Tom Burg, a twelve-year veteran of Silicon Alley, blogs for us about marketing, the digital economy, and how social media is transforming the way we all communicate.
Google’s in the news for developing a process to improve people management within the company. It looks a lot like the way the company perfects its search algorithms or makes design decisions: analyze the data and completely (some would say blindly) trust the results. Because the performance review system is entirely online, it’s also entirely searchable. The team heading up what’s known as “Project Oxygen” found correlations between the “phrases, words, praise, and complaints” used on in-house surveys, reviews, and nominations to arrive at eight traits that separate good managers from bad.
Those traits, by and large, read like they came from a Reader’s Digest management primer–having a clear vision for your team, helping with career development, and being productive and results-oriented.
All kidding aside, the end results have been pretty impressive. The focus ought not to be on those eight traits, which frankly any first-year business student could tick off pretty quickly. It’s that Google ranked those traits by importance, and took an objective, data-driven approach to the results. Surprisingly, Googlers rate technical expertise among their managers as the least important of the traits. I give credit to Google for acting on a management survey that assigned such a low ranking to its major core competency.
Having spent some time at Google after it acquired DoubleClick in 2008, I think the single biggest improvement the company can make is to identify and reward managers who excel at the soft touch. Ironic, then, that it took a hard-line, datacentric approach to get there, but hey–whatever works! Here’s hoping that other companies start utilizing the data to improve their leadership as well. Management is subjective enough as it is.
