Yet a 2017 Gallup poll found that only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work. Gallup calculated that by “moving that ratio to six in 10 employees, organizations could realize a 27 percent reduction in turnover, a 40 percent reduction in safety incidents and a 12 percent increase in productivity.” That's why it's not enough for organizations to simply hire talent. If leaders want to unleash individual and collective talent, they must foster a psychologically safe climate where employees feel free to contribute ideas, share information, and report mistakes.

By Reed’s count, he takes six weeks of vacation a year, and from my limited experience, I would add “at least.”

Reed’s own modeling is fundamental to the success of the unlimited vacation policy throughout Netflix. If the CEO doesn’t model this, the method can’t work. Even then, Reed’s substantial vacation-taking has trickled down as intended in some areas of Netflix and not so well in others. When those leaders under Reed don’t follow his example, their employees often sound a bit like the zombies from Reed’s nightmares.

For operational roles, you can pay an average salary and your company will do very well. At Netflix, we don’t have a lot of jobs like that. Most of our posts rely on the employee’s ability to innovate and execute creatively. In all creative roles, the best is easily ten times better than average.

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 “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.