That will never work
Found a really interesting podcast episode the other day. Marc Randolph was talking about the beginning of Netflix - surely a story many have heard before. There was one train of thought, stuck with me for a long time, so I felt is worth writing down.
(thanks to https://sonix.ai for the transcript)
"Culture in many cases stems from how the founders behave and then they pass that on to their employees. At the beginning, Netflix's culture was not that much different from any startup. You have enough things you can keep a hundred people busy and so you can't be telling people: here's what you should do, and if you want to do this problem do this and then check into that. I don't have time for that. I'll see you in three weeks, and here's what I expect you to have done. And I trust that you're going to actually figure it out. You're going to bump into things you didn't anticipate you're going to have problems, you're gonna have delays. You'll figure it out. And in three weeks you all assemble and you look around the room and everyone's got their shit in order and you go, that's awesome.
That works great when you have seven people. But then when you get to 70, what happens is someone shows up late at the assembly point and you go - oh this isn't good. So you say - everybody, from now on I want to check in: have status reports once a week, so I can find things out in advance. And then, one person a couple of weeks later overspends and you go - oh, this isn't good. From now on, any expense over 500 dollars needs to be pre-approved, to make sure we don't overspend. And so pretty soon, this group of people who you had entrusted, you'd given them this responsibility to meet you at a certain point, but the freedom to solve the problems is all of a sudden gone and you're treating them all like a bunch of seven year olds.
And you realize two things. One is when you make people to do the status reports and expense reports, they stop making independent decisions. You slow everything down. Getting to a place used to take three weeks, now it takes six weeks, and your people don't feel having flexibility to try something unconventional to get there. But the other thing you realize is people hate it. They won't say things like: "you're trusting me with this large budget and this major responsibility, but you don't trust me whether I can make a decision about what to buy or not to buy", or "you don't trust me as to what kind of hotel I can stay or whether I have the judgment to fly business class or coach class I'm going to Japan".
Soon you recognize that not only does the company move so much faster and so much better when everyone has the freedom to make decisions but the responsibility to make good ones, but also people love working there."