latheli rhianna audree

[Rosalie Checca]

LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.

Shortly after becoming a full professor in the early 1990s, I started doing some research and a bit of consulting. I learned that meetings in renowned for-profit companies can be every bit as screwed up as those I had experienced in academia. Yet I only recently realized that two intertwined lessons just might be the most crucial for leaders who are determined to use meetings to propel organizational performance. Before I get to those new lessons, however, let me give some examples of those bad meetings and discuss my past efforts to discover how to run good meetings.

The first lesson is that, even though everyone may be at the same meeting, they often have clashing perceptions and opinions about which decisions were made (or not made) during the gathering. If you lead a meeting, your job is to make sure that every decision made is crystal clear to everyone present before the meeting ends. The second lesson is that leaders must make sure that decisions made in meetings are communicated to, and ultimately implemented by, their organizations. I know, this all sounds absurdly simple. Alas, my (admittedly biased) experience is that most organizations screw up both lessons on a regular basis.

After our conversation with Patty was over, Dave and I thought back to all the bad meetings we had studied and suffered through over the years. If only these two questions had been asked and answered before those meetings had been adjourned. So many people inside and outside those meetings would have been spared unnecessary confusion and frustration. So many people would have been saved from getting pissed off. And, best of all, what happened in those meetings would have helped so many organizations march forward in constructive ways.

I am a Stanford Professor who studies and writes about leadership, organizational change, and navigating organizational life. Follow me on Twitter @work_matters, and check out my other posts on LinkedIn and my Work Matters blog. My most recent book (with Huggy Rao) is Scaling Up Excellence

One of the most important mandates at Netflix was that people talk openly about issues with one another. That went for subordinates, colleagues, and bosses. We wanted honesty to flow up and down, all around the company.

With Reed, things couldn't have been more different. When I interviewed with him, one of his first questions was, "What's your HR philosophy?" Remember, I'd worked at Sun and at Borland, so I answered in my fluent HR-speak: "Reed, I believe that everyone should draw a line from their personal ambitions and integrity and become empowered to contribute." He looked at me and said, "Do you even speak English? You know what you just said didn't mean anything, right? Those words don't even string together into a logical sentence."

When I got home that day and my husband asked me how the interview had gone, I told him, "Well, I got into a fight with the CEO." Fortunately, I got the job, and I quickly came to love how blunt Reed and I could be with each other. He always challenged my assumptions and called out any HR truisms I might spout, and that felt great. I felt respected. Reed never coddled me in the slightest, and I loved the way he pushed me to keep finding new ways to improve the business. As soon as I had accomplished something I was really proud of, he would say, "Okay, that was great! So now what?"

One of the pillars of the Netflix culture was that if people had a problem with an employee or with how a colleague in their own department or somewhere else in the company was doing something, they were expected to talk about it openly with that person, ideally face to face. We didn't want any criticizing behind people's backs.

Holding people to this standard of transparency has many benefits. One is that it puts the clamp on politicking and backstabbing. I've often said that I hate company politics, not just because it's nasty but because it's so inefficient. Think about it. If I'm going to stab someone in the back, I have to go get a knife, hide it, wait until I'm alone with that person, and catch them off guard. I'd better be sure to kill them or they'll come back after me. It takes planning and it's high risk. Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier just to tell that person, "It makes me crazy when you do that, so please stop!" More important, though, is that honesty helps people to grow, and it flushes out the differences of opinion and alternative ideas that people so often keep to themselves.

Openly sharing criticism was one of the hardest parts of the Netflix culture for new employees to get used to, but most of them quickly came to appreciate how valuable the openness was. When I talked about this with one of our great team leaders, Eric Colson [now Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix], he told me the giving and taking of honest feedback was central to how well his team worked, and his teams worked beautifully. That's why Eric rose to the position of VP of Data Science and Engineering in less than three years at the company, having begun as an individual contributor.

He'd been managing a small data analytics team at Yahoo! before coming to Netflix, and he recalled that the culture there was to be super supportive of people and not to criticize them. He told me that when he started getting critical feedback from colleagues at Netflix, "It hurt. People told me, 'Colson, you're not good with communication; when you need to get a message out to a wide audience, you take too long to make the point and it's unclear.'" His initial reaction was to think, Oh yeah? Well I've got a lot of things to say about you too! But before long, he realized that "when you reflect on what they've said, you see it from their point of view, and you learn how to improve on those things. That directness was really helpful." Again and again at Netflix, I saw that people rebounded quickly from the initial shock of receiving negative feedback and learned not only to appreciate it but to deliver it themselves much more consistently and thoughtfully.

Eric also shared wth me a story that reinforced what I observed so often when managers weren't willing to give people tough feedback: It puts undue pressure on the boss to provide cover and cheats the employee of the chance to improve.

We worked hard at Netflix to engender the kind of belief Eric expresses in this value of totally honest feedback, and to coach managers so that they felt comfortable delivering it. That was a major focus of my time. Sometimes I would just let the person with the issue vent, loudly and passionately. They'd recite in detail all the bad behavior of the person they were annoyed with. Then I would ask, "What did she say when you told her that?" Typically, the person complaining would say, "I can't say this to her!" I'd push back, "But you said it to me, didn't you?" and they'd look sheepish, realizing it wasn't right to unload behind the person's back.

Then we would practice the same conversation without the emotion. We'd also discuss the importance of giving specific examples of the problematic behavior and proposing solutions. Following those rules makes such conversations actually constructive.

Practice is crucial for honing your delivery style. You can do it in front of a mirror or with your spouse or a friend. Actually rehearsing what you'll say, out loud, allows you to hear the tone of your voice. You might even want to record yourself. It's also important to think about your body language, which can speak louder than words. We're often totally unaware of how emphatically it's sending a negative message.

The most important thing about giving feedback is that it must be about behavior, rather than some essentializing characterization of a person, like "You're unfocused." It also must be actionable. The person receiving it has to understand the specific changes in their actions that are being requested.

The comment, "You're making a great effort, but you're not getting enough done" is essentially meaningless. An action version would be, "I can see how hard you're working, and I really appreciate that, but I've noticed that there are some things you're spending too much time on at the expense of others that are more important." You would then establish better prioritization with the person.

I once received an extraordinarily helpful piece of feedback that is a model for being direct and suggesting a solution. Someone who worked closely with me and was often with me in meetings told me that I should talk less. "You're always talking so much that others don't get a chance to get their two cents in." Done. I started to catch myself and make sure I shut up and listened more.

Many people feel hesitant to speak so openly, but the truth is that most people really appreciate the opportunity to get a better understanding of their behavior and how it's being perceived, as long as the tone of delivery isn't hostile or condescending.

The Netflix executive team modeled honesty in a number of ways. One was to conduct an exercise we called "Start, Stop, Continue" in our team meetings. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they're doing really well and should keep doing. We were such believers in the value of transparency that we did this exercise in our meetings, out loud in front of the group.

Recognition of how important it is to be open rippled down through the company as we'd go back to our teams and report that the executive team had just done "Start, Stop, Continue" and fill them in on what had been said. That wasn't a mandate; it didn't make it an HR initiative. Most of the executives just did it, which exemplifies the power of modeling. A few told me it would never work with their teams, and I'd say to them, "Well, you know, they're doing it in product and in marketing, and it seems to be working there because they're getting lots of great work done." That was usually quite compelling.

90f70e40cf