Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…In my personal experience, I have felt a lot more at ease by having these conversations than by not having them. So in many roles I've had, I haven't been sure how I was doing or things I could be doing better on, and I didn't quite know how to get that information. And that made me feel much more stressed or nervous or at risk than having it be part of the culture to have those conversations. So the thing that I think can be nerve wracking, and I feel it myself, is the high bar for excellence at Netflix and if we're doing this while you're surrounded by amazing people. And that can feed a sense of, "Am I doing well enough compared to how everyone else is doing? I know the bar's high." For the most part, that can drive people and in a good way, but in some ways it makes people nervous. And that's where I think it's helpful to know we expect to have these conversations so you can just kind of let your shoulders relax a little bit of, "Yes, the expectations are high, but my manager says I'm doing a great job, or my manager says I'm not doing a great job, but they gave me concrete things that I could do better." And so I think knowing is better than not. And so in that sense, it's the culture combined with the conversations around performance I hope take a little bit of that stress out of it. But I've certainly heard it a lot that without that conversation, people can be nervous. That's such a good point and such a good example that I feel like every company wants to have a high bar and have only high performers and keep the bar really high for every person they hire. I'm curious, I know this could be its own podcast and book, but just in terms of hiring people that are amazing and keeping this bar of excellence, is there anything you can point out that might be helpful to other companies hiring to help identify amazing people and make sure that bar stays high? One thing I know is you guys pay a top market for salary. I think that's one unique thing about Netflix, is we just pay people. So maybe that's an part of this answer, but just what advice do you have for people to keep a really high bar in their talent? Yeah, I mean on the compensation point, we pay what we call personal top of market, meaning we want to be highly competitive in the pay, but we don't want pay to be like the golden handcuffs of Netflix sets market rather than paying people a strongly competitive compensation. So I think that that's important for attracting and retaining talent and has been a big part of the culture, but almost more importantly, we hope we don't have to rely on that to want people to want to be at Netflix or for us to be able to assess whether people are going to thrive at Netflix. The way that I've thought about hiring with that context is we know we're going to offer you very highly competitive compensation, but are you going to come to Netflix and help us identify the right problems to solve or new ways to solve existing problems? And that's a different way of hiring than you might think about, especially at scale where you're saying, "Does this person have this skill, this skill, this skill? Check they're going to fit in this box and they're going to deliver this work that I need them to do." I'm being intentionally simplistic. I recