Experts have found that if you stare at what you are desperate to avoid, you are actually more likely to paddle into it. Similarly, at Netflix, we tell all employees it is best to focus on learning, teamwork, and accomplishment. If a person gets obsessed by their risk of being let go (or an athlete becomes obsessed with the risk of being injured) they canât play light and confident, and this can bring about the very troubles they were trying to prevent.
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At most companies, the boss is there to approve or block the decisions of employees. This is a surefire way to limit innovation and slow down growth. At Netflix, we emphasize that itâs fine to disagree with your manager and to implement an idea she dislikes. We donât want people putting aside a great idea because the manager doesnât see how great it is. Thatâs why we say at Netflix: DONâT SEEK TO PLEASE YOUR BOSS. SEEK TO DO WHAT IS
But with our culture of candor at Netflix, people get loads of feedback every day. Before any employee is let go, he should have heard clearly and regularly what he needs to do in order to improve.
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 âyou must let go of X percent of your peopleâ 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 Netflixâs 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. Thatâs 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 isnât being played to a rule book and we donât have limits on how many people we play with. One employee doesnât 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 âKeeper Test Promptâ as soon as possible. That almost always improves the situation. During your next one-to-one with your boss ask the following question: âIf I were thinking of leaving, how hard would you work to change my mind?
Even at Netflix we have pockets of the company where safety and error prevention are our primary goals and there we fence off an area to build a little symphony orchestra that plays pitch-perfect rules-and-process.
Take, for example, employee safety and sexual harassment. When it comes to protecting our employees from injury or harassment, we invest in error prevention (training) and hotlines; we have strong processes to make sure all claims are properly investigated; and we use process-improvement principles to drive the incident rates down to zero.