How Google Makes Managers Awesome | Michelle Donovan

Michelle Donovan hi everyone I'm Michelle Donovan and I've been with Google people operations team for 10 years now and I'm thrilled to be here with you today to talk with you about making managers awesome so let's get started I wanted to start by talking a little bit about best practices and I want to start in this way because within the field of human resources best practices have become very popular and in the best case a best practice can be sort of a source of inspiration something that's working at one company that you want to think about adopting at your own company but in the worst case a best practice can be something that happens to work narrowly in one company that another company just sort of picks up and blindly follows and it's Google we don't believe in best practices at Google we believe in data and this is a female here over and over in the summit and so when it comes to a product decision or a sales decision or even a decision about our own people we think all of these decisions should be based on data and analytics and I know earlier today you heard from Prasad study he talked about making work better and today I'm going to talk with you a little bit about a project that I worked on with Prasad of his team and was focused on managers and together we set out to F two simple questions number one do managers matter at all you heard this morning Prasad hints a little bit that we weren't sure whether or not managers matter and we wanted to turn to the data and find out and the second question we had if they do matter what is it that our best managers are doing and it was in hopes that if we learn something from our best managers we could train the rest of our managers so before I give into the research project I want to share two pieces of context with you the first context is around 10 X so our co-founder Larry Page talks to us about stinking 10x he likes to say you should think 10x and not 10% and what he means by that is to make giant progress you need to take giant 10x leap forward and not just like little baby 10x incremental improvements and so when you think about self-driving cars or a balloon fueled Internet those 10x leaps seem really obvious but what does 10x look like on the people side and we started one dream maybe 10 X on the people side is all about the manager because if you think about it if we could measurably improve our thousands of managers at Google those managers would have a significant impact on the tens of thousands of Googlers that they manage and that's 10x the other piece of context that I want to share with you is a little bit of history about managers at Google so this morning Prasad Sethi hinted that a little bit when he said sometimes our engineers think that our managers are these middlee bureaucrats and so we have historically had our managers our Googlers re-question the value of managers and historically we like to say the engineers would say in the best case scenario my manager is a bit of a nuisance and in the worst case scenario some of our engineers would say I think my manager is actively trying to undermine me they were really skeptical really skeptical about managers and in fact when we're just a few hundred people at Google our co-founders Larry and Sergey were so sick of the complaint that they said enough and they got rid of all our managers they got rid of them and that lasted for a few weeks basically it was a disaster because everything started escalating to Larry so vacation requests interpersonal problems the works it didn't work and so Larry finally relented and you reinstated the managers and I share this story with you a because it's true but because it gives you an idea of the context why we'd want to set out on this research project in the first place and so we had that question do managers matter and so the first thing that we did in the research project we had to figure out who are the best managers at Google and who are the worst ones and we did that based on two data sources the first data source was a performance review ratings and so this is your management chains look down at how effective that manager is and you can see performance reviews plotted along the x-axis so managers with really high ratings are on the right the second data source that we looked at was the teams view of the manager and we got this from a survey that the team filled out about their manager you can see that plotted on the y-axis so teams that were very favorable about their managers those managers at the top and so you can see our top managers in the upper right top performance ratings top survey scores the worst managers are done on the left now one interesting findings about this chart is that we saw managers in the other quadrants so if you look in the lower right you can see what we call perf favoring managers these are managers with very high performance ratings but their own teams don't see very highly of them and when we dug in here what we found is oftentimes these are managers who are cranking towards really tough deadlines and burning up a team so although their managers love them their own teams were very unhappy in the other quadrant we have team theory managers so these are managers where their own team loves them but their managers aren't so sure and what we've done we dug in here is that oftentimes managers and needs in this bucket we're trying to be the team's best friend so a team loved them but they weren't delivering on results so now that we understand the quadrants I really want to focus you in on the best and the worst so when we pick the best managers we picked managers who are in the top five percent of that performance rating and of that survey so the upper quartile and on the bottom it was a bottom quartile and our next step was to study the differences to figure out does it really matter if you have a manager who's in that best bucket and we found out it matters a lot we found out that your manager at Google is the single biggest driver of your happiness at Google we found out that if you have a manager in that best bucket those managers have teams with lower turnover rates their team's report they're more productive they're more innovative and they're happier across the board and these findings held across functions across jobs anyway we've cut it once we knew that okay managers matter what is it that that best group of managers is doing so again we turn to the data and we read through stacks of performance reviews we read through survey comments one analysis that we conducted is called double-blind interviews so in a double-blind interview I the interviewer don't know whether the manager that I'm interviewing is a best or worst and that manager doesn't know either we ask them the same types of questions how do you spend your time when you focus on and then we go and analyze the results and what we found is those best managers are doing things differently and one example is that our best managers were much more likely to have one-on-one so those best managers were much more likely to schedule one-on-one meetings with their teammates and what that means is they would sit down with their reports usually about once a week talk about the work what's going well what's not going well what can you do about it what can I use your manager do to help you with that the worst manager is just weren't likely to do that and that's a really simple thing that we now can teach managers as soon as you become a manager set up those one-on-one and by the way here's a guide for what a good one-on-one looks like so we have analyzed all this data we've looked at all these results and to recap it was survey comments performance reviews those double-blind interviews and we ran what we call qualitative data analyses and from all that data eight attributes of our managers very clearly emerged and they're posted here we found that our best managers are doing these things they're great coaches they empower their team they express interest and so on oftentimes when I show people this list they say it's kind of straightforward it's even kind of simple and I agree the thing that makes this was really compelling for us is it's based on our data that it's based on our managers and we have such respect for data at Google that it's a very compelling list for our managers and so one thing to point out about the list they are in order so one of the most important things that our best managers are doing is coaching their team you might notice that technical skills is on the list but it's last it's number eight and so what we found is that technical skills are important because they help a manager advise the team it's kind of tough to advise if you don't have some domain expertise to advise them but it's not the most important thing the softer skills the cocaine the communicating those are much more important when it comes to our best managers and what they do and what they spend their time on so technical skills is on the list but it's not number one so one of the most powerful things about this project was not the research itself but what we did with research so what we've done with the findings is we woven them into every aspect so the manager lifecycle what you're looking at here is a manager feedback survey report and so what we do is every six months we very simply ask the team how's your manager doing I'm using a truth the survey is very short takes about five minutes it's anonymous so we encourage the teams to be candid and it's for development field purposes only so what that means is it's not tied to their performance for you at all we give the report to your to the managers if at least three of their team members respond and we say this is for you this is for you to think about how you're doing on these eight attributes which we knew are important and it's for you to think about where you might want to improve when we give these result reports we do a few things to help commanders one of the things we do is we strongly encourage them to share the report with their team and we give them a discussion guide to help with that so we say look be a role model talk about the growth mindset tell them everybody is working on something I heard you I see in my report I'm doing brain on coaching and communicating but not so great on micromanaging so here's what I'm going to try and give me feedback in the same way that I give you feedback you give me feedback and we give them discussion guides to help with that the second thing we do is we try to make it easy for them to take action to improve so we tell them if you score low on coaching which is of course you can take to improve on coaching here's an article you can read about coaching and for us we found that this combination of self awareness through the report and making it easy for them to take action has been really powerful for us and so how do we know if this is working once again we turn to the data and one thing we very carefully track at Google is our average satisfaction score of our managers across all our surveys and we know that in 2010 our managers are scoring at 83% and today they're it's about 89% and while we're always going to keep investing in managers and trying different things this is one indicator to us that we're on the right track but it's something we keep a very close eye on it's something we care a lot about and so what kinds of things might you want to be thinking about with managers in your own companies I've been talking to some of you on break so they know that some of you are very small companies and maybe you're just starting to think about having a manager others of you are much bigger and you've had managers for a long time so my advice is no matter where you are it's no matter what stage of your company - think about that whole lifecycle or the manager so when you're hiring or you're promoting managers think about the behaviors that you value in your company and ask some questions about those behaviors figure out how you want to assess them on those behaviors when managers become managers think about how to train them so at Google we like to train managers after they become a manager and been a manager for a little while we've actually found about two to six weeks of being a manager is a sweet spot so what we do when you become a new manager we first send you an email and we take congratulations we send you a bunch of things to read including v8 attributes and we encourage them to sign up for a class a few weeks later we like them to come to our class and the reason we like them to code our class after they have managed for a little bit is they bring questions to the class and they are highly motivated and in that class to learn because they've already started to see a couple things and they're very interested in learning more now you don't want to train them too late because we could train them too late they can actually do a little bit of damage so you want to catch some rates in that sweet spot and just to kind of share with how we're constantly is sort of iterating and launching one idea that were Weymouth's right now is how could you train a manager before they become a manager and so one of the things that we see in our data is oftentimes before a manager starts managing the team they'll manage an intern so right now we're looking at our intern training for next summer for all our managers of all those interns so say can we beef up that manager intern training and train them just like we train our other managers so that later in their career when they start managing a bigger team they're more prepared so training is a big thing to think about and then lastly think about feedback so I shared the manager feedback survey that's worked for us but encourage you in your own cultures and in your own companies to think about what might work for you to help give you our managers more feedback we found giving manager that sense of self-awareness has been really critical to their improvement so hiring training feedback those are all things to think about and like on the hiring session all this work is posted in free guides on our rework site we've posted those eight attributes we have our new manager training posted there and we've also posted our manager feedback survey which you can customize and use in your own companies so it's our hope that today by sharing some of our practices that it helps you our partners think about what behavior is an attribute view value and your own managers and how you might want to help support them we know that having a great manager is often a defining moment in someone's career and it just sort of makes me wonder what if everyone had that opportunity to have a great or even an awesome manager so that's the end of my presentation and with that we move into a Q&A session and I'm happy to take any questions that you have yes yeah yeah big question so he's asking what happens when a manager is stuck and what I say is we first assume positive intent and we try to help them get them to a course one of the things that we do is we know when we look at those managers feedback survey reports that sometimes there's a reason why a manager is struggling like maybe they're having to take the team through reorge or there's like some tough things happening on the team so we kind of give them a chance and we say look here's how I can help you as a human resources professional here's a class you can take here's some things you can do we give them a chance we one of the things that we do in the data is we look for what we call serial low scoring managers so if you score low on this report two three four cycles in a row so that's a pretty big signal something's really wrong and then we get in there more seriously and say one more chance but if you can't turn it around then it's time for you not to be manager anymore and we do have a percent of managers with the happens to we kind of call it you need the will and the skill and if they can't follow through on it through the training then we'll help them get into what we call an individual contributor track yes um yeah yeah yeah it depends because yeah yeah yes no question so the question is is it hard to the individual it depends because I'll tell you in some of the more engineering organizations sometimes they'd rather be on the technical individual track so it does highly depend on the function I would say that and I'd say sometimes people just prefer and so the way we kind of get them there is they'll be happier so when they're not doing well as a manager it's they know it the team knows it it's like a pretty big struggle so by the time we reach that decision oftentimes it's like look there's this other track and then they go into that and they're happier and the team's happier but yeah it does happen sometimes yes sir you first of all thank you for sharing a list great information so question for you what have you found to be the most effective method for training your managers is it in classroom and giving them materials to read it is sending them to trainings at seminars is it mentoring can you get why do that yeah that's a great question so one of our best ways is to do an all-day training with these new managers one of the things that we found to be the most useful is to have a really great manager come in and we call do a cameo in in the training and we find anos courses when a great manager comes to visit those courses score 10 points higher and the reason they score 10 points higher is that manager shares the view in the trenches and they're like look guys here's a mistake I mean don't make it and they go through real-life situations and it's just sort of different a different feel than HR saying hey here's what you should know and do so I'd say training and bringing in your better managers to help train them and spend some of our best stuff we're trying to do a little bit more with online and reading articles and that kind of thing just so we can scale but kind of in class room where you can roleplay has been one of the better pieces right yep ah honestly not really so the question is you have a rule of thumb for the number of reports we like to say that around five to seven is like the sweet spot much less and you don't get a lot of scale and too many and you can't have those one-on-one meetings so five or seven is listed the sweet spot it's a great question how do you decide who to promote to be a manager so in the if you were in the hiring or in façades talk you might have heard a little bit about those committees and so when we look at promotions committees review information about the manager our potential manager and so one of the things that you look at is what information is it that we have based on how they're doing on those eight attributes and a committee will generally decide hi I have a question because it's very similar to the into the previous question sometimes there are like three or more people that seems to speak for the promotion for be a manager to become a manager mm-hmm so is there a way to prepare someone before make the promotion or how do you decide is similar yeah it's a great question and we get this question a lot especially from our junior employees who like wanted events maybe a manager we even have a topic Google called so you want to be a manager and one of the things we advise those employees is things like a leader be a leader mentor someone volunteer to either be an interns manager or be that interns buddy like all these behaviors coaching expressing interests that kind of thing you can do with your colleagues so if you're on a project you can step up as a leader on a project so we one of the things that that list gives us is this this set of things that people can look at and try to do hi slightly different way of looking at what you're saying because everything you said is been great I run a small team of ten people yeah with one manager so I think all those things are very useful to look at him and guide him but how do I know if I'm doing a good job as their overall leader and how much of this can you apply to yourself how do you actually measure that you mean an individual contributor or the manager yeah so I have a team of ten people I'm the director then I have the assistant manager who runs the rest of the team but just as much as I'm reviewing him as a manager of everyone else how do I apply that to myself to make sure I'm being a good overall division leader director yes okay sure so the question is um he has managers under him but how does he make sure that the indirect reports is what we would call it think highly of him as a managing director a couple of things we do is we have an annual survey called Google guys we call it that so it's kind of like the sign of the time to cool and we actually ask about your manager and your director and your VP and a few teams in the management chain and we do that so that you can get a little report on how you're doing it for the leaders we have some more questions about goes we have a vision does she make good decisions and things like that that's one tack we do we also have other ways to get feedback held like real-time feedback so it's a way just to send ten people an anonymous survey question and they can respond so I'll give you example like I had an on site a few weeks ago and I just sent it to my team and said how was that on site what did you like and what can we improve so there are some ways like that through online surveys where you could get a little feedback the other thing is we also strongly encourage people just ask just to have one-on-ones with some of your indirect reports and ask them how you think you're doing so just thanks to that so just for example then that list of a things that you had you could just send out as a survey to the whole team and say fill out anonymously about both the director and your immediate line manager that's right that's that's very make a scoring system or something that's right you can send that it sound like a dream is a new scale and I know to think about what behaviors you value at your company right so this is our list and you're welcome to it but you could also edit it revise it change it to fit your own culture for sure yeah great question hi um how do you set objectives to improve like attitude like a behavior positive attitude where the skill is there but like a positive approach to like management is not bad that's what's missing okay so the question is how do you get people to change your behavior if maybe they kind of have a bad attitude is that like a little yeah yeah interesting question here's one thing we do so because we so strongly encourage managers to share those reports with the teams a lot of managers do share it and it's actually kind of unusual for them not to share it and once they've shared it the team has access to how you're doing and so managers are actually pre motivated to improve because six months later they know they're going to get another report so if they're kind of in the toilet for one report they're pretty motivated to do something so the next report doesn't look so bad and so this kind of regular interval of giving these reports helps with that a little bit if they have a parable attitude and they for load time and time again and they won't improve then we get into sort of what we talked about earlier where HR steps in and we're like look this isn't really working out and I think you should try going on this different track so do you think that um kind of follow that last question that a feedback work for like smaller teams as well so we've got like 25 and there's three for managers do you think that the feedback it works just as well on the smaller team doesn't like knowledge oh definitely yeah I think I mean I think feedback is the key to all this and it's exactly kind of tough to ask someone for feedback which is why these regular interview will help so I think I mean we have examples of just engineering managers who just didn't have self-awareness they actually thought that they should be the team's best friend and once they got the first report they're like whoa I guess they don't want that so yeah asking for feedback Bhutan is really key great thank you yep I have to pretty quick question that's one the process you described for you send an email to someone and say hey congratulations your manager go play around for a couple of weeks and then come take some training does that process is that the same if you bring someone into the company as a people manager but they've never worked there before yeah so yeah I just always question is you send this email that says congratulations you became a manager do you do it the same way as if you hire we have to have two different tracks so if you're hired in as a manager we put you in training right away and we'd help tell you how managing is a little different at Google I'd say that for one for two I'd say the we are pretty careful with that email and we don't say kind of play around but we do we make it a little more like looks congratulation this is a big deal here's what you need to start doing and we have high expectations of you and your team is counting on you and we really kind of play that up a little bit many not so when you guys are doing this feedback from the team and you're sharing with the manager you mentioned that you need three people to respond they share it how did you guys end up with three it's a great question initially we started with five actually to really protect the team so it is anonymous so you can't attach it to an individual because we want to be very protective and we found that there wasn't that much to be concerned about there wasn't retribution or different things and we found if we took it down to three and we did some pilots first and we found it worked and now that we take it down to three we can send out reports to a much bigger list of managers that have a small team and some of those managers of small teams actually need it the most because they're in the early stage of managing so it works for us but we would never take it lower than three because you do want to be careful of that yeah okay thank you yep good question hi um I have been a manager for the company I work I work at for two years and a half and when I when I entered the company I had two main goals one was to take this really traditional company to the digital to a digital stage and to work on culture because you know sometimes mission and values and those things end up looking really nice at a presentation but people don't actually