Google is an awesome company that many entrepreneurs want to model their own businesses on. But would you believe the company was once highly resistant to and disdainful of management?
The company has an engineering driven culture, one of analytics and reasoning, and data evidence. So they used a data-driven approach to HR to convince their ranks that management mattered.
David Garvin, professor at Harvard Business School explains their strategy in three steps.
Step 1: Unfreeze
Google tackled the company status quo that management didn’t matter by rigorously analysing and comparing highly rated versus poorly rated managers to evaluate differences in team satisfaction, performance and individual turnover. Through double-blind interviews they proved to engineers that good managers make a big difference.
Step 2: Organisational practices
Google then changed their feedback surveys to mirror traits discovered in their research, developed training, and worked with leading thinking managers to convince and demonstrate these things mattered.
Step 3: Re-freezing
This is the process of institutionalising changes. Google took best practices and turned them into award systems and performance reviews. They got to the point where people became much more promotable based on their enhanced traits.