One of the big challenges for larger organisations is giving managers the feedback they need to do their jobs properly. The New York Times interview with senior vice president of people operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, covers some interesting aspects of how accountability in the workplace helps executives.
Google surveys its staff twice a year on how they think their managers are performing in a Upward Feedback Survey that pulls together between twelve and eighteen different factors which the company then uses to measure how their leaders are performing.
That bottom-up, data driven approach has proved to be successful as Bock told the New York Times.
We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.”
You don’t actually have to do that much more. Because for most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct. One of the applications of Big Data is giving people the facts, and getting them to understand that their own decision-making is not perfect. And that in itself causes them to change their behavior.
Accountability matters – who’d have thought?
The other thing that Bock and Google’s HR team have learned from their measuring management performance is just how effective consistency can be.
We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.
Sometimes we make things too complex – and Google’s experience with managers shows that simple accountability and consistency are far more effective than complicated KPIs.