welcome to meet the boss TV I'm Anna Gilligan in this program I'm at Google
headquarters in Mountain View California to speak with Leanne Hornsey VP of
people operations about how she manages some of the brightest minds in the world
we really tried to make this a place where people want to be and I have to
say it doesn't happen by accident it does happen by design so I've read
that Google only hires people that they believe could be innovative thinkers why
is that so important to the company well I don't think it's quite true to say we
only hire people who are innovative thinkers we certainly only hire people
who we consider to be incredible talent and part of that talent could be about
innovative thinking could you tell me a little bit about the hiring process at
Google I mean it's kind of it's like the holy grail of places to work and you
hear so many legendary stories about how many interviews people had what is the
process when I was hired four and a half years ago I had 14 interviews across two
different continents and it really was quite grueling and it took you know
several months nowadays we tend to try to limit a number of interviews to
between four six maximum possibly possibly eight but the reason that we
have so many interviews is that we believe very strongly that we should
hire through consensus so for example if I was going to hire you to work for me
I couldn't just make the decision that you seem good and that we could get on
we'd ask somebody who would work for you to interview you and a couple of your
would-be peers so we believe very strongly making 360-degree decisions
around people that we hire and the reason that we do that is we believe
that each and every hire we make is probably the most important people
decision that we're going to take we're very we're very proud of our culture
here and we and we want to protect it and we want to make sure that we don't
dilute it so we put a good deal of effort into making sure that everybody
we hire would be a creative to the culture so
what is the culture that each employee has to fit into so well we try very very
hard to not be hierarchical to be reasonably democratic in our
decision-making to be very informal but formal when it comes to how we do things
in terms of our decisions so we never make decisions on the fly for example we
always use data we're always very rigorous in our thoughts but we're less
rigorous and less formal in the way we dress the way we eat the way we act
Leanne horns II joined Google in 2006 and heads up human resources for the
sales arm of the company Google has become such a phenomenon that its name
has become a verb now this presents a unique challenge to Leanne who has to
keep up with its growing staffing needs without becoming bureaucratic I asked
her how she does it and where a lot of companies go wrong when it comes to
human resources I think it's very difficult I think I'd be lying to you if
I said oh it's easy we can you know we can scale to 50,000 people and still be
innovative and still be creative no you have to work at it you definitely have
to work at it we do lots of things to make sure that we don't become
bureaucratic by default so one of the things is we look very very carefully at
the number of levels we have in the organization we really try to keep that
tight and light so every course or so we have what we call bureaucracy buster
which is basically anybody can write into as senior guys and say look this
thing is driving me mad it's slowing down I can sense
bureaucracy I can sense lots of form-filling
and we do our very very best to take those ideas and eradicate the
bureaucracy so we work hard at it I've seen you guys put a lot of time into it
when you said that you try to limit the number of layers so it doesn't become
bureaucratic what's that is there a magic number where you say if we go
beyond this we're in trouble we've toyed with having magic numbers and we've
found that that really doesn't work because some of our organizations are
very you know they're big they're thousands of people and some of our
organizations are hundreds of people so we've played with magic numbers and with
throwing them in bin and we've decided that really we just need to take more of
a common-sense due to this but I think it would be
would be pretty uncomfortable if the number of layers got into double figures
but that would feel very uncomfortable for us oftentimes there's an issue an
organization someone's a great individual contributor but it's a very
different job to then manage the people that are doing that job you did so well
how do you spot those people who will become great leaders and managers and
make sure that there's a smooth transition so I think I've gone on
record saying that my biggest worry at Google my biggest difficulty at Google
is managing Talent my problem is I hire brilliant people so
you know 95 99 percent of my people are high talent they really really are the
people here are good so we don't use traditional methods it would be wholly
inappropriate when you have a talent pool such as Google has to have high
potential programs for example so what we tend to do and we do a lot of it we
encourage a great deal of rotation and mobility so for example in the sales
organization we've had roughly about a thousand people move jobs over over this
last sort of three quarters and they either move jobs permanently or they
move jobs to go and see for a period of time if they'd like to work in X Y or Z
area we also bring people together into project teams working on
cross-functional big company issues so that people can build skills and talents
outside of their own that their own sort of function and their own area of
expertise so we work very very hard on giving very bright people additional
skills additional learning and additional knowledge and of course we
also have the normal promotional processes and all that stuff we also
