Culture of transparency and participation integral to tech giant’s success
Scaling innovation: Shannon Deegan, director of people operations, central staffing and business development at Google, spoke in August at a Strategic Capability Network event about the importance of innovation to organizations and what Google does to foster it. For more information, visit www.scnetwork.ca.
By Shannon Klie
At Google, innovation is an imperative, according to Shannon Deegan, director of people operations, central staffing and business development.
“We realize the minute we stop innovating is the minute we stop being a leader,” said Deegan at a Strategic Capability Network event in Toronto last month.
The company, which has become synonymous with Internet search over the past decade, recognizes innovation comes from everyone — from software developers to child-care providers.
That’s one of the reasons the company, based in Mountain View, Calif., instituted “20 per cent time” where all 24,000 employees, regardless of their position or level, spend 20 per cent of their working hours on personal projects. For example, Gmail, which has become one of the company’s core money-making products, was an employee’s personal idea, said Deegan.
But not every idea has a commercial application.
“Some of these things we’re probably never going to be able to monetize,” he said.
That doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t valuable. A group of employees who shared a passion for astronomy created Google Sky, a sky view made up of a collection of space photographs from the Hubble telescope. While it might never make money, it was a project that engaged employees, said Deegan, and made them feel valued when the company launched it publicly.
And to ensure employees aren’t afraid to take risks, the company celebrates mistakes at an annual awards ceremony by recognizing teams who tried something innovative but failed. This is because even failures are valuable, said Deegan.
For example, Wave, a social network-type application that includes chat, video, photos and maps, didn’t take the world by storm and, one year after its launch, Google decided to drop it. But the work that was done on Wave has improved other Google products including Gmail and Google Maps, said Deegan.
“We want people to feel like they can take a risk and not worry about it,” he said.
Google also encourages innovation through transparency. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, share all the information they can with employees about where the company is going and any challenges it might be facing. They hold weekly town hall meetings that are broadcast to employees in all of Google’s 60 offices around the world, said Deegan.
“Employees want to be part of that process,” he said. “It creates an environment of ownership that really inspires people.”
If an employer isn’t open about its goals and challenges, employees will become disengaged, he said.
“That (transparency) piece of it is more important than any other piece.”
The Googleplex, Google’s headquarters, is located about 90 minutes south of San Francisco. It is a very casual environment and there are many perks for the 10,000 employees who work there, including 25 restaurants and cafeterias with free food, free haircuts and a shuttle bus for employees commuting from San Francisco (yet another employee idea), said Deegan.
“We also realize that a lot of those things are (the minimum you need) to attract the best talent,” he said, as competitors in Silicon Valley are offering many of the same perks.
So the company works hard to engage employees through a culture of participation. At Halloween, everyone dresses up and there are always good-natured pranks on April Fool’s Day. Different departments find their own way to bring employees together. For example, Deegan’s HR staff re-enact weekly Glee episodes, with each employee drawing a character’s name at random.
An organization also needs to be agile if it’s going to be innovative. That’s why Google has a very loose organizational structure where employees are encouraged to take ideas and concerns directly to the founders, rather than going through their direct manager, said Deegan.
While having cafeterias with free food and lounges are seen as perks, they’re also great places for employees to meet and talk with other employees they don’t normally interact with, he said.
“It’s really to foster that exchange of ideas.”
This is also why Google doesn’t encourage telecommuting on a regular basis.
“We really feel that to be innovative, you really need to be in that environment,” said Deegan.
But employees aren’t expected to be in the office during set hours because the company trusts them to get their work done when and how is best for them, he said.
Google also provides the raw materials to ensure everyone can do their job. If a computer breaks down, it’s fixed the same day. If an employee needs a new mouse, there are stores around the Googleplex where he can pick out the model of his choice.
To truly be agile, people need to be good at many things, which is why Google doesn’t like to hire specialists. Instead, the company looks for people who are very smart and passionate about several different things, especially non-work-related activities such as sports and travelling, said Deegan.
To ensure Google is engaging employees and addressing any issues they might have, the company has an annual employee survey, Googlegeist, to find out what’s working and what’s not. But even more important than asking the questions, Google acts on the feedback, said Deegan.
“We gain their trust with the questions we ask and because we actually do something about what we’re hearing,” he said.
Some of the actions that have come out of the survey include providing more people-manager training, making it easier for employees to find mentors, focusing more on career development and educating employees about the value of their total compensation packages.
