Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

You’ve got to constantly monitor the message and update it. This is a job that you should be doing forever.

what people most want from work: to be able to come in and work with the right team of people— colleagues they trust and admire—and to focus like crazy on doing a great job together.

many team leaders are not free to do away with policies and procedures. But every company and every manager is free to institute the practices we used to instill the core set of behaviors that made the Netflix culture so limber.

When leaders not only are open to being wrong but also readily admit it—as Reed did that day, and regularly did—and when they do so publicly, they send a powerful message to their teams: Please speak up!

“Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?”

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

If people ask in a true spirit of interest about the problems others are wrestling with, remarkable bridges of understanding can be built.

When I talked with my former VP of HR Jessica Neal about this, she said a great thing about what a company’s culture should be: “Culture is the strategy of how you work. And if people believe it is a strategy and that it is important, they will help you think about it deeply and try things.”

the most important job of management is to focus really intently on the building of great teams.

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.