I have served as a technical executive in several listed companies. I often encounter giant baby employees in my work. Their external performance is that they cannot manage themselves well, lack self-discipline, and lack the minimum ability to resist setbacks and The ability to resist pressure requires the care of leaders and the patience of colleagues. As a manager, you must never let the giant baby in the team exist, and you must always keep the team in the best condition.
What kind of standards should we demand of ourselves, so that we can become useful talents for the company and grow rapidly in the workplace? This article uses the very famous "Netflix Culture Handbook" in Silicon Valley as an entry point to explore the culture and code of conduct of top engineers in Silicon Valley. I believe it will be helpful for your growth.
Netflix (Netflix) is a legendary company. It is also known as the "Four Musketeers of US stocks" along with Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Compared with the other three companies, everyone knows less about Netflix. The most impressive thing may be its "House of Cards" and its purchase of the overseas distribution rights of "White Night". In fact, as early as 2009, Netflix became a role model for Silicon Valley companies to emulate. A PPT of "Netflix Culture Collection" was circulated in Silicon Valley, with more than 15 million views and downloads.
This magical document was called "the most important document in Silicon Valley" by former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and it is not one of them. It was written by Patty McCord, who was Netflix's chief talent officer at the time, worked at Netflix for 14 years, and participated in the formation of Netflix's founding executive team.
Her various practices are not only subversive to the outside world, but even a little crazy, but every operation is in line with Netflix's corporate culture, creating amazing effects. For example, she pushed Netflix to eliminate the vacation system, reimbursement system and travel system, and even established a headhunting agency within the company. She later published the "Netflix Culture Handbook", sharing with readers the essence of Netflix culture and how to create each company's own "Netflix culture".
The following are the 8 principles of Netflix culture, everyone should have a basic understanding first:
1) We only recruit adults. Netflix does not recruit giant babies, adults can manage themselves well, not only can find problems but also solve them.
2) Let everyone understand the business of the company. Try to inform the employee of all the information in the environment, and then let him judge how to act is the most reasonable, let the employee drive himself.
3) Only by being absolutely honest can we get truly efficient feedback. One of Netflix's cultural pillars is being open and honest.
4) Only facts can defend opinions. At Netflix, employees are allowed to have their own opinions and defend their opinions, but opinions should always be based on facts.
5) Start building the teams you will need in the future now. To face the future, think about what kind of team members you need, not what kind of people you lack right now, so you can find what kind of people.
6) The relationship between employees and positions is not a match but a high degree of match. The responsibility for recruiting talent does not lie with HR, but with the hiring manager.
7) Pay employees for the value they bring. Remuneration is determined according to the real value that employees bring to the company. At the same time, it is necessary to afford the money and try to ensure that everyone is at the top of the salary level in the labor market.
8) Say goodbye nicely when you leave. Performance reviews should be not just annual, but quarterly + annual.
According to the principles of Netflix culture, combined with the domestic workplace environment, we have summarized 6 codes of conduct for "adults" in the workplace:
Rule 1: Don’t be a giant baby
In a conversation with Hastings, the founder of Netflix, Patty McCord talked about the norms of "adults" in the workplace: "How do you know this is a great thing?" "I look forward to it every day." Go to work and solve problems with these people."
What Hastings expressed is exactly what Netflix people hope to get from their work: to join a team they trust and admire, and everyone can focus on accomplishing a great thing together.
The adults here are not only mature in age, but also mature in professionalism. Every adult aspires to work with high performers. In the Netflix company, everyone understands that "many people are powerful" is an illusion. Because if you look at the entire Silicon Valley, you can see the power of a small but sophisticated team. Netflix people believe that the simplest possible workflow and strong corporate culture can make the company invincible, which is far more important than the speed of development.
In order not to allow rules and regulations to restrict the work of adults, Netflix even canceled the vacation system, reimbursement system and travel system, and anyone can freely decide the time of vacation. They also pay employees the highest salaries in the industry, treat employees like adults, and they find that employees' creativity is activated to the greatest extent.
Adults in the workplace first need to have two ways of thinking:
First, the π-type growth mindset. Horizontal breadth and vertical depth refer to having relatively extensive general knowledge and cultivation, and at the same time having deep understanding and unique insights in professional vertical fields. The π-type growth mindset can make people think more, and it can gradually enable people to have the overall control thinking of deployment.
Second, the habit of thinking about lifelong growth. In fact, the definition of "adult" mentioned in Netflix's culture manual can also be understood as: In the workplace, one must have the habit of thinking for lifelong growth. The scariest thing about "boiling frogs in warm water" is that you don't know when they are cooked.
Rule 2: Maintain moderate anxiety
It's really not easy for people in the contemporary workplace. Post-95s have already started to maintain their health. If they don't enter a management position at the age of 35, they are considered to have reached the end of their career. In fact, excessive anxiety is really unnecessary, and endocrine disorders will harm others and ourselves. Only by maintaining moderate anxiety and increasing the sense of self-crisis can we reversely promote ourselves to improve.
How to improve it? Maintain the workplace mentality of "riding a donkey to find a horse"! This is not to instigate resignation, but to find out personal differences through this mentality, and make targeted improvements based on the differences.
