Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

When I talked with my former VP of HR Jessica Neal about this, she said a great thing about what a company’s culture should be: “Culture is the strategy of how you work. And if people believe it is a strategy and that it is important, they will help you think about it deeply and try things.”

inculcating a core set of behaviors in people, then giving them the latitude to practice those behaviors—well, actually, demanding that they practice them—makes teams astonishingly energized and proactive.

The conventional thinking is that if you allow people to be anonymous, they will be more truthful. In my experience that’s not the case. Truthful people are truthful in everything they do. And if you don’t know who is giving you feedback, how can you put their comments into the context of the work they’re doing,

what people most want from work: to be able to come in and work with the right team of people— colleagues they trust and admire—and to focus like crazy on doing a great job together.

billion annually. Research also shows that word of bad customer experiences spreads to twice as many people as that of good experiences. This is a problem that must still by and large be solved by people. Despite attempts to offer customer service through computer bots or preprogrammed FAQs or messaging systems, face-to-face or voice-to-voice servi

“Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?”

That respect for one another’s intelligence and genuine desire to discover the bases of colleagues’ views drove intense mutual questioning and kept it mostly productive and civil, if often quite colorful. The team also modeled this vigorous questioning for employees in many forums, openly debating one another.

People can also be biased about which data they marshal. And we’ve all seen that people tend to privilege their own data over that of others.

We had been creating an annual road map and doing annual budgeting, but those processes took so much time, and the effort wasn’t worthwhile because we were wrong all the time. I mean, really, we were making it up. Whatever our projections were, we knew they would be wrong in six months, if not three. So we just stopped doing annual planning. All th