🤸 Netflix culture queen, NBA lessons, & the quality of your relationships

Hey — it’s Cristina & Jenni.

Each week, we share leadership reflections, resources, and laughs to help you excel in your role (+ have fun along the way).

As two tech leaders, we’re here to “lead in public” by sharing what we’re learning in our day-to-day roles, encouraging others to do the same, and learning and growing as leaders together.

Enjoy!

What we’re reflecting on this week

I have a confession to make.

I spent most of my weekend binge-watching and consuming content from Patty McCord.

No, she’s not the next TikTok sensation or a comedian.

Patty is one of the most badass People leaders I’ve come across.

She spent 14 years as Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, where she helped create some of the most innovative talent management policies of our time. Some of her guiding principles include:

• Trust people, not policies

• Reward candor

• Throw away the standard playbook

The famous Netflix culture deck?

That was spearheaded by Patty, alongside CEO Reed and other Netflix executives. They wrote a PowerPoint deck about the organization's talent management strategies which went viral and has been viewed more than 10 million times.

But let's backtrack a second.

The reason a lot of what Patty says resonates with me is because of her way of rethinking the way we do things and challenging conventional norms.

For example, she argues that instead of creating policies to protect companies against the minority who might take advantage, we should give people responsibilities and freedom.

People have power: don't take it away.

• The goal should be to manage people in a way that allows them to exercise their full powers.

• This means creating an environment where they can challenge leadership and one another, and speak up about ideas and problems.

And this is coming from someone who helped build the culture that brought Netflix a $160 billion market cap.

Patty reinvented HR, and her approach to People Ops and Talent is still shaking the industry.

How did she do it?

Well, it took her over 10 years.

But luckily she’s highlighted the five key tenets that helped Netflix attract, retain, and manage exceptional employees. As managers, we believe these principles are important reminders that you always have the power and responsibility to rethink the way you work.

Here are the five key tenets:

1. Hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults. Hire employees who prioritize company interests and rely on logic over formal policies, whether the issue is communication, time off, or expenses. 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Their expense policy is an excellent example of this principle: "Act in Netflix's best interests."

2. Tell the truth about performance. Replace formal reviews with informal conversations. Netflix's Culture deck includes this blunt statement: "Adequate performance gets a generous severance package." They believe it's better to offer a generous severance package instead of placing someone on a Performance Improvement Plan.

3. Managers must build great teams. Great teams accomplish great work. So, managers should prioritize recruitment and assembling skillfull teams for long-term success and adaptability.

4. Leaders own the job of creating the company culture. Address the following issues:

   • Mismatches between values and behaviors

   • Employee understanding of business drivers

   • Potential subcultures needing different management

5. Good Talent managers should think like businesspeople and innovators first, and like HR people last. Based on her 30+ years of business experience, Patty’s never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. Instead of focusing on superficial perks like pizza Fridays and T-shirts, encourage understanding of high performance and company needs.

I enjoyed learning about how Patty built an honest, high-performance culture for one of the most influential brands of our time.

While many of the ideas seem like common sense, Patty rejected the constraints of outdated practices and went against traditional HR norms. This highlights the importance of questioning our actions and the "best practices" that we blindly adopt in order to meaningfully contribute to our company's and team's overall success.

→ Can you rethink the way you're leading using the 5 tenets as inspiration?

P.S. Check out the HBR article from Patty that inspired this post below.

What we’re learning this week

• 🎙️Sam Hinkie on the lessons from the NBA that shaped his career - Hinkie started his own venture capital firm, Eighty-Seven Capital, and shares unconventional approaches from finding and attracting the right people to building trust.

• ✍️ Former CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly, on the golden triangle: Strategy, purpose, and culture - This article is a great reminder that to increase our chances of success, we need all 3: a strong strategy, purpose, and culture. It highlights how culture is often the most neglected and the role of leaders in shaping behaviors, and the key levers to consider to shape an effective culture.

• ✍️ For those of you who want to dive deeper, check out Patty's article on how Netflix reinvented HR - it offers plenty of more tangible examples and anecdotes that bring the five tenets to life.

What we’re enjoying this week

This nugget is from the podcast episode we mentioned above.

Upon hearing it, we reflected on how a business's most powerful leverage is its people.

Taking it one step further, we should never underestimate the power of building and nurturing relationships with others. This applies not only to colleagues and employees, but also to customers, partners, and the importance of having a strong, diverse support network across all levels.

That’s it for this week — thanks for reading.

See you next Thursday! 🤸‍♀️