The 75-question employee survey is also part of the company’s promise that all people decisions are based on data and analytics, said Deegan.
HR uses analytics to track how employees are performing, identify the low performers and then chart their development. Analytics are also used to see if Google is attracting the right people and if they are being engaged and retained, he said.
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By Trish Maguire
The fundamental principle underlying Google’s success over the past decade can be summed up as: “It’s all about freeing people to exercise their full potential within their teams and projects.”
In listening to the stories and examples from Shannon Deegan, director of people operations at Google, there is no escaping the fact the search giant firmly believes leadership is a business priority.
As many organizations find themselves restructuring strategies and business plans in the wake of the recession, perhaps Google’s leadership philosophy deserves closer scrutiny. Such a philosophy speaks to a core belief about leadership styles and human nature where effective leaders understand their own assumptions about human nature.
For example, if a management team believes, fundamentally, people want to do their best, are self-motivated and want to perform, then they most likely value seeing people flourish. Presumably their preferred leadership style encourages independent and creative thinking, allows for mistakes, removes obstacles, provides the right tools and sets high goals while holding people accountable.
Evidently, the leadership style of choice for Google is one of influence and not position. If your title was “Leader of People Operations,” what would your honest answers be to the following questions?
• Is your organizational design built around titles, functions and tasks, or does it operate with small projects and small teams where people want and choose to perform at the peak of their abilities?
• Do town hall meetings really unite everyone and promote a sense of concerned ownership or is it a top-down platform for show and tell?
• Do you really have an open-door policy where people can speak freely with the head of your organization?
• What strategies have you implemented to foster a culture that does away with bureaucracy?
• How does your total rewards program compensate for innovation, culture and retention?
• On a scale of one to 10, how liberally does the management team encourage the exchange of information, knowledge and creative ideas across teams and projects?
• How would your management team respond to a company-wide strategy that required 20 per cent of everyone’s time had to be spent on personal projects?
• Do your managers see themselves as resources, and act as such, for their team players or are they too busy worrying and working with the 10 per cent to 20 per cent of unsatisfactory team players?
• If the head of your organization scrutinized every final candidate’s hiring package because he was actively engaged and believed in the importance of selecting the “right fit,” how might this influence your managers’ and executives’ commitment to the hiring and selection process?
These are just a few lessons every leader can learn from Google’s track record for creating an exemplary, high-performance culture through an unequivocal clarity with their leadership philosophy, style and behaviour.
As a leader, how effective is your organization’s leadership philosophy in “freeing people to exercise their full potential within their teams and projects?”
Trish Maguire is a commentator for SCNetwork on leadership in action and founding principal of Synergyx Solutions, focused on developing customized talent management strategies for small entrepreneurial businesses. She can be reached at [email protected].
By Karen Gorsline
Google, known for innovation and continued growth, occupies a prominent position on almost all top employer lists.
For Google, scaling innovation is a strategic capability. And executives in most companies would wholeheartedly concur innovation is key to their future success. So why are there so few companies like Google around?
A strategic capability for one company may not be one for another. On the surface, Google provides a basic commodity — information. But it has positioned itself to be the best and first choice for information of all kinds, everywhere. This means finding new types of information to make available, to the widest base of users possible, in the most convenient and accessible format.
The more users, the more advertising revenue is generated. The basic formula is one familiar to news media but the scope, reach and responsiveness to the needs and interests of users are unique. While some companies may need pockets of innovation or require engagement of the workforce around continuous improvement, many companies see strategic capability more grounded in cost-effectiveness, efficiency and other more traditional forms of products.
Scaling innovation at Google is more than fluff. Google’s fun, energized workplace seems like a dream world for employees trapped in their cubicles doing mundane work. What is sometimes overlooked is the price Google pays to support its three guiding principles for innovation: ubiquity, transparency and agility.
Google has not given employees the freedom to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects without a purpose. Not all of the projects are able to find commercial applications but in each case the learning that occurs becomes part of the residual intellectual capital of the organization.
While the means of testing products and ideas is sometimes novel, Google is founded on engineering and despite the apparent silliness and fluff, everything is measured and analyzed.
Google has invested extensively in processes for information sharing to support ubiquity, transparency and agility. If something is not working, the truth is out there. People may innovate to find a solution or, where a situation is not recoverable, celebrate the mistake and the learning that came with it. Numbers and truth — just not in traditional accounting terms — point to a very disciplined underpinning to running a business known for playfulness and personal freedom in the workplace.