For example, if your future career plan is to be a director within 3 years, first go to major recruitment websites to search for the job requirements and job responsibilities of the position, and then sort out the skills according to the recruitment requirements, and analyze your qualifications. and non-compliant aspects, and finally formulate an improvement plan (decomposition of goals according to time nodes).
Maintain moderate anxiety, steadily sublimate yourself, be a friend of time, maybe one day you will look back and find: Huh? I have become stronger!
Criterion Three: Delivering Beyond Expectations
The resources of an enterprise are limited. The main consideration for who is promoted and raised is the output and growth of employees. Therefore, in the workplace, you must perform beyond expectations in order to stand out among many colleagues and become the best. There is an English sentence "Under promise, Over deliver!", which expresses that you should not make promises easily, and once you make promises, you will exceed expectations.
Enterprises are all result-oriented, but the process is a necessary condition to support the results. Sometimes the leader does not understand your work, and the support or coordination is not enough. At this time, we need to manage upwards.
Upward management is an art, which I understand as three aspects:
1. Resonate: The direct superiors are the ones who know the nature of their work best, let them have empathy, and strive for the greatest communication and support in the work process.
2. Community of interests: The most direct community of interests is the KPI between superiors and subordinates, consider issues from the perspective of the other party, and communicate with data and results as much as possible.
3. The importance of the post: This is why the results should be displayed, and the importance and necessity of the post can be highlighted only when there are results.
Principle 4: Persist in learning and grow upward
"Working adults" know how to invest in themselves. Now is an era of selling anxiety, with various courses and videos flying all over the sky, you must not blindly study for "horizontal breadth", but choose courses that are really useful to you. This "useful" refers to what is helpful to the current job or to your own growth.
Learn more from historical experience, other people's thinking, and classic theoretical frameworks, and then make judgments based on your own thinking and cognition to form your own views on the world. Whether it is right or wrong, it belongs to your independent thinking.
The purpose of self-investment is to "go to a higher place", and if necessary, you can also take the master's and doctoral exams. The executives of many Internet companies are almost all "prestige schools", "returnees", and "masters and doctorates", which also represents the employment standards of contemporary enterprises.
Principle Five: Pursue Excellence
The pursuit of excellence means that we must do our best in whatever we do. Higher standards lead to better choices. For a mature person, his standards should come from his heart, not the evaluation of others, let alone be influenced by the environment.
According to the Internet, the daily schedule of Mr. Lu Qi, former vice chairman of Baidu and executive vice president of Microsoft:
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Get up at 3 o'clock, check emails, and reply to emails;
Run 5 kilometers at 4 o'clock;
From 5 to 6 o'clock, go to work in the office;
Before 7 o'clock, all mails will be processed;
Before 8 o'clock, make a work plan for the day;
At 9:00, have a morning meeting with foreigners who came late;
Get off work at 22 o'clock and study for an hour;
Go to bed at 23:00.
I only sleep 4 hours a day for more than 20 years. Referring to the self-growth of engineers, Lu Qi emphasized that Engineering Excellence, that is, the excellence and ability of engineering technology, we must do the best in everything we do, and we must be the strongest in the industry. He explained that Engineering Excellence is a never-ending, individual, team, pursuit of capabilities and innovation of tool platforms, which together can bring us long-term, core competitiveness.
Principle 6: Adhere to long-termism
In the book "Treat Time as a Friend", the author mentioned that he participated in a computer class when he was 10 years old. With more computer knowledge than ordinary people, he has completed the massive work of writing "batch scripts" in the book in a short period of time.
And this book later became a bestseller. Since its publication in 2003, at least 40,000 copies have been sold every year, and the income has exceeded 1 million yuan. Li Xiaolai believes that without these computer skills, even if he spends more time, it will be difficult for him to complete works of the same quality. These skills are due to his learning without utilitarianism when he was a child. Among the two friends who were in the same period as him, one did not sign up, and the other gave up on the way to school because they thought learning computers was "useless".
Luo Zhenyu, the founder of "Luo Ji Thinking", said: "Anyone, no matter how strong or weak you are, you can become a friend of time through the long-termism behavior pattern." Long-termists are the way for us ordinary people to reach the sky.
The above 6 codes of conduct can help you grow into a working adult. Always remember that the boss invites you to help the company solve problems rather than create problems. Everyone has a price tag on his head, which corresponds to your contribution. If you are not worthy, there will be disasters.
The above content is excerpted from the best-selling book "The Way of Technical People's Cultivation", the author Huang Zhekeng, who once served as the technical director of Yihaodian, the vice president of technology of Yiyao. Internet large-scale system research and development, large-scale technical team governance, blockchain innovation, etc.
The above content is excerpted from the best-selling book "The Way of Technical Personnel Practice", the author Huang Zhekeng, who served as the vice president of technology of Yiyao.com, CTO of Haier Agricultural E-commerce, CTO of Zhongtong Commercial, technical director of Yihaodian, etc.; published the best-selling book " "The Top of Technology Management"; the founder of the technology media "Technology Leadership", with 300,000 followers on the whole network; good at digital transformation of enterprises, growth of technical personnel, new technology application and innovation, etc.
