About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I like thinking about how to scale a company without making it feel like a big company. The standard way to scale a company is to use hierarchy and process to manage the larger scale – big decisions get passed up the chain to an appropriate decision maker, and little decisions are handled by a process that has been standardized.
But I have always disliked this approach, as it removes the initiative of smart and independent thinkers at all levels of the organization. Why hire smart people if you won’t let them think for themselves? I have long been fascinated by different management structures or bossless companies that trust their employees to make the right decisions. None of these organizations have been proven to scale past a few hundred people, though.
So how can we build companies that give autonomy to small teams while scaling up to thousands of people? Or to put a finer point on it, how can Google really be run like a startup?
As I watch the leaders at Google, I’ve realized that part of the answer is that the leaders tend to be consistent and principled. I work in the finance department, and Patrick Pichette, our CFO, is a master of this. He tends to ask the same set of questions:
That’s it. He’s so consistent that I feel like I can project his voice into a meeting, and so I have become an extension of him within the org. I understand the principles he uses to make decisions and can therefore give others a good sense of how he’ll react before they go into a meeting. I can also anticipate the questions he is likely to ask, and make sure that my team has good answers beforehand so we’re not scrambling afterwards.
What’s interesting about this to me from an organizational design perspective is that Google is not depending on process or hierarchy to guide me. The thing that keeps the finance org aligned is a consistent set of principles modeled by the CFO, who then trusts employees to use their judgment in applying those principles. That is an organizational model that can scale.
And when I thought about the rest of Google, I realized that’s a lot of what makes it work – each of us Googlers has an internal model of key decision makers (Larry Page, Patrick Pichette, Nikesh Arora, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Huber, etc.) and has a good idea of how each of them would react to a proposal. That enables us to make decisions without having to pass them up the hierarchy and without having an explicit process, and still be confident that the decisions will be consistent with the corporate direction.
I think this is how a lot of other great companies have worked. Whether it’s Walt Disney or Steve Jobs or Herb Kelleher at Southwest, their people knew how their leaders would react and could act more independently because of that knowledge. It’s not quite a cult of personality, because that would imply that the followers have no independent thought and are only doing what they’re told. It’s more like teaching a team a playbook and letting them figure out how to apply it in their particular situation. I also read once that the military does a good job of this, making sure that everybody knows the overall strategic goals for an engagement, such that if the situation changes, they don’t blindly follow their orders to “Take that hill!” if it doesn’t help with the overall strategic goal (some Googling reveals this is called Commander’s Intent).
I like this idea of scaling by trusting your people to do the right thing while not hog-tying them with a process. It lets them adapt the leaders’ guiding principles to their individual situations such that they have autonomy, but without having the organization dissolve into chaos. It does have the challenge that it won’t work if you have bad people in the org, but my guess is that pretty much no management tactics work if you have bad people – they will circumvent your process.
Anyway. I’ve been mulling this over for a while, and figured it’d be a good topic for my first blog post in nearly a year. Work has actually been calm for a couple weeks, so I have finally overcome my activation energy to post. I need to make the time to do it more often, as I have dozens of post ideas floating around, and I like myself better when I’m writing regularly.
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So, this is something I’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about over the last year, and the funny thing is that I like what you’re saying because it’s exactly where I ended up.
You might want to try reading Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” – basically the idea is exactly the same as the Commander’s Intent – the leaders communicate the deeper underlying intent/philosophy of the company, and then trust the people to make the correct judgments “on the ground”.
I find that if things aren’t going well – and we’ve had a couple times when that’s been the case, then the correction is, “What part of the intent wasn’t communicated clearly?” and that answers a *lot* of most of the disconnect.
So for us, for instance, we communicate a lot of the core ideals of the what we’re trying to do – the *why* of what we’re doing, and the high levels of the “how”, and then that’s it. I try to let the people with the expertise run with it, and I trust them to do a good job – to do a *better* job in their field than I would.
And if something isn’t how *I* want it, I either consider, “Why do I want it this way?” and if it’s because of an underlying “why”, then we have a discussion of that. That’s the intent. It’s obviously not something that anyone can execute on 100%, but that’s my philosophy on what my role *should* be.
And yes, it only works when you have great people on your team who are motivated, who will be passionate and driven about helping the team execute the intent at the highest quality.
seppo
Seppo, thanks for sharing your story, and for the Simon Sinek suggestions. I’ve thought for a long time that a good manager’s job is to provide context and then step out of the way to let their people use their expertise, as you suggest. I’ve had that belief challenged recently, as it doesn’t work as well with more junior people who don’t yet have their own expertise (e.g. I took a class in situational leadership which convinced me that more junior people often need (and want!) more direction. But, in general, with a high-performance team, I think it works to agree on a goal and get the heck out of their way.
Glad to see you writing again!
You’re response to Seppa brings up my initial reaction, which is that this seems to describe a kind of first principles for a type scaling, but not necessarily the how that scales.
You can scale by giving small teams more autonomy. In order to give small teams more autonomy you should have guiding principles.
I think this is where process and hierarchy actually form the buttress for the type of scaling you’re describing. In order to acculturate those guiding principles and make small autonomous teams a projection of executive decision making you need to be able to take new/junior people through a number of cycles with some transparent “show your work” thinking around decisions before they can become a scaled module of the organization.
This stuff tends to happen organically in smaller organizations, but with an org as large as Google where would you say you see this kind of refinement happening, and is it a deliberate process or an effect of proximity?
Hi Brian, thanks for the comment. I agree these are more guiding principles rather than a handbook as to how this might work.
In my experience for Google (and I should hasten to add that I am not speaking in any way on behalf of Google and this is only my personal opinion), it’s a very informal process, which is why it has taken me a while to figure out its value. It’s not even clear to me that it’s an intentional process. But new Googlers are often expected to take several months to get the hang of how Google works, and it’s often very difficult for senior people to come in, because they don’t get the informal cues from our executives.
So it’d be interesting to see how this might work if an organization were designed to actually work this way. As you observe, other companies have initiation periods and mentors to guide new employees through the process of getting acculturated. I feel like that’s often to impress the process and rules upon employees, rather than to give them the tools they need to be autonomous within the company, but I might be biased.
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