Google ‘gets it’— we are all people, not resources. Google understands business is about people. Its customers are people. Its employees, to some extent, mirror its customer base. If employees are excited about a product or idea, odds are customers will be too. Google gives employees the opportunity to get excited about the kinds of work they do, to get in the habit of participating and making a contribution, and to learn from the people with whom they work. Google uses techniques like “bureaucracy bashing” to find things that need to be fixed and idea generation to find out how to fix them. It allows employees to express themselves as individuals and teams in a multitude of ways so energetic participation becomes the norm.
While working on virtual access to information, it promotes face time. Google approaches employee engagement the same way it approaches its overall business — like creativity, it can’t be “managed.” It is necessary to set up an environment where it can flourish. Transparency with respect to employee surveys, information and commitment to a meritocracy is built into processes.
While not every company is a Google, every company can benefit from Google’s recognition of employees’ potential and the importance of fostering engagement in the workplace with the same energy and discipline it uses to pursue business goals.
Karen Gorsline is SCNetwork’s lead commentator on strategic capability and leads HR Initiatives, focused on facilitation and tailored HR initiatives. She has taught HR planning, held senior roles in strategy and policy, managed a large decentralized HR function and directed a small business. She can be reached at [email protected].
By Tracy Cocivera
Google has relentlessly pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. Innovation is Google’s lifeblood. It sees endless opportunities to create even more relevant, useful and faster products for users.
In his presentation, Shannon Deegan highlighted how Google has cracked the code on sustainable innovation. It dawned on me that all of Google’s innovation efforts are a function of building leadership capacity. Google implicitly and intuitively understands how to do this. By shedding light on the dimensions necessary to build leadership capacity, all organizations can deliberately achieve sustainable innovation.
In Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap, authors David Weiss, Vince Molinaro and Liane Davey said leadership capacity consists of three dimensions:
Leadership behaviours: This dimension is the extent to which leaders demonstrate holistic leadership behaviours.
Leadership culture: This dimension is the way in which the norms, values and standards in an organization shape leaders’ behaviour.
Organizational practices: This dimension is the extent to which an organization’s practices affect holistic leadership.
It can be argued Google is one of the world’s most successful organizations because of its unrelenting focus on these three dimensions.
According to Leadership Solutions, holistic leadership requires leaders to focus on the entire business by paying attention to six leadership elements:
• customers
• business strategy
• culture and values
• organizational
• team
• personal.
Google has focused on each of these elements as it attracts, selects, develops and retains exceptional technology and business people. It favours ability over experience, and every employee wears several hats. There is an implicit assumption all employees need to be attuned to the elements of holistic leadership to be successful. This helps them work collaboratively on challenging projects to create the next generation of web technologies.
During his presentation, Deegan highlighted how each office creates an environment designed to foster creativity, teamwork, health and happiness. It is also evident Google is focused on the second leadership capacity dimension — leadership culture. While offices are not identical, they each reflect the Google culture and values that work and play are not mutually exclusive. It’s common for employees to take advantage of pool tables, grassroots employee groups (such as a chess club), yoga and piano.
Finally, Google leverages organizational practices that specifically build leadership capacity. Innovation processes are one of the practices identified by Weiss, Molinaro and Davey that encourages the creativity of all leaders. Google dares to innovate. Its commitment to innovation depends on everyone being comfortable sharing ideas.
Through its organizational practices, every employee is a hands-on contributor and an equally important part of the company’s success. No one hesitates to pose questions and suggest new ideas to the founders in a weekly all-hands meeting. Through organizational practices that accelerate innovation, Google maintains its competitive edge.
Tracy Cocivera is a contributing commentator on organizational effectiveness for SCNetwork and a senior consultant in leadership solutions at Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions. As a business psychologist, she helps executives and teams enhance their effectiveness and create more value for their organizations. She can be reached at [email protected].
Would you like to attend one of the upcoming Breakfast Series in Toronto? Here’s a look at upcoming sessions:
October: Into the blast furnace, with Courtney Pratt, who will share stories about Stelco’s journey through bankruptcy protection (Oct. 21).
November: Building leadership capabilities, with Jackie Greaner of Towers Watson and Kelly Neri of the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (Nov. 16).
Visit www.scnetwork.ca for more information.
