Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[slow guitar music plays]
>>Fitz: Oh, hi. You're here.
>>Ben: Good afternoon, Mr. Fitz.
>>Fitz: Good afternoon.
>>Ben: It's time for another question to be answered here at Google Chicago.
>>Fitz: It is and my name is Brian Fitzpatrick. People call me Fitz.
>>Ben: My name is Ben Collins-Sussman and people call me Ben Collins-Sussman.
>>Fitz: And we're here at Google Chicago and we've got another question on the gPad for
today.
>>Ben: That's--
>>Fitz: And this question comes from thebalthasar in Luxembourg and says, "Do you feel you are
being well-managed by your superiors?" No. Next question.
[Ben laughs]
>>Ben: Stop, wait, wait, wait. You feel you're being well, wait, I'm trying to think, what's,
what's going on in that question, "Do you feel you're being well-managed by your superior?"
>>Fitz: I, the reason I said no--
>>Ben: What is management, though?
>>Fitz: is because I don't feel like I am managed by my superiors. I mean, I don't think
that, in the traditional--
>>Ben: That's not the same as, yes.
>>Fitz: sense of the word, right?
>>Ben: It's not the same as being ignored, but yeah, I think like you said. This, this
goes a lot into the talk that we're giving now, but traditional sense of management at
a traditional company is somebody who stands over you and barks orders and tells you what
to do.
>>Fitz: Right. They hold out the carrot or they hit you with a stick.
>>Ben: One or the other.
>>Fitz: The carrot and the stick thing.
>>Ben: Which is morally sort of a hold-over from [laughs] the Industrial Revolution, right?
You want people to work more efficiently so you hold out carrots and sticks and--
>>Fitz: On the assembly line where--
>>Ben: On the assembly line.
>>Fitz: stuffing meat into a can or something.
>>Ben: Right.
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: But, as we've been talking about, in various places, the, the thing we really wanna
do in management is involve management--
[chair squeaks]
into a way where, where it's, it's for a creative role, right? If you're, if you're managing
people doing creative things, like solving engineering problems, it's not about carrot
and sticks and barking orders. It's about helping them be productive. And so, we have
a question is, "Do you feel like your manager is helping you be productive? Is he--
>>Fitz: Yes.
>>Ben: removing obstacles, or she? Is your manager staying out of your way? Protecting
you from bureaucracy?" There's a bunch of things that a good manager should do and I
think--
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: my manager cer-, well, we have the same manager, or no? We do have the same manager.
>>Fitz: Hi, I'm Fitz.
>>Ben: Hi, I'm Ben.
[both laugh]
>>Fitz: We're back with a question. Oh, we already had the question.
>>Ben: What did we say? What was the question, again?
[both laugh]
>>Fitz: So the, the answer, to answer, the answer to the question really is that I think
it's the wrong question to ask for Google, in particular. The question is, the question
would probably be more like, "Are your managers helping get your job done? Are they serving
you well, right?"
>>Ben: Right.
>>Fitz: I mean, management really should, is a service-oriented role where your goal,
like you said, remove obstacles, make sure that your pe-, people that are reporting to
you are doing your, your, they're career is going in the right direction for them.
>>Ben: Right. So, you do want attention from your manager in terms of, "Are you productive?
Are you happy?"
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: "Are you on the career track you want?" But you don't want them in your face every
day. And that's certainly not their role at all.
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: This is a place where they really expect you to be self-driven and self-motivated so
that if, if you are the kind of person who expects to be given orders every single day
and you put on your blinders and do exactly what you're told--it's gonna be hard get along,
right?
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: If you, when you're expected, when you get here they treat you like an adult.
They say, "Here you are. Here are your responsibilities. See you later." Right? And either you get
your work done or you don't. And if you don't, there's, no one's gonna come and, and say,
stand over your desk every day and say, "Are you done yet? Are you--"
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: You don't get your work done, that's a problem.
>>Fitz: There's no time for it. Micromanagement doesn't scale, basically.
>>Ben: It doesn't scale.
>>Fitz: You have to hire people that know what needs to be done and can figure things
out on their own and are enough of a go-getter to go out and--
>>Ben: Right.
>>Fitz: and get the next thing that needs to be done.
>>Ben: So true.
>>Fitz: My first six months here, my manager literally did not say two words to me. He
said one and it was "Hi."
[Ben laughs]
And he shook my hand and that was the last time I saw him for six months.
>>Ben: Yeah.
>>Fitz: But, that's again--
>>Ben: An extreme.
>>Fitz: an extreme case, but
[Ben laughs]
I was, I sat on the team to work with you--
>>Ben: Yeah.
>>Fitz: and--
>>Ben: We were still productive and--
>>Fitz: we knew what we needed to do and we got it done. And we knew we had, we, I had
in there I needed to get something, but I, we each, we each had our own mentor to, to
ask for questions. We had other folks in our team to go to and so you sort of work, you
just work things out and you make things happen, I think.
>>Ben: I think, for that reason, it's, it can be a little bit scary, right? It's, it's,
it's a place that gives you tremendous trust, right? The default assumption when you work
here is you're a generalist, you can work on any problem and we trust you to be productive.
And, in that sense, there's no red tape, there's no thing getting in your way and it's fantastic
to have that kind of freedom and that kind of trust.
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: It feels really empowering. At the same time, it's also kind of intimidating
because if you, if you fail you have no one to blame but yourself.
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: And its ok, you just need to own up to your mistakes.
>>Fitz: It's like, it's like that thing my grandfather used to write on every, the top
of every letter he sent me when I was in college was, "Freedom equals responsibility." Right?
You're given a tremendous amount of freedom, but that means you have a lot of responsibility,
so when, if something goes wrong or its, you don't get any work done you can't say, "Well,
he didn't let me do anything." Or something like that.
>>Ben: Or, "The bureaucracy got in my way," or something. "My manager wouldn't let me
do," --
>>Fitz: That's an excuse and I mean there are, again, extreme cases where this might
happen somewhere, or--
>>Ben: It's not the norm.
>>Fitz: It's rarely the norm. So--
>>Ben: Yeah, I think the management culture here is pretty cool, actually. I really, it's
part of the overall culture of responsibility and trust.
>>Fitz: Well, I think if it wasn't like this neither one of us would've wanted to move
into engineering management here.
>>Ben: Right.
>>Fitz: Cause who wants to, who wants to sit all day and check, "Have you done your work
yet?" And, I mean, if I did that it would mean--
>>Ben: You would be somebody's mother.
[Ben laughs]
>>Fitz: I would go into daycare. Right, exactly.
[Fitz laughs]
So--
>>Ben: There is, there is not a lot of management at Google, either. It's a very thin management
layer, I think--
>>Fitz: Within engineering. I don't know about sales.
>>Ben: Engineering. I don't know about sales.
>>Fitz: No.
>>Ben: But in engineering, I mean, it is acknowledged that some management is needed, but it, there,
there, it's clear that there's a wariness not to create too much.
>>Fitz: Right.
>>Ben: Right. It's really, like we said earlier, it's, it's a very wide, flat, distributed
set-up engineering team. It's, there isn't a lot of command and control at all.
>>Fitz: Agreed.
>>Ben: Yup.
>>Fitz: All right.
>>Ben: Good.
>>Fitz: Thanks a lot.
>>Ben: Thank you. >>Fitz: Bye.