Learning Abroad
Management Made to Measure at Google It’s no surprise that Google, the data-mining superpower, has come up with a list of effective management behaviors based on what it calls “people analytics.” By analyzing words and phrases in performance reviews, feedback surveys, and nominations for top-manager awards, a team from Google’s people operations came up with eight management behaviors ranked by importance and effectiveness within Google. The eight behaviors are not surprising in themselves (be a good coach ranked first). But where this list of behaviors breaks from the norm at many companies is that the behaviors are ranked using internal data to determine which ones work best in the Google culture to improve managers’ performance. Laszlo Bock, vice president of people operations at Google and a leader of Project Oxygen as the effort is known, noted a surprising lesson that emerged when the management behaviors were ranked by their value to employees. Technical expertise, which abounds in Google’s engineer-driven culture, came in last. Project Oxygen found that human interaction skills were much
New measures emerging The quest for better metrics has led i4cp to Conduct research with a number of large companies. “The first stop for organizations on the analytics journey? when they really want to know their impact on the business? is quality of hire,” says a report from i4cp titled The Metrics of High Performance: Quality of Hire. Their research has also identified three other metrics that contribute to performance; - Quality of movement: When an employee is shifted within the organization, what is the success rate? - Quality of separation: Who is leaving the organization? Is the organization losing key talent? Is the termination rate a problem? - Time to full productivity: How long does it take to master a new role and become productive within the organization? Whatever direction metrics take in the future, says Joyce, “they should reflect the outcome of highimpact learning design on the business. We owe our companies that much.” 42
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more important than technical expertise in the behavior of the managers of successful teams. Giving clear, regular feedback and helping employees with their careers outranked technical ability when it came to good team management. Armed with the list of behaviors, Google began training and coaching managers to use them. Before-andafter 360 surveys of managers, touching on the eight behaviors, showed how the training was influencing behavior. “We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” said Bock in a recent New York Times interview. The intent of Project Oxygen was not to develop an algorithm for successful management to sell to the outside world. To try this at home, you would need substantial amounts of data and analytic expertise. The significance of Project Oxygen for the larger training world is that it demonstrates that it is possible to take a data-driven approach to the art of managerial behavior change.
Pat Galagan is editor-at-large for T+D; pgalagan@astd.org. Copyright American Society for Training and Development May 2011 Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
Bibliogaphy Bibliography for: “Measure for Measure” Galagan, Pat “Measure for Measure”. Training & Development. FindArticles.com. 27 Sep, 2011. Copyright American Society for Training and Development May 2011 Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved