Our opinion what makes them special

We strive to develop good decision-making muscles everywhere in our company. We pride ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior management makes. Each leader's role is to teach, to set context, and to be highly informed of what is actually happening. The only way to figure out how the context setting needs to improve is to explore a sample of the details. But unlike the micro-manager, the goal of knowing those details is not to change certain small decisions, but to learn how to adjust context so more decisions are made well.

We tell people not to seek to please their boss. Instead, seek to serve the business. Let me know if you want to specifically override my decision. As companies grow, they often become highly centralized and inflexible.

Symptoms include:. We avoid this by being highly aligned and loosely coupled. We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals.

We may find that the strategy was too vague or the tactics were not aligned with the agreed strategy. And we discuss generally how we can do better in the future. Ultimately, the end goal is to grow the business for bigger impact while increasing flexibility and agility. We seek to be big, fast and nimble. New employees often comment in their first few months that they are surprised at how accurate this culture description is to the actual culture they experience.

Around the world, we live and create our culture together. In fact, hundreds of our global employees contributed to this document. We do not seek to preserve our culture — we seek to improve it. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture further. We find new ways to accomplish more together.

Every few years we can feel a real difference in how much more effectively we are operating than in the past. We are learning faster than ever because we have more dedicated people with diverse perspectives trying to find better ways for our talented team to work together more cohesively, nimbly and effectively.

As we wrote in the beginning, what is special about Netflix is how much we:. Netflix Culture. What is special about Netflix, though, is how much we: encourage independent decision-making by employees share information openly, broadly, and deliberately are extraordinarily candid with each other keep only our highly effective people avoid rules Our core philosophy is people over process.

Real Values The real values of a firm are shown by who gets rewarded or let go. Dream Team A dream team 1 is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators. Freedom and Responsibility There are companies where people ignore trash on the floor in the office, leaving it for someone else to pick it up, and there are companies where people in the office lean down to pick up the trash they see, as they would at home.

Some examples of how we operate with unusual amounts of freedom are: We share documents internally broadly and systematically. Nearly every document is fully open for anyone to read and comment on, and everything is cross-linked. There are some leaks, but the value of highly-informed employees is well worth it. There are virtually no spending controls and few contract signing controls.

Each employee is expected to seek advice and perspective as appropriate. Frankly, we intermix work and personal time quite a bit, doing email at odd hours, taking off a weekday afternoon, etc. Our leaders make sure they set good examples by taking vacations, often coming back with fresh ideas, and encourage the rest of the team to do the same. Each employee chooses each year how much of their compensation they want in salary versus stock options. You can choose all cash, all options, or whatever combination suits you 4.

You choose how much risk and upside you want. These year stock options are fully-vested and you keep them even if you leave Netflix. There are no compensation handcuffs vesting requiring you to stay in order to get your money. People are free to leave at any time, without loss of money, and yet they overwhelmingly choose to stay.

We want managers to create conditions where people love being here, for the great work and great pay. This personal investment not only motivates individuals but also galvanizes the entire team. To take great managing from theory to practice, the author says, you must know three things about a person: her strengths, the triggers that activate those strengths, and how she learns.

What sets the great boss apart from the average boss? The literature is rife with provocative writing about the qualities of managers and leaders and whether the two differ, but little has been said about what happens in the thousands of daily interactions and decisions that allows managers to get the best out of their people and win their devotion. What do great managers actually do? Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess.

The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths.

Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack. For 17 years, I had the good fortune to work with the Gallup Organization, one of the most respected research firms in the world. These interviews were a part of large-scale studies that involved surveying groups of people in the hopes of finding broad patterns in the data.

For my book, I used this foundation as the jumping-off point for deeper, more individualized research. In each of the three areas targeted in the book—managing, leading, and sustained individual success—I first identified one or two people in various roles and fields who had measurably, consistently, and dramatically outperformed their peers.

What interested me about these high achievers was the practical, seemingly banal details of their actions and their choices. Why did Myrtle Potter repeatedly turn down promotions before taking on the challenge of turning around that failing drug? Manjit works the night shift, and one of her hobbies is weight lifting. Are those factors relevant to her performance?

What were these special people doing that made them so very good at their roles? This is the exact opposite of what great leaders do. Great leaders discover what is universal and capitalize on it. Their job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can succeed in this only when they can cut through differences of race, sex, age, nationality, and personality and, using stories and celebrating heroes, tap into those very few needs we all share.

Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way. But to excel at one or both, you must be aware of the very different skills each role requires. Such insights help you know which of your actions will have the most far-reaching influence in virtually every situation. For a concept to emerge as the single controlling insight, it must pass three tests. First, it must be applicable across a wide range of situations.

Take leadership as an example. Lately, much has been made of the notion that there is no one best way to lead and that instead, the most effective leadership style depends on the circumstance. With enough focus, you can identify the one thing that underpins successful leadership across all situations and all styles. Second, a controlling insight must serve as a multiplier.

In any equation, some factors will have only an additive value: When you focus your actions on these factors, you see some incremental improvement. The controlling insight should be more powerful. It should show you how to get exponential improvement. Finally, the controlling insight must guide action. It must point to precise things that can be done to create better outcomes more consistently.

Insights that managers can act on—rather than simply ruminate over—are the ones that can make all the difference. What does the chess game look like in action?

A critical part of her job, therefore, is to put people into roles and shifts that will allow them to shine—and to avoid putting clashing personalities together.

At the same time, she needs to find ways for individuals to grow. Give Jeffrey a generic task, and he would struggle. Give him one that forced him to be accurate and analytical, and he would excel. So, as any good manager would do, she told him what she had deduced about him and praised him for his good work. And a good manager would have left it at that. But Michelle knew she could get more out Jeffrey. So she devised a scheme to reassign responsibilities across the entire store to capitalize on his unique strengths.

A revision is a less time-consuming but more frequent version of the same thing: Replace these cartons of toothpaste with this new and improved variety. Display this new line of detergent at this end of the row. Each aisle requires some form of revision at least once a week. This arrangement is simple and efficient, and it affords each employee a sense of personal responsibility.

It was a challenge. But Michelle reasoned that not only would Jeffrey be excited by the challenge and get better and better with practice, but other employees would be freed from what they considered a chore and have more time to greet and serve customers.

After the reorganization, Michelle saw not only increases in sales and profit but also in that most critical performance metric, customer satisfaction. So far, so very good. With his success at doing resets and revisions, his confidence grew, and six months into the job, he wanted to move into management. Besides, like any good chess player, she had been thinking a couple of moves ahead. Over in the cosmetics aisle worked an employee named Genoa. For instance, you might say, "My prior experience in customer service provided me with technical skills and an extensive knowledge base for how our product works.

As a marketer, I will be able to use this knowledge to ensure we're meeting our customers needs with every campaign we launch. Similar to the answer above, this answer is a good one if you're attempting to switch industries.

If you think your prior experience could deter interviewers from seeing you as exceptionally qualified, this is an optimal chance to prove them wrong. Consider how your background has allowed you to gain unique skills that others, who followed a more linear career trajectory, might not have. For instance, if you previously worked at a small startup and now you want to transfer to a large corporation, it's important you mention how those skills will make you successful in this new role.

This answer shows your interviewer that you're not afraid to take risks. Of course, you'll only want to say this if you have a positive example to reinforce the importance of failure in the workplace. You don't want to sound like you make mistakes all the time, but you'll stand out if you mention how you turned a failure into a success.

For instance, you might say, "I'm not afraid of failure. In my last role, we tried to streamline our SEO process and, along the way, found we'd accidentally decreased traffic to our site. However, this initial failure allowed me to see the errors in our previous procedure. With this answer, you're showing you're capable of remaining flexible and open-minded when something doesn't work right away, and you know how to take failures and use them as learning opportunities -- a critical skill for any work environment.

If you're stuck on deciding how to demonstrate your unique qualifications, start by thinking about how other people approach problems at your company, and how you differ. For instance, most people are either logical and use analytics to solve problems, or emotional and use creativity. It's rare to find someone who is both. If you truly believe you combine these two aspects, it's an impressive ability you should highlight.

Remember, when your interviewee asks "what makes you unique", she's really wondering "how will you help our company? To avoid sounding like you're bragging, consider a personality trait or skill set that helped your last company achieve results. If the results are quantitative, make sure you have the specific numbers to support your claim. They require more personnel, more equipment, and more space than do speaking and listening.

Often a stenographer and a messenger are needed, to say nothing of dictating machines, typewriters, and other writing materials. Few people ever feel it is safe to throw away a written communication; so filing equipment is needed, along with someone to do the filing.

In oral communication there are more human senses at work than in the visual; and if there is good listening, more can often be communicated in one message. And, perhaps most important of all, there is the give-and-take feature of oral communication. If the listener does not understand a message, he has the opportunity to straighten matters out then and there.

Perhaps the most obvious of the upward avenues is the human chain of people talking to people: the man working at the bench talks to his foreman, the foreman to his superintendent, the superintendent to his boss; and, relayed from person to person, the information eventually reaches the top.

This communication chain has potential, but it seldom works well because it is full of bad listeners. There can be failure for at least three reasons:. It would be absurd to assume that these upward communication lines could be made to operate without hitches, but there is no reason to think that they cannot be improved by better listening. But the first steps must be taken by top management people.

More and better listening on their part can prime the pumps that start the upward flow of information. People in all phases of business need to feel free to talk to their superiors and to know they will be met with sympathetic understanding.

But too many superiors—although they announce that their doors are always open—fail to listen; and their subordinates, in the face of this failure, do not feel free to say what they want to say. As a result, subordinates withdraw from their superiors more and more. When such problems remain unaired, they often turn into unrealistic monsters that come back to plague the superior who failed to listen. Above all, during an oral discourse, the listener refrains from firing his own thoughts back at the person talking or from indicating his displeasure or disapproval by his mannerisms or gestures; he speaks up only to ask for clarification of a point.

Since the listener stands the chance of hearing that his most dearly held notions and ideas may be wrong, this is not an easy thing to do. To listen nondirectively without fighting back requires more courage than most of us can muster.

But when nondirective listening can be applied, the results are usually worth the effort. The persons talking have a chance to unburden themselves. Equally important, the odds are better that the listener can counsel or act effectively when the time comes to make a move. Yet the past experience of many executives and organizations leaves no doubt, in our opinion, that better listening can lead to a reduction of the human frictions which beset many businesses today.

High-pressure salesmanship is rapidly giving way to low-pressure methods in the marketing of industrial and consumer goods. To put this approach to work, the skill of listening becomes an essential tool for the salesman, while his vocal agility becomes less important. How a salesman talks turns out to be relatively unimportant because what he says, when it is guided by his listening, gives power to the spoken word.

Regardless of the values that listening may hold for people who live by selling, a great many sales organizations seem to hold to the conviction that glibness has magic.

Their efforts at improvement are aimed mainly at the talking side of salesmanship. It is our conviction, however, that with the typical salesman the ability to talk will almost take care of itself, but the ability to listen is something in real need of improvement. The most important affairs in business are conducted around conference tables.

A great deal has been said and written about how to talk at a conference, how to compromise, how to get problem-centered, and how to cope with certain types of individuals. The reason for this is simple when we think of the basic purpose for holding almost any conference. If there is far more talking than listening at a conference, however, the oral contributions made to the group are hardly worth the breath required to produce them. More and better listening at any conference is certain to facilitate the exchange of ideas so important to the success of a meeting.

It also offers many other advantages; for example, when participants do a good job of listening, their conference is more likely to remain centered on the problem at hand and less likely to go off on irrelevant tangents. The first steps toward improved conference listening can be taken by the group leader. And if the leader himself does a good job of listening, he stands the chance of being imitated by the others in his group.

Some businessmen may want to take steps to develop a listening improvement program in their companies. Here are 14 suggestions designed to carry on what we hope this article has already started to do—build awareness of listening. Such speakers are available at a number of universities where listening is being taught as a part of communication training. Provide everyone with a simple form divided into spaces for each hour of the day. Each space should be further divided to allow the user to keep track of the amount of time spent in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Discuss the results of these forms after the communication times have been totaled. What percentage of the time do people spend listening? What might improved listening mean in terms of job effectiveness? There is at least one standardized test for this purpose. Also, lend the records to employees who might wish to take them home to enjoy them at their leisure.

When new people go to work for the company, ask them to listen to these sessions as part of their initial training. Check their comprehension of what they hear by means of brief objective tests. Emphasize that this is being done because listening is important on the new jobs.

Ask observers to comment on how well an executive seems to listen. Do his remarks reflect a good job of listening? Does he keep himself from becoming emotionally involved in what the subordinate says? Does the executive listen in a way which would encourage the subordinate to talk freely? After making a call, a salesman should write down all useful information received aurally from the customer.