4A Feedback Guide

Secrets take up a lot of space in our brains. One study showed we spend twice as much time thinking about our secrets as we do actively concealing them.

According to a study by Michael Slepian, a professor of management at Columbia Business School, the average person keeps 13 secret...

While companies describe themselves as families. Netflix calls itself a high performance team.

Families stay together regardless of "performance". A team however: 

• Demands excellence, counting on the manager to make sure every position is filled by the best. 

Focus on Alignment not Control:

1. Align on a north star. Every team remember should know what the the vision and the objectives.
2. When someone does something dumb, don't blame them but reflect what context was unclearly set.

Receiving bad news about your work triggers feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and vulnerability. But studies showed that the employees are not that opposed by negative feedback: 

• 57% of respondents claim they would prefer to receive corrective feedback to positive feedback. 

The Netflix employees is required to "say exactly what they really thought, but with positive intent—not to attack or injure anyone, but to get feelings, opinions, and feedback out onto the table, where they could be dealt with." The management team observed that candor ...

Netflix's Culture has 3 main components:

1. Talent Density: Create a workforce of top performers that are paid top of the market.

2. Candor: Candid feedback is encouraged even if it might feel uncomfortable. Full organisational transpa...

Netflix is a well known for treating their employees like adults. They have a lot of autonomy (no approvals for decision making for example) but have to perform at the highest level and the organisation punishes bad behaviour. 

1. Freedom & responsibility...

Decision making at most organizations is structured like a pyramid: Depending on the stakes a decision is being made by different people in the hierarchy. In a production company, changing the lead actor for a movie, may require the CEO sign-off, although it is the director who has most the b...

IF A PERSON ON YOUR TEAM WERE TO QUIT TOMORROW, WOULD YOU TRY TO CHANGE THEIR MIND? OR WOULD YOU ACCEPT THEIR RESIGNATION, PERHAPS WITH A LITTLE RELIEF? If the latter, you should let them go and look for a star you would fight to keep.

The Keeper Test applies to everyone ...

Netflix's managers understood that merely adequate performers brings down the performance of everyone on the team. The rockstar principle guiding this says that "In all creative roles, the best is easily ten times better than average." So the goal of a Netflix leader is to create a team ...

As a company grows setting rules and policies can never work well. Real life is so much more nuanced than any policy could ever address. So Netflix focuses more on context, letting people make decisions based on the explicit context or by mimicking good behaviour: 

• Act in the best inte...

If you have an idea you’re passionate about, do the following: 

1. “Farm for dissent,” or “socialize” the idea: create a shared memo explaining the idea & invite colleagues for input
2. For a big idea, test it out: Nothing workd better than a small, ...