To listen to the podcast version of today’s post, click play above!☝️☝️ My podcast is taking leaps forward this week; I’ve added a punky jingle and am freestyling over the content 🕺

Netflix has created what’s maybe the most shared power point presentation in the history of power point. It’s a deck of 126 slides on how they shape their culture and motivate people.

Patty McCord, the former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, was part of Netflix’s radical HR strategy. Here’s a fascinating and provocative talk she gave in 2018. She’s a breath of fresh air in HR and people management — a function which is often only a reactive and supporting, when it really should be a function of growth. Check it out!

Having been a people manager for a couple of years, I wanted to highlight how I’ve seen HR and management enable growth.

Throwing more bodies at a problem will not solve it faster. In my previous job, as my boss and I were hiring a second person to join me in sales, she told me that hiring another me wouldn’t double the sales output. This isn’t to say that I’m better or more productive than whoever was to join our team, but that with new and more people there will be new layers of inefficiencies, such as admin work, training, misunderstandings and so on. To avoid slowing down the growth of the business when new people are joining, it’s important to have a clear onboarding and training plan — if not, new starters will be spending much longer learning the job.

Know the problem you are hiring for. If an organisation is struggling with sales, hiring more sales people may be the completely wrong approach. Taking the time to investigate and identify what’s stopping sales can reveal problems you didn’t know of. For example, customers might be unhappy with the product you are making — in which case, the solution to more sales could be hiring someone to improve the user experience.

Poor behaviour is contagious. At work we’re part of a team and we’re reliant on each other. If colleagues are just doing the bare minimum, constantly complaining about their job, or in general have a bad attitude, they will bring the rest of their team down. Their lack of responsibility and integrity will spread like a disease to colleagues — they will see that poor behaviour is accepted, and will be less motivated to work hard. As Patty McCord says, hire only fully formed adults who take responsibility for themselves and their team members.

Honest feedback. Do you have some colleagues that have poor, demoralising or ineffective habits that really annoy you? The truth is that it probably annoys a lot of other people too, and they are probably not aware of their habits themselves, as no one has ever told them. Whether it’s constant late comings, demoralising comments, ineffective work or anything else, it’s impeding growth — and we do everyone a favour by giving them honest feedback.

Enable and empower people closest to the problem. Senior executives and manager are often not aware of everyday challenges of the business, such as poor customer experience or malfunctioning systems. The doers — those who code software, speak to customers and welcome people in the reception — must be empowered to report internally when something’s not working right, and enabled to fix and improve the situation themselves. That can be something as simple as giving them admin rights to a specific software, so they can log in and correct what’s not right.

That’s it for today! Have a great weekend, and see you next week!

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