Elizabeth Stone: preference

Transcript context

…Maybe a last question around just the culture. We talked about candor a bit. I'm just curious if there's an example that comes to mind of an example of candor that you recently saw or had to be the candid person that might be interesting to share where it's like, "Oh wow, that's what you mean when you say a culture of candor." There's a couple things that come to mind. I am generally a transparent leader, meaning I share information freely and openly. It's part of the culture to context, not control, which means part of my job is to make sure that people have the context they need to do their jobs well. And in practice, that means I take notes in leadership meetings and I share those notes with the whole organization. And that is sometimes it includes candor around reflections on things that aren't going well or problems we need to solve. Sometimes it's just letting people know, "Here's what leadership's talking about so that they have a sense of what's top of mind." But it's a version of transparency that I feel strongly about, doesn't exist a lot of other places. I think it's a version of candor too in being able to share... I can't always share every detail of everything that we're talking about, but I do try to share things that probably push the boundary a little bit in the team, feeling like they understand what's happening across the company and what I'm thinking about. And then there's a second example that comes to mind, which is, until two years ago, individual contributors didn't have levels at Netflix. So all engineers were just senior engineers, all data scientists were senior data scientists, and we did not have a leveling system. We introduced IC levels two years ago almost exactly. And it was a big, big, big shift because it was seen as something that was sort of sacred of it. A lot of people came to Netflix because we didn't have it. We didn't have process around promotions. This is probably part of why we never had performance reviews, because promotions really weren't at play. And it gave people a sense of freedom of not having to worry about that type of structure. But when you get to a scale of an organization, we needed some type of scaffolding to say, "We want to talk about how we compose teams. When do we need the person who has 30 years of experience? When do we want to have a new grad?" Because that's what the work requires. We didn't have a language for it. So I introduced Levels a couple of years ago and we had quite a change rollercoaster is the only way I can describe how it went. That's a good phrase.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.