can be a coworker, classmate, client). What made this person difficult to work with for you?
- What steps did you take to resolve that problem?
- What was the outcome?
- What could you have done differently?
Link to example list of Performance Based Interview Questions
