The Google Model by Annika Steiber

Author:Annika Steiber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3.8.4 Strong Leaders Are Humble

Many interviewees noted that leaders at Google should be humble and modest, as well as a supportive force that enables the team to perform well. This includes admitting mistakes and telling their employees, “You are the ones with the knowledge this matter needs, not me.” Such leadership places special demands on individuals who are accustomed to excelling—many of them from the time they were children—but who now, as a leaders, needing to instead skillfully give others the support they need to excel. An interviewee asserted that leaders “needed to be able to discipline themselves in order to support others’ independence and to provide their teams with the opportunity to shine.”

An often-repeated comment is that being a leader at Google means assuming a special style.30 Leaders must support their teams while not standing in their way. One employee said that his manager held him on a “very long leash” but that this manager was also very accessible. Whenever the employee asked for help, he received it in a most positive manner.

One manager described leading an innovative team in terms of giving team members limited resources and stimulating them to experiment until they found something they really believed in. He said that he supported his employees even when he didn’t completely understand what they were doing. If he had allowed his opinion to set aside their views, his perspective would likely have become an obstacle to their innovative capabilities. This way of acting accords with the company’s policy of encouraging leaders to support their teams. There is a natural desire for innovation in many of Google’s employees, even though they fight to find time for their innovative work.

When a team has worked with an idea, its members come to a point where they need to be given additional resources if they are to continue. A leader must then ask the members of the team whether they believe in their idea enough, are passionate enough about it, and have succeeded in mobilizing a sufficiently large group of supporters. Those colleagues who believe that the idea in question is a major and important one will volunteer to participate in the project. Being able to mobilize a large group of supporters is the best way to give a project a flying start. This is an example of how the collective—the crowd—influences decisions based on the creative work of a team. The leader’s role at that stage, according to several interviewees, is to provide support and resources to scale up an innovation regionally and globally so that it will benefit a larger group of users.

A leader’s efforts to influence employees to take greater risks are linked to the great tolerance Google has for failure. Several interviewees mentioned that the company’s values in terms of big thinking and scalable technology were the natural starting point for approaching innovations.

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