High-performing knowledge workers often question whether managers actually contribute much, especially in a technical environment. Until recently, that was the case at Google, a company filled with self-starters who viewed management as more destructive than beneficial and as a distraction from “real work.” But when Google’s people analytics team examined the value of managers, applying the same rigorous research methods the company uses in its operations, it proved the skeptics wrong.
Mining data from employee surveys, performance reviews, and double-blind interviews, the team verified that managers indeed had a positive impact. It also pinpointed exactly how, identifying the eight key behaviors of great Google managers.
In this article, Harvard Business School professor Garvin describes how Google has incorporated the detailed findings from the research into highly specific, concrete guidelines; classes; and feedback reports that help managers hone their essential skills. Because these tools were built from the ground up, using the staff’s own input, they’ve been embraced by Google employees. Managers say that they’ve found their training to be invaluable, and managers’ ratings from direct reports have steadily risen across the company.
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Since the early days of Google, people throughout the company have questioned the value of managers. That skepticism stems from a highly technocratic culture. As one software engineer, Eric Flatt, puts it, “We are a company built by engineers for engineers.” And most engineers, not just those at Google, want to spend their time designing and debugging, not communicating with bosses or supervising other workers’ progress. In their hearts they’ve long believed that management is more destructive than beneficial, a distraction from “real work” and tangible, goal-directed tasks.
A few years into the company’s life, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin actually wondered whether Google needed any managers at all. In 2002 they experimented with a completely flat organization, eliminating engineering managers in an effort to break down barriers to rapid idea development and to replicate the collegial environment they’d enjoyed in graduate school. That experiment lasted only a few months: They relented when too many people went directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other nitty-gritty issues. And as the company grew, the founders soon realized that managers contributed in many other, important ways—for instance, by communicating strategy, helping employees prioritize projects, facilitating collaboration, supporting career development, and ensuring that processes and systems aligned with company goals.
Google now has some layers but not as many as you might expect in an organization with more than 37,000 employees: just 5,000 managers, 1,000 directors, and 100 vice presidents. It’s not uncommon to find engineering managers with 30 direct reports. Flatt says that’s by design, to prevent micromanaging. “There is only so much you can meddle when you have 30 people on your team, so you have to focus on creating the best environment for engineers to make things happen,” he notes. Google gives its rank and file room to make decisions and innovate. Along with that freedom comes a greater respect for technical expertise, skillful problem solving, and good ideas than for titles and formal authority. Given the overall indifference to pecking order, anyone making a case for change at the company needs to provide compelling logic and rich supporting data. Seldom do employees accept top-down directives without question.
Google downplays hierarchy and emphasizes the power of the individual in its recruitment efforts, as well, to achieve the right cultural fit. Using a rigorous, data-driven hiring process, the company goes to great lengths to attract young, ambitious self-starters and original thinkers. It screens candidates’ résumés for markers that indicate potential to excel there—especially general cognitive ability. People who make that first cut are then carefully assessed for initiative, flexibility, collaborative spirit, evidence of being well-rounded, and other factors that make a candidate “Googley.”
So here’s the challenge Google faced: If your highly skilled, handpicked hires don’t value management, how can you run the place effectively? How do you turn doubters into believers, persuading them to spend time managing others? As it turns out, by applying the same analytical rigor and tools that you used to hire them in the first place—and that they set such store by in their own work. You use data to test your assumptions about management’s merits and then make your case.
To understand how Google set out to prove managers’ worth, let’s go back to 2006, when Page and Brin brought in Laszlo Bock to head up the human resources function—appropriately called people operations, or people ops. From the start, people ops managed performance reviews, which included annual 360-degree assessments. It also helped conduct and interpret the Googlegeist employee survey on career development goals, perks, benefits, and company culture. A year later, with that foundation in place, Bock hired Prasad Setty from Capital One to lead a people analytics group. He challenged Setty to approach HR with the same empirical discipline Google applied to its business operations.
Setty took him at his word, recruiting several PhDs with serious research chops. This new team was committed to leading organizational change. “I didn’t want our group to be simply a reporting house,” Setty recalls. “Organizations can get bogged down in all that data. Instead, I wanted us to be hypothesis-driven and help solve company problems and questions with data.”
People analytics then pulled together a small team to tackle issues relating to employee well-being and productivity. In early 2009 it presented its initial set of research questions to Setty. One question stood out, because it had come up again and again since the company’s founding: Do managers matter?
To find the answer, Google launched Project Oxygen, a multiyear research initiative. It has since grown into a comprehensive program that measures key management behaviors and cultivates them through communication and training. By November 2012, employees had widely adopted the program—and the company had shown statistically significant improvements in multiple areas of managerial effectiveness and performance.
Google is one of several companies that are applying analytics in new ways. Until recently, organizations used data-driven decision making mainly in product development, marketing, and pricing. But these days, Google, Procter & Gamble, Harrah’s, and others take that same approach in addressing human resources needs. (See “Competing on Talent Analytics,” by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Jeremy Shapiro, HBR October 2010.)
Unfortunately, scholars haven’t done enough to help these organizations understand and improve day-to-day management practice. Compared with leadership, managing remains understudied and undertaught—largely because it’s so difficult to describe, precisely and concretely, what managers actually do. We often say that they get things done through other people, yet we don’t usually spell out how in any detail. Project Oxygen, in contrast, was designed to offer granular, hands-on guidance. It didn’t just identify desirable management traits in the abstract; it pinpointed specific, measurable behaviors that brought those traits to life.
“Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side but love being closely managed on the career side.”
That’s why Google employees let go of their skepticism and got with the program. Project Oxygen mirrored their decision-making criteria, respected their need for rigorous analysis, and made it a priority to measure impact. Data-driven cultures, Google discovered, respond well to data-driven change.
Project Oxygen colead Neal Patel recalls, “We knew the team had to be careful. Google has high standards of proof, even for what, at other places, might be considered obvious truths. Simple correlations weren’t going to be enough. So we actually ended up trying to prove the opposite case—that managers don’t matter. Luckily, we failed.”
To begin, Patel and his team reviewed exit-interview data to see if employees cited management issues as a reason for leaving Google. Though they found some connections between turnover rates and low satisfaction with managers, those didn’t apply to the company more broadly, given the low turnover rates overall. Nor did the findings prove that managers caused attrition.
As a next step, Patel examined Googlegeist ratings and semiannual reviews, comparing managers on both satisfaction and performance. For both dimensions, he looked at the highest and lowest scorers (the top and bottom quartiles).
“We are not trying to change the nature of people who work at Google,” says Bock. “That would be presumptuous and dangerous. Instead, we are saying, ‘Here are a few things that will lead you to be perceived as a better manager.’ Our managers may not completely believe in the suggestions, but after they act on them and get better UFS and TMS scores, they may eventually internalize the behavior.”
Project Oxygen does have its limits. A commitment to managerial excellence can be hard to maintain over the long haul. One threat to sustainability is “evaluation overload.” The UFS and the TMS depend on employees’ goodwill. Googlers voluntarily respond on a semiannual basis, but they’re asked to complete many other surveys as well. What if they decide that they’re tired of filling out surveys? Will response rates bottom out? Sustainability also depends on the continued effectiveness of managers who excel at the eight behaviors, as well as those behaviors’ relevance to senior executive positions. A disproportionate number of recently promoted vice presidents had won the Great Manager Award, a reflection of how well they’d followed Oxygen’s guidelines. But what if other behaviors—those associated with leadership skills—matter more in senior positions?
Further, while survey scores gauge employees’ satisfaction and perceptions of the work environment, it’s unclear exactly what impact those intangibles have on such bottom-line measures as sales, productivity, and profitability. (Even for Google’s high-powered statisticians, those causal relationships are difficult to establish.) And if the eight behaviors do actually benefit organizational performance, they still might not give Google a lasting edge. Companies with similar competitive profiles—high-tech firms, for example, that are equally data-driven—can mimic Google’s approach, since the eight behaviors aren’t proprietary.
Because the eight behaviors are rooted in action, it’s difficult for managers to fake them.
Still, Project Oxygen has accomplished what it set out to do: It not only convinced its skeptical audience of Googlers that managers mattered but also identified, described, and institutionalized their most essential behaviors. Oxygen applied the concept of data-driven continuous improvement directly—and successfully—to the soft skills of management. Widespread adoption has had a significant impact on how employees perceive life at Google—particularly on how they rate the degree of collaboration, the transparency of performance evaluations, and their groups’ commitment to innovation and risk taking. At a company like Google, where the staff consists almost entirely of “A” players, managers have a complex, demanding role to play. They must go beyond overseeing the day-to-day work and support their employees’ personal needs, development, and career planning. That means providing smart, steady feedback to guide people to greater levels of achievement—but intervening judiciously and with a light touch, since high-performing knowledge workers place a premium on autonomy. It’s a delicate balancing act to keep employees happy and motivated through enthusiastic cheerleading while helping them grow through stretch assignments and carefully modulated feedback. When the process works well, it can yield extraordinary results.
That’s why Prasad Setty wants to keep building on Oxygen’s findings about effective management practice. “We will have to start thinking about what else drives people to go from good to great,” he says. His team has begun analyzing managers’ assessment scores by personality type, looking for patterns. “With Project Oxygen, we didn’t have these endogenous variables available to us,” he adds. “Now we can start to tease them out, using more of an ethnographic approach. It’s really about observations—staying with people and studying their interactions. We’re not going to have the capacity to follow tons of people, but what we’ll lose in terms of numbers, we’ll gain in a deeper understanding of what managers and their teams experience.”
That, in a nutshell, is the principle at the heart of Google’s approach: deploying disciplined data collection and rigorous analysis—the tools of science—to uncover deeper insights into the art and craft of management.
