(81) Your organization is like a sports team, not a family

This week I had a powerful Aha moment while conversing with my wife who was sharing with me the ideas from a book she was reading titled Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord. Patty is famous for drafting the very popular culture deck at Netflix.

My wife shared with me that Netflix as an organization looks at itself as a sports team and not a family. Just as great sports teams are constantly scouting for new players, the organization continually looks for talent and reconfigure team makeup. They set the mandate that their decisions about whom to bring in and who might have to go must be made purely on the basis of the performance their teams needed to produce in order for the company to succeed.

The analogy of an organization to a sports team hit me like a ton of bricks. I loved the analogy.

Team Coaches Are the Model, Not Guidance Counselors, Professors

So many companies spend so much money on — and ask employees to devote so much time away from their jobs for — formal training classes. Much of this time, money, and effort is misplaced. As sports coaches will tell you, there’s no better way to learn how to perform than to be in the game.

Organizations need to accept that they don’t owe their people anything more than ensuring that the company is making a great product that serves the customer well and on time. They don’t owe people the chance to take on a role they’re not prepared for and don’t have the talents for.

Organizations need to accept that they don’t owe their people anything more than ensuring that the company is making a great product that serves the customer well and on time. They don’t owe people the chance to take on a role they’re not prepared for and don’t have the talents for. They don’t owe them a different job created to reward them for their service. And they certainly don’t owe them holding the company back from making the personnel changes needed to thrive.

They don’t owe them a different job created to reward them for their service. And they certainly don’t owe them holding the company back from making the personnel changes needed to thrive. This may sound harsh, because the notion that companies should make special investments in developing people, provide paths for promotion, and strive for high employee retention rates are deeply ingrained. But such thinking is outmoded and isn’t even the best approach for employees. It often leads to people becoming stuck in jobs they don’t really want or aren’t doing as well as they want to — or as you need them to — rather than scouring the job landscape for better opportunities.

Giving people promotions and coaching them in new roles can be both enormously satisfying for team leaders and great for performance. But promoting and developing people are also often simply not the best things for team performance. Managers should not be expected to be career planners. In today’s fast-moving business environment, trying to play that role can be dangerous.

Managers should not be expected to be career planners. In today’s fast-moving business environment, trying to play that role can be dangerous.

At Netflix, during interviewing people, they tell them straight out that they were not a career-management company, that they believed people’s careers were theirs to manage, and that while there might be lots of opportunity for them to advance at the company, Netflix wouldn’t be designing opportunities for them. So often companies give people half of a job they need done, because the person can’t do the whole job. Netflix realized that they just couldn’t afford to do that. Netflix needed people who could do the whole job. They were also determined not to make the incredibly common mistake of promoting into management roles strong performers who are simply not well suited to managing.

At Netflix, when we were interviewing people, we told them straight out that we were not a career-management company, that we believed people’s careers were theirs to manage, and that while there might be lots of opportunity for them to advance at the company, we wouldn’t be designing opportunities for them.

Netflix believes the best advice for all working people today is to stay limber, to keep learning new skills and considering new opportunities, regularly taking on new challenges so that work stays fresh and stretches them.

“At Netflix we encouraged people to take charge of their own growth, availing themselves of the rich opportunities we afforded them to learn from stellar colleagues and managers and making their own way, whether that meant rising within the company or seizing a great opportunity elsewhere.”