Still, people felt vulnerable - and that bred suspicion. More and more, I began to think that many of our employees viewed any change as a threat to the Pixar way (and, as such, to our ability to be successful going forward).

We also encourage all managers to consider each of their employees regularly and make sure they’ve got the best person in every spot. To help managers on the judgment calls, we talk about the Keeper Test:

If a person on your team were to quit tomorrow, would you try to change their mind? Or would you accept their resignation, perhaps with a little relief? If the latter, you should give them a severance package now, and look for a star, someone you would fight to keep.

We encourage our managers to apply the Keeper Test regularly. But we are very careful to not have any firing quotas or ranking system. Rank-and-yank or “you must let go of X percent of your people” is just the type of rule-based process that we try to avoid. More important, these methods get managers to let go of mediocre employees, but they kill teamwork at the same time. I want our high-performing employees to compete against Netflix’s competitors, not one another. With rank-and-yank what you gain in talent density you lose in reduced collaboration.

Fortunately, there is no reason to choose between high talent density and strong collaboration. With the Keeper Test we can achieve both. That’s because there is one critical way we are not like a professional sports team. On the Netflix team there is no fixed number of slots. Our sport isn’t being played to a rule book and we don’t have limits on how many people we play with. One employee doesn’t have to lose for the other to win. On the contrary, the more excellence we have on the team, the more we accomplish. The more we accomplish, the more we grow. The more we grow, the more positions we add to our roster. The more positions we add, the more space there is for high-performing talent.

There are two steps we take at Netflix to minimize fear around the office. The first step is that any employee who is feeling the type of anxiety that Marta and Derek discussed is encouraged to use what we call the “Keeper Test Prompt” as soon as possible. That almost always improves the situation. During your next one-to-one with your boss ask the following question: “If I were thinking of leaving, how hard would you work to change my mind?

POST-EXIT Q & A

There is nothing more ominous than people on your team disappearing from the roster with no word about how the decision was made or how much warning that person received. The biggest worry people have when they learn a colleague has been let go is whether that person had feedback or whether the termination came out of the blue.