Bulldozer00's Blog

I recently stumbled upon this interesting NY Times article: “Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve”. Prior to developing their 8-point improvement plan, the management philosophy that propelled Google to superstar status was this:

“For much of its 13-year history, particularly the early years, Google has taken a pretty simple approach to management: Leave people alone. Let the engineers do their stuff. If they become stuck, they’ll ask their bosses, whose deep technical expertise propelled them into management in the first place.”

After collecting inputs from their vast workforce, a Google task force concluded that technical expertise in the management ranks was still important, but it ranked as the lowest priority on their list of desired manager attributes:

… Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

So, let me summarize the management characteristics that Google will value most in the future.

• Being accessible
• Making time for one-on-one meetings and taking an interest in employee’s lives and careers.
• Helping people by asking questions and not dictating answers.

Google’s conclusions weren’t earth shattering, but they’re hard to implement in orgs where bosses spend all of their time going to agenda-less meetings, cavorting with their meta-bosses, taking status from their direct reports, and dueling with their peers, no?