Liane Hornsey
Anna Gilligan: Welcome to MeetTheBoss.tv, I’m Anna Gilligan. In this programme I’m at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Californiato speak with Liane Hornsey a VP of People Operations about how she manages some of the brightest minds in the world.
Liane Hornsey: We really try to make this a place where people want to be. And I have to say, it doesn’t happen by accident-it does happen by design.
Anna Gilligan: So I have read that Google says they only hire people who they believe are innovative thinkers. Why is that so important to the company?
Liane Hornsey: Well I don’t think it’s quite true to say we only hire people who are innovative thinkers. We certainly only hire people who we consider to be incredible talent and part of that talent could be about innovative thinking.
Anna Gilligan: So could you tell me a little bit about the hiring process at Google? It’s like the Holy Grail of places to work. You hear so many legendary stories about how many interviews people had. What is the process?
Liane Hornsey: When I was hired 4 ½ years ago I had 14 interviews across 2 different continents and it really was quite grueling and it took several months.
Now a days we tend to try to limit our number of interviews between four, six maximum, possibly, possibly eight. But the reason that we have so many interviews is that we believe very strongly that we should hire through consensus.
So for example, if I was gonna hire you to work for me I couldn’t just make the decision that you seem good and that we could get on. We’d ask somebody who would work for you to interview you and a couple of your would-be peers.
So we believe very strongly in making 360 degree decisions around people that we hire. The reason that we do that is we believe that each and every hire we make is probably the most important people decision that we’re going to take.
We’re very proud of our culture here and we want to protect it and we want to make sure that we don’t dilute it. So we put a good deal of effort into making sure that everybody we hire would be accretive to the culture.
Anna Gilligan: So what is the culture that each employee has to fit into so well?
Liane Hornsey: We try very, very hard to not be hierarchical, to be reasonably democratic in our decision-making, to be very informal, but formal when it comes to how we do things in terms of our decisions. So we never make decisions on the fly. For example, we always use data, we’re always very rigorous in our thoughts, but we’re less rigorous and less formal in the way we dress, the way we eat, the way we act.
Anna Gilligan: Liane Hornsey joined Google in 2006 and heads up Human Resources for the sales arm of the company. Google has become such a phenomenon that its name has become a verb. Now this presents a new challenge for Liane who has to keep up with its growing staffing needs without becoming bureaucratic. I asked her how she does it and where a lot of companies go wrong when it comes to human resources.
Liane Hornsey: I think it’s very difficult. I think I’d be lying to you if I said oh, it’s easy. We can scale to 50,000 people and still be innovative and still be creative. No; you have to work at it. You definitely have to work at it.
We do lots of things to make sure that we don’t become bureaucratic by default. So one of the things is we look very, very carefully at the number of levels we have in the organization. We really try to keep that tight and light.
So every quarter or so we have what we call bureaucracy buster which is basically anybody can write into our senior guys and say look, this thing is driving me mad. It’s slowing down. I can sense bureaucracy. I can sense lots of form filling.
We do our very, very best to take those ideas and eradicate the bureaucracy. So we work hard at it and our senior guys put a lot of time into it.
Anna Gilligan: When you said that you try to limit the number of layers so it doesn’t become bureaucratic, what’s that? Is there a magic number where you say if we go beyond this we’re in trouble?
Liane Hornsey: We’ve toyed with having magic numbers and we’ve found that that really doesn’t work because some of our organizations, they’re big. They’re thousands of people and some of our organizations are hundreds of people.
So we’ve played with magic numbers and we’ve thrown them in the bin and we’ve decided that really we just need to take more of a common sense view to this.
But we’d be pretty uncomfortable if the number of layers got into double figures. That that would feel very uncomfortable for us.
Anna Gilligan: Often times there’s an issue in organizations. Someone’s a great individual contributor, but it’s a very different job to then manage the people that are doing that job you did so well. How do you spot those people who will become great leaders and managers and make sure that there’s a smooth transition?
Liane Hornsey: So I think I’ve gone on record saying that my biggest worry at Google, my biggest difficulty at Google is managing talent. My problem is I hire brilliant people. So 95-99 percent of my people are high talent. They really, really are. The people here are good. So we don’t use traditional methods. It would be wholly inappropriate when you have a talent pool such as Google has to have high potential programs, for example.
So what we tend to do and we do a lot of it, we encourage a great deal of rotation and mobility. So for example, in the sales organization we’ve had roughly about 1,000 people move jobs over this last 3 quarters. They either move jobs permanently or they move jobs to go and see for a period of time if they’d like to work in X, Y or Z area.
We also bring people together into project teams working on cross-functional, big company issues so that people can build skills and talents outside of their own function and their own area of expertise.