leave it or managers don't actually make people leave it so my question is if you have a clear culture of the kind of people you want your company a really clear values like freedom and responsibility we don't go we don't we are not going to check on the time you arrived at the office we are not go is not a control culture but is a responsible culture how do you how do you make all the people inside a company actually live that culture in it I mean it there's no right or wrong culture it's like how do you make people live those values like okay so I kind of hear your question if you have certain cultural values like freedom how do you help make those values come alive that come alive like yeah not every day yeah everything we do yeah how the wind stalled up so it's a great question and I would say it starts at the top so you set the tone at the top with how the leaders treat people so do the you know leaders lock down the cabinets with the office supplies I mean I think we forget that employees take their cues from everyday things that happen lead by Excel so I'd say the leaders have to set the tone at the top and managers can be a huge lever so if you want people treated a certain way how do you train the managers on what you expect and for us like laying out the eight behaviors makes it really clear we just have so many engineers and they just want to see it like laid out very clearly and once you do that then they can they can try to match your expectation so I'd say set the top your managers can help and then help find ways to communicate that and small ways to your employees okay thank you yeah sure how are we doing on time okay it can take us few more questions and I can go to break hi yeah so it's a great question she's saying she's in a small agency and she manages but she also is busy I'd say we definitely have that all over the place busy busy managers and so one of the things that we encourage them to do is just think really carefully about your time and so it sounds obvious what would I mean by that is have one-on-one meetings but maybe you have them every other week during your heavy sales periods their marketing periods when it comes time to the performance review you set aside an hour for that person in you dig deep but in the other week you kind of go shallow or you just have a quick 15-minute chicken so that's one of the things we advise and then the other thing we say is just the little things you can do for your team can go a long way so one of the behaviors is about expressing interest and you know we've passed with engineering managers they're like of course I care about the team and I'm like okay of course you care but how do they know you care so even just learning spouses names girlfriends names the cat's name and you ask them you know how is Philip doing in school that makes a big difference rather than hey house do you have a son or something I don't know so I think there's many little ways where you can send a quick email or see him in the hall that can make a big difference and show people that you care and see them as a whole person I have two quick questions so on the one hand and it kind of like through the questions early on if you start to identify some senior individual contributors that that's next natural progression would be a manager yeah you're starting to think that they might not have what it takes to be manager or might not want to be a manager how do you foster that through the company and we have more what we call individual tracks in the technical areas so in our technical like in an engineering air area we do have a tracker you can keep moving up demonstrate a great deal of technical expertise and mentoring or other people but we do have that track and I actually think that check is important so that people aren't forced to be a manager if they don't want to but in most areas that aren't technical the general progressive management and if you don't have those skill set it can be an issue you can it can't be honest it can so in other areas like more like a marketing or finance or other places it's true that in order to move up you need to get gas gain those skills to be a people manager okay so on that front and my other question at what point in the hiring process do you start interviewing for management skill set all the way at the intern level or and how do you do that so we have one of our attributes that you might have heard about in the hiring talk is leadership and so even if you're a junior employee we look for example when you're in college of stepping up as a leader all the way up to like our top SVP who we interview so we do ask everyone about leadership if we are interviewing you for a people manager job we actually ask you questions on these eight attributes so we say like tell me about a time that coached and hopefully they know what that means and they have some examples of helping some employees generational management and also generational identification like having a Gen X or even more so at millennial who manage a Kinnick yeah what's the date what kind of data you have yeah so the question is sort about managing different generations it's a fair question I think something that we see sometimes in the younger generations is this is huge in earnest like like we had a younger employee last month he's like I have to learn something every day and I was like every day sometimes we just need to like get the presentation done so I so I do I do think that there are some generational differences I mean honestly we typically take our managers I'm just gonna be honest back to the APA over ears and say everyone's different when you coach you need to tailor your coaching style to that individual where they're at in their career what motivates them take time to get to know them here's some questions you can ask to get to know them and send that how we sort of train our managers to deal with it's not just generational but many different aspects of what might motivate an employee but we don't over focus on the generational thing it's a little bit more like everyone's an individual is how we treat it I think that's pretty good the questions are kind of slowing down to what I see of them available so if you have other questions I'm happy to chat and there is a lot posted on rework or you can happy to reach out to me individually not happy to help thanks again for attending [Applause]

Channel: re:Work with Google

Views: 77,479

Rating: 4.8869109 out of 5

Keywords: HR, Google, Management, managers, new managers, how to manage people

Id: QC_PGHkRvTw

Length: 36min 40sec (2200 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2017