powerful

Key Insights

• People walk in the door with power — the job is not to empower them. “A company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it.” McCord’s frame (built from her years as Netflix’s chief talent officer) rejects the paternalism implicit in most “empowerment” culture talk — the default should be agency, not managed freedom.
• Business literacy as the precondition for good decisions. “People need to see the view from the C suite in order to feel truly connected to the problem solving that must be done at all levels.” Companies invest in training but fail to explain how the business actually works. McCord required that any employee, stopped in an elevator, could recite the company’s top five priorities in order and in the same words leadership used.
• The right person for the job is not always the person who’s done well so far. “We would be willing to say goodbye to even very good people if their skills no longer matched the work we needed done.” This is the principle that Netflix enacted through its “keeper test.” McCord is honest that it is uncomfortable and that it requires treating people as adults who can handle honest feedback about fit.
• Feedback must be behavioral and actionable, not characterological. “The most important thing about giving feedback is that it must be about behavior, rather than some essentializing characterization of a person, like ‘You’re unfocused.’” Abstract personality feedback produces defensiveness; specific behavioral feedback produces change. The person receiving it must understand exactly what to do differently.
• Hire for the job you have now, not the job someone did before. The rule at Netflix: promote from within when the domain requires expertise already inside the company, and bring in outside talent when the problem requires skills or experience the company has never developed. The question is what the job actually requires, not who deserves a reward.

— Drafted from external sources; review and edit to make your own.

---

Kindle Highlights: Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

Highlights

company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it. Do that, and you will be astonished by the great work they will do for you. — location: 127 ^ref-55789

---

while I’ve removed the words “policy” and “procedure” from my vocabulary, I love discipline. — location: 141 ^ref-27001

---

People need to see the view from the C suite in order to feel truly connected to the problem solving that must be done at all levels and on all teams, so that the company is spotting issues and opportunities in every corner of the business and effectively acting on them. The irony is that companies have invested so much in training programs of all sorts and spent so much time and effort to incentivize and measure performance, but they’ve failed to actually explain to all of their employees how their business runs. — location: 390 ^ref-30782

---

If you stop any employee, at any level of the company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and, if they’re really good, in the same order. If not, the heartbeat isn’t strong enough yet. — location: 499 ^ref-14537

---

The most important thing about giving feedback is that it must be about behavior, rather than some essentializing characterization of a person, like “You’re unfocused.” It also must be actionable. The person receiving it has to understand the specific changes in their actions that are being requested. — location: 604 ^ref-64793

---

We were combative in that beautiful, intellectual way where you argue to tease out someone’s viewpoint, because although you don’t agree, you think the other person is really smart so you want to understand why they think what they think. — location: 770 ^ref-29711

---

“How do you know that’s true?” Or my favorite variant, “Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?” — location: 775 ^ref-34476

---

debates there underscored that no one, no matter how experienced or high level, could fully understand customer needs and desires purely on the basis of their experience or brilliance. We often went into tests with sharp divisions in our expectations about the results. One — location: 888 ^ref-38907

---

We had a rule of thumb for whether to promote from within or bring in a top performer from outside: did the job to be done require expertise that no one inside had, or was the work in an area that we were ourselves at the forefront of innovating? — location: 1105 ^ref-40292

---

Have the Right Person in Every Single Position | At Netflix we had three fundamental tenets to our talent-management philosophy. First, the responsibility for hiring great people, and for determining whether someone should move on, rested primarily with managers. Second, for every job, we tried to hire a person who would be a great fit, not just adequate. Finally, we would be willing to say goodbye to even very good people if their skills no longer matched the work we needed done. — location: 1200 ^ref-42682

---

We allowed employees to tell us what portion of their compensation they wanted in stock options, and rather than adding those onto their salary, the amount was in lieu of a portion their salary. In addition, rather than using stock options as “golden handcuffs,” we imposed no vesting period. Options would vest on a monthly basis. Those options were available to exercise for ten years, allowing for long-term increase in the stock price. — location: 1274 ^ref-3486

---