So we work very, very hard on giving very bright people additional skills, additional learning and additional knowledge. Of course we also have the normal promotion processes and all that stuff.
We also spend an awful lot of time preparing people for management. I’ve often said that I was a manager for about 15 years before I knew how to do it. It’s often when you get very, very good individual contributors who are used to doing it themselves who are highly motivated, it’s very hard for them to manage people ‘cause that’s a very big transition.
So we put lots of support in place. We have mentoring programs; all the stuff you would expect; a lot of leadership programs. We run what we call career gurus where we give advice to would-be managers. We have lower expectations of managers when they’re first in the job. We don’t suddenly drop them in and say right, we expect you to be able to do the same as one who’s been managing for ten years.
So we recognize very, very clearly that it’s quite a difficult transition and some people don’t want to make it. So for example, in engineering a lot of people stay as individual contributors and they’re perfectly happy with that and our pay scales and our promotion scales absolutely allow for that to happen.
Anna Gilligan: Now you said it took you 15 years to realize how to become a good manager.
Liane Hornsey: Me personally, yes.
Anna Gilligan: Was there kind of a light bulb moment?
Liane Hornsey: Yes.
Anna Gilligan: What did you learn that made that switch into good management?
Liane Hornsey: Yeah; there was a light bulb moment. I think it was very much about really believing rather than just saying that my success was linked to the success of my people. I’d always been an individual contributor who succeeded. So my whole working life was geared towards what I did.
I had a light bulb moment when I realized it wasn’t about me anymore and that my success was absolutely linked to the success of the team. That absolutely changed the way I managed. It literally turned it 180 degrees.
Anna Gilligan: I read that you said that you measure people with positives; not negatives. For example, you don’t keep track of sick days. Why is that so important at Google?
Liane Hornsey: I guess because we believe that people are grown-ups and adults and they’ll do the right thing and that we don’t have to be monitoring them and measuring them and watching their every move and in my experience that’s right.
So for example, if you just take my team, I never look at their holiday, I never look at their sick, I never look at what time they come in or what time they leave. I do look at their output. That’s what I’m interested in. How they get to that output. Why should I bother? They’re grown-ups.
Anna Gilligan: Do you believe in a work/life balance and if so, how is it encouraged here?
Liane Hornsey: Work/life balance is such an interesting subject. Yes, I do believe people need work/life balance. I really do. But I believe it’s different for every individual. So I actually think it would be paternalistic and wrong to tell people that they have to leave the office at 3, 4, 5 or whatever. Okay?
I think people are grown-ups and they have to make decisions for themselves around how they work, when they work. It’s a little bit like how I answered the question earlier. I don’t check on my people when they come to work, when they leave work.
So for example, if somebody who works for me wants to go to the dentist or wants to go to the doctor or wants to go pick up their kids or whatever, I don’t even notice it and nor would I expect them to ask.
So I absolutely feel that we concentrate on output; not on how many hours you’re at work. So work/life balance is a different thing to every individual, but yes, of course we care about it and we leave it to the individual to decide.
Anna Gilligan: So you keep mentioning this focus on output. So how frequent are the review processes and what’s the process for that?
Liane Hornsey: So everybody in the organization and I say everybody, but it never is everybody, right. The vast majority of the people in the organization do have quarterly goals. So they’ll sit down with their manager and maybe with their team and say right, this is what I think I’m gonna do this quarter. Does it sound right? And let’s work out the measures around that. Then every quarter that will be reviewed.
We review it quite formally. We take it very, very seriously. We are a performance related culture. So the manager will review how the individual’s done, sit down with the individual, they’ll have a long conversation and the managers will all get together as well to calibrate how they feel about the whole teams. So we take that process very, very seriously and it does impact compensation, et cetera, as you would expect.
Anna Gilligan: Now for several years Google has topped Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. What are the traits or the characteristics of Google that you think places it so high year after year?
Liane Hornsey: So over the last six weeks I’ve been talking to a lot of people who are new to the company and I’ve sat down with them and I’ve said, “What do you like? What don’t you like? What did you find that as you would expect? What did you find that was different?”
Universally in 100 percent of cases people have said to me we love the people. So I have to say and I know I’m utterly boring around this, it comes down to hiring. I think if you hire people who really want to work on shared goals and shared products and shared things who you feel will be accretive to the culture, it really, really impacts how people feel about the organization.
Of course we also do do a lot of things. So there’s all the stuff that people might consider the fluff, like the free food, like the soft areas, like the fact that we don’t check people’s working hours or sickness particularly. We really try to make this a place where people wanna be. I have to say it doesn’t happen by accident. It does happen by design.