spend an awful lot of time preparing people for management you know I've
often bother I've often said that you know I was a manager for about 15 years
before I knew how to do it and it's often when you get very very good
individual contributors who are used to doing it themselves who are highly
motivated it's very hard for them to manage people because that's a very big
transition so we put lots of support in place we have mentoring programs you
know all the stuff you would expect a lot of leadership programs we run what
we call career gurus where we give advice to would-be mentor
would be managers we have lower expectations of managers when they're
first in the job we don't suddenly drop them in and say right we expect you to
be able to do the same as when you're managing for 10 years so we recognize
very very clearly that it's quite a difficult transition and some people
don't want to make it so for example in engineering a lot of people stay as
individual contributors and they're perfectly happy with that and our pay
scales and our promotion scales are absolutely allowed for that to happen
now you said it took you 15 years to realize how to become a good manager
very personal yes yes was there kind of a light bulb moment what was what did
you learn that made that switch into good management yeah there was a light
bulb moment and I think it was very much about really believing rather than just
saying that my success was linked to the success of my people I'd always been an
individual contributor who sort of succeeded and so my whole life was
geared my whole working life is geared towards what I did and I had a lightbulb
moment when I realized it wasn't about me anymore and that my success was
absolutely linked to the success of the team and that absolutely changed the way
I managed I mean it literally turned at hundred eighty degrees and I read that
you said that you measure people with positives not negatives for example you
don't keep track of sick days why is that so important at Google I guess
because we believe that people are grownups and adults and you know they'll
do the right thing and that we don't have to be monitoring them and measuring
them and watching their every move and in my experience that's right you know I
mean so for example if you just take my team I never look at their holiday I
never look at their sake I never look at what time they come in or what time they
leave I do look at their output that's what I'm interested in how they get to
that output why should I bother you know they're grown-ups do you believe in a
work-life balance and if so how is it encouraged here work-life balance is
such such an interesting subject yes I do believe people need work-life balance
I really do but I believe it's different for every individual so I actually think
it would be paternal dick and wrong to tell people that they
have to leave the office at three four five or whatever okay I think people are
grown-ups and they have to make decisions for themselves around how they
work when they work and it's a little bit like hi answer the question earlier
I don't check on my people when they come to work when they leave work if
people want so for example if if somebody who works me wants to go to the
dentist or wants to go to the doctor or wants to go pick up their kids or
whatever I don't even notice it and nor would I expect them to ask so I
absolutely feel that we concentrate on output not on how many hours you're at
work so well I've balance is a different thing to every individual but yes of
course we care about it and we leave it to the individual to decide so you keep
mentioning that this focus on output yeah so how frequent are the review
processes and kind of what's the process for that everybody in the organization
and I say everybody but it never is everybody right but the vast majority of
the people in the organization do have quarterly goals so they'll sit down with
their manager and maybe with their team and say right this is what I think I'm
going to do this quarter does it sound right and let's work out the measures
around that and then every quarter that will be reviewed and we review it quite
formally you know we take it very very seriously we are a performance related
culture so the manager will review how the individuals done sit down with the
individual they'll have a long conversation and the managers will all
get together as well to calibrate how they feel about the whole team's so we
take that process very very seriously and it does impact compensation etc as
you would expect now for several years Google has topped fortunes list of the
100 best companies to work for what are the traits or the characteristics of
Google that you think places it so high year after year so over the last six
weeks I've been talking to a lot of people who are new to the company and
I've sat down with them and I've said what do you like what don't you like
what did you find that was as you would expect what did you find that was
different and universally University in a hundred percent of cases
people have said to me we love the people so I have to say and I know I'm
uh nut early boring around this it comes around data hiring I think if you hire
people who really want to work on shared goals and shared products and shared
things who you feel will be accretive to the culture it really really impacts how
people feel about the organization and of course we we also do do a lot of
things you know so you know there's all the stuff that people might consider the
fluff like the free food like the soft areas like the fact that we don't check
people's working hours or sickness particularly we really try to make this
a place where people want to be and I have to say it doesn't happen by
accident it does happen by design for more
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