Work Rules! by Bock Laszlo

Author:Bock, Laszlo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics / Management, Business & Economics / Leadership, Technology & Engineering / Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781455554805
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2015-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

What surprised me is that in addition to benefiting the person being advised, the advisors themselves benefit as well. Through repeated experience, our company’s leaders are building their listening and empathy skills and their own self-awareness. It sounds simple, but the benefits they experience in these sessions have a cascading influence. They claim to be better managers, leaders, and even spouses as a result of building these skills. Note that this is not an HR program, though we manage the administration of it. As Shannon Mahon, the program manager, points out: “The secret sauce is that engineers really own this, not People Operations.” Googlers created this for one another.

Similarly, there are volunteers who serve as Gurus, focusing less on individual issues and more on issues of leadership and management across the company. Becky Cotton, at the time part of Google’s online payments team, was our first official Career Guru, a person to whom anyone could turn for career advice. There was no selection process or training. She just decided to do it. She started by announcing in an email that she would hold office hours for anyone who wanted career advice. Over time, demand grew and others volunteered to join Becky as Career Gurus, and in 2013 more than a thousand Googlers had sessions with one of them.

Today we have Leadership Gurus (drawn in part from the annual winners of our Great Manager Awards); Sales Gurus (for advice on selling, so that, for example, a Googler working in the auto industry in Italy can get advice from one in Japan); and Expectant and New Parent Gurus; Having Googlers coach one another not only saves money (I’ve been told that some external coaches charge $300 per hour or more), but also creates a much more intimate community. As Becky puts it, “You can automate a lot of things, but you can’t automate relationships.” Becky still coaches 150 people each year, and reports that people often stop her in the halls to tell her, “I would not still be at Google if not for the Guru I spoke to.”

Getting started is as easy as Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt hanging out her THE DOCTOR IS IN sign. Over the years, Becky has partnered with a number of Fortune 500 technology companies to help them launch their own Guru programs. HR professional Sam Haider and product manager Karen McDaniel, both with financial software company Intuit, did just that. Sam recalls: “We learned of Google’s Career Guru program at a Career Development Summit that they hosted and thought it might be a simple, scalable answer to the challenge [of offering 1:1 career advice globally]. We experimented with small groups to validate the idea and then leveraged a grassroots effort already existing in our finance organization. Over the next few months, it grew in popularity and went global.”

If you want to unlock your organization’s tremendous potential for teaching and learning, you need to create the right conditions. Organizations always seem to have more demand for people development than they can satisfy, and Google is no different.

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