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.
Q. What are some things that the managers are ranked on?
A. Some of them are very straightforward — the manager
treats me with respect, the manager gives me clear goals, the manager
shares information, the manager treats the entire team fairly. These are
fundamental things that turn out to be really important in making
people feel excited and happy and wanting to go the extra mile for you.
Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?
A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data
crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and
test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new
college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used
to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we
don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found
that they don’t predict anything.
What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college
education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams
where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never
gone to college.
Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?
A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at
Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in
school, because the skills you required in college are very different.
You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you
think about things differently.
Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial
environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained,
they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own
frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the
professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out,
but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an
obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there
is no obvious answer.
Q. Any crystal-ball thoughts about how Big Data will be used in the future?
A. When you start doing studies in these areas, Big
Data — when applied to leadership — has tremendous potential to uncover
the 10 universal things we should all be doing. But there are also
things that are specifically true only about your organization, and the
people you have and the unique situation you’re in at that point in
time. I think this will be a constraint to how big the data can get
because it will always require an element of human insight.
In terms of leadership, success is very dependent on the context. What
works at Google or G.E. or Goldman Sachs is not going to be the right
answer for everyone. I don’t think you’ll ever replace human judgment
and human inspiration and creativity because, at the end of the day, you
need to be asking questions like, O.K., the system says this. Is this
really what we want to do? Is that the right thing?
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