6 Important Reminders for Managers from Google Leadership

Here at GovLoop and GovDelivery, supervisors occasionally trade tips, management ideas, and best practices over email. We love learning from one another, and are constantly looking for ways to improve the way our companies work. So when Scott Burns, GovDelivery’s CEO, sent across an email with Book Recommendation: How Google Works, as the subject line, my interest was piqued.

Said Scott:

I’ve been really enjoying the book, “How Google Works.”  Some of you have heard me pontificate about why using Google and Apple as examples is cliché… so it hurts me to recommend this book so emphatically, but I can’t resist. I’m about 40% done and it is excellent.

Scott continued on, saying there were six incredibly important reminders that the book had already given him about leadership. Our team at GovLoop found them very useful — so I’m sharing them here with you.

• The most important role of manager is to recruit and hire super talented people
• Hire for awesomeness, not to fill an open slot on the org chart. If you have an awesome person and no spot, make a spot
• Care more about how smart someone is, their level of demonstrated passion for work/life/etc, and how fast they learn, far more than experience
• Recruitment is for everyone. HR helps facilitate.
• F hierarchy (and by that I mean “forget”). Basically, people who think more about titles and ceiling tiles than doing awesome work are wasting time on the wrong things. Invest in things that help people do better work, keep offices (if any) small and push people close together to encourage collaboration and energy. Remember that quality ideas are as likely (or more likely) to come from people doing the work vs. management.
• Focus product investment in areas where we bring unique technical insight (can be engineering… or insight about the market) vs. copycat and competitor chasing.

Scott also pointed to this document from Netflix about workplace culture as a good resource and inspiration.

What do you think? Do you agree with those reminders from the book? Are they in use in your workplace? And what do you value in workplace culture? We’d love to hear your takeaways — post them in the comments below.