Your people can handle the truth, straight and in person, and so can you.

If you stop any employee, at any level of the company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and,

There is no problem with people having strong opinions. On the contrary, it’s important that they do and that they argue for them vigorously. However, people’s opinions should always be fact based. Insisting that decision making be fact driven doesn’t detract from the importance of opinions. It just means people are expected to try really hard to

Employees should be told never to withhold questions or information from you or their direct superiors.

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.

We wanted all of our people to challenge us, and one another, vigorously. We wanted them to speak up about ideas and problems; to freely push back, in front of one another and in front of us.

data can be used as an accountability shield, deflecting responsibility for a judgment call. People are more comfortable making decisions based on hard data in part because they can fall back on that data if the decision turns out to be wrong.

One was to conduct an exercise we called “Start, Stop, Continue” in our team meetings. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they’re doing really well and should keep doing.

We hadn’t created it for broadcast. We created it as an internal company document, using it to communicate the culture to new hires and make sure we were perfectly clear about how we wanted them to operate.