Google’s HR boss just stepped down — here’s some of the best insight he’s given into being a superstar employee at the tech giant
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Laszlo Bock.
After 10 years of running human resources at Google, Laszlo Bock is stepping down.
As Business Insider’s Jillian D’Onfro reports, Bock will stay on as an advisor to CEO Sundar Pichai.
Over the course of his career at Google, Bock was a fount of wisdom on hiring, getting hired, and succeeding as both a manager and an employee — not just at Google, but at any company.
One of the most interesting insights he ever shared was that Google encourages employees to fall short of some of their goals.
In other words, superstar Googlers deliberately set goals that they know will be ridiculously hard to achieve. Although they try their best to reach those goals, they know that only making it, say, two-thirds of the way is okay.
To understand how this process works, it helps to know about Google’s internal grading system for employees, called OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results.
Here’s how it works: Each Googler sets a goal and three key outcomes that result from achieving that goal. At the end of the quarter, they get a grade between 0 and 1 on each key result.
The ultimate aim isn’t to score a perfect 1, but to land somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7.
The idea is that, if you score a 1, your objective was too easily achievable. If you score between 0.6 and 0.7, then you were probably thinking big.
In March 2016, Bock explained the rationale behind the company’s scoring system in a talk with Kris Duggan, CEO of Betterworks:
In order to set these ambitious goals and have them be credible, you also have to realize they’re not all going to be successful. We look for that 60% to 70% success rate across everything we do.
What’s nice about that too is you don’t actually need a sandbag [where an employee sets a goal they know is easily achievable], because people know like, “I’m going to set a bunch of hard goals, I’m gonna miss a bunch of them,” and it’s okay. It’s not okay to be 60% achieving on everything forever, but if I have a bad quarter, or bad few months, or bad year, or if I’m off on a few areas, totally fine.
Bock also said that Googlers’ performance on their OKRs isn’t tied directly to their compensation or eligibility for promotions. That’s because their goals should be what Larry Page and Sundar Pichai refer to as “moonshot” goals, in which they “really swing for the fences.” Presumably, it wouldn’t be fair to penalize employees for pushing themselves.
These moonshot goals are similar to what management theorists call stretch goals, which go beyond what seems possible.
Even outside of Google, setting (and trying to achieve) stretch goals is a crucial part of employee performance. Recent research by the leadership development consultancy Zenger/Folkman found that the most meaningful behavior of top employees — according to their managers, peers, and reports — is setting stretch goals.
For employees, the takeaway here is that it’s wise to set at least one objective that you know will be near-impossible to achieve. Then, of course, you need to work as hard as you can to get there. It could impress your manager more than setting reasonable goals and hitting them, no problem.
Meanwhile, managers can develop their employees by suggesting goals outside those employees’ comfort zones, and showing some understanding if they don’t make it all the way there. Ultimately, you’ll probably wind up with better — if not perfect — results because you encouraged greater effort.
Bottom line? Whether you’re working at Google or elsewhere, stretch goals are one path to make sure you never stop improving.
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