Work Rules… Get It?
Overexplaining Lazlo Bock’s intended pun
Welcome to another book review.
This time it didn’t take us 7 months to publish the review so we’re pretty proud and excited.
Today we’re going through Lazlo Bock’s “Work Rules”, which is mostly a compilation of his experiences as SVP of People Operations (AKA, HR, for everyone else) in Google.
This book is many things, and at the same time, is only one.
You can distill the entire book down to a list of rules that the author kindly puts together for us on page 348. By all means, we’re not at all saying that this book was not worth the read. On the contrary, it was absolutely wonderful. But it is nonetheless, a list of rules… Work Rules, if you may.
That being said, today’s review is going to have a structure based on the Work Rules. Recently we’ve been exposed to a lot of what happens inside of Rakuten so we’re going to explore some of the work rules and talk about them under the scope of what happens in Rakuten (from Daniel’s knowledge and experience) and from what happens in Google (from Bock’s book).
Sounds fun? Let’s go.
Rule # 3: Hire only people who are better than you
This sounds a little bit frightening, doesn’t it?
It’s hard to cope with the uneasiness of knowing that you are managing someone who is clearly more skilled than you in certain areas. If we don’t trust people and worry all the time that others might be trying to push us out to get themselves in, we might find it inconceivable to hire people who are better than us.
Some people have a concept of “being the boss” that encompasses knowing better than our employees. If we think like that, we become micromanagers. And the reason we do lies in the fact that we not only think we “know better”… sometimes we actually do. So, unless we have a parental instinct that allows us to see our team making mistakes that could have been easily avoided and yet do nothing, just “for the sake of learning”, we’re just gonna end up micromanaging our people. And that sucks. That sucks form everyone’s perspective. As managers, we don’t want to be doing our team’s jobs. As team members, we don’t want our managers telling us how to do our jobs. Micromanagement sucks and it is the result of hiring people who are not better than ourselves.
Now, people “better than ourselves” does not necessarily mean hiring better at everything. And this is the key to understand how this works. Each person in the team plays a role that connects to a larger objective. We need to play with that.
We need to hire people who are better than ourselves at solving the kind of problems that we need them to solve for our group.
Rule # 4: Don’t confuse development with managing performance
Google does this and it ends up pushing the company’s internal system closer to a democracy, in which Managers end up having less of the tools that a typical Manager would have elsewhere (total authority to decide bonus compensation, hire, fire, or boss people around, etc ), and shift their roles closer to the one in charge of making sure that his team has no road blockers preventing them from achieving their goals.
We’d like to say that Rakuten is the same. And in some areas, we do feel it is very similar, or even better, depending on the department. But some areas are definitely just retrograde.
This is not fingerpointing, these are just facts.
According to Bock, Google too has some departments that are better to work for than others. Not every middle career manager that they hire adapts to their working style and ends up going somewhere else after some months or years. As you can imagine, even in Google, when it is your manager the one who “fails” because he felt he needed the rank as a way to exude authority, probably your experience is not great. You’re likely to be micromanaged and told what to do and how to do it all the time.
Rakuten goes along the same lines. Some managers are just plain awesome, and some are pricks. And the prick manager typically considers himself a vessel of authority, empowered by the system to use team members as pawns in a chessboard. But in that sense, can we really blame them?
The irony is that the best way to arrive at the beating heard of great management is to strip away all the tools on which managers most rely — Lazlo Bock
When we strip away managers from their commonly held tools, we force them to use other methods to push their teams forward. We coerce them to use other tools, better tools, to reach the goal.
Rule # 1: Give your work meaning
Stripped away from commonly held tools, managers are coerced to become leaders and coaches. Under these circumstances, what other devices do managers actually have?
Inspiration and Meaning
Leading is being able to craft a goal that is both aspirational and never-ending, so that the most talented people feel constantly compelled to continue thriving towards it, outbesting themselves on every iteration, and adding real value to the community along the way.
This idea connects with our latest publication here in Reading as a habit, where we discussed leadership and Simon Sinek’s thoughts on it. Because there we mentioned how trusting people and empowering them to do the right thing, as opposed to telling them how to act on every instance, creates an environment in which we feel safe and compelled to give back.
Now, that sounds great and all but, how does a manager come up with a goal (or worse… set of goals!) for her team that will, in the end, hopefully, replace having the plain authority to just boss everyone around?
We connect with a larger mission. In the case of Google it’s clear and quite easy to feel compelled by it, because of how brilliantly the founders put it together: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s pretty powerful. And you can easily feel how it makes the world a better place. As a manager, you can build up a story on top of that.
Now Rakuten? Well, here’s the mission statement:
Contribute to society by creating value through innovation and entrepreneurship, Empowering people to realize their hopes and dreams, Embracing new thinking, Rakuten changes the world through innovation.
Inspired? Me neither.
It is definitely a challenge for the managers to find ways to connect their own local goals with those of the larger organization when the mission statement is so vague and generic. So in that regard, the lesson to be learned here is that Google’s management did a great job in creating a mission statement that easily cascades down the organization and permeates all over the different groups regardless of how much the company grows.
To proof this, let’s look at some numbers from Comparably.com.
We visited Google’s and Rakuten’s company profiles on the site and ran into some numbers that back up this point.
As we presented already, both companies have very different mission statements. Now, the interesting question is, how much does that impact employee engagement and working culture?
Take a look:
The graph speaks for itself so we’ll just gonna let it sink for a bit. Yeah…
One small caveat: as of today, Rakuten’s company profile in Comparably.com has 507 ratings, vs more than 51k of Google’s one. So you can call into question the statistical significance of this comparison, but that doesn’t undermine the fact that in the case of Rakuten, 0% connects to the company’s mission, vision, and values.
Now, what do we do with this information?
How do we transform our organizations into better places to work in, if as managers we can’t simply boss people around to follow our commands, but at the same time, we don’t have a compelling greater mission that we can connect to and help our colleagues connect themselves to?
We nudge our way towards change.
Rule # 8: Nudge
This is a wonderful concept, to say the least. We’re probably going to read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book, Nugde in the near future to stay tuned for that review.
We can nudge our way through situations that strip us of other methods that have been rendered less effective, such as purely authoritative management techniques.
Nudging requires empathy and knowledge about the objectives we have as a team, as much as a deep understanding of the resources we have to achieve them. Bock’s quote from Adam Grant’s work is a fantastic example of how small changes can have huge impacts if we find the right incentives:
Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they only meet for a few minutes. It imbues one’s work with a significance that transcends careerism or money — Adam Grant in his book, “Give and Take”.
Finding ways to help our teammates empathize with the users of the services they support is great for business because they will have more incentives to take ownership of their work in a way that can help those in the benefit of whom they are working.
So in short, Rule # 8 comes down to experimenting with small nudges that shift the incentive schemes, so we can tip the situational balance towards the direction of the larger goal.
— — — — — New section! ↓
Book references by that seem pretty worthwhile
- Thinking fast and slow, Daniel Kahneman
- Give and Take, Adam Grant
- Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
- Future Perfect, Stan Davis
Thank you for reading and if you found this interesting, don’t hesitate to comment or reach out. I’ve found that a healthy discussion about a topic of our interest is the best way to digest the content.
I’m a Product Manager in Rakuten EXPRESS with a proclivity for web design and programming. I live in Japan and currently help a startup in AgTech and other in EdTech get off the ground. Happy to connect on LinkedIn or Instagram. And while you’re at it, here’s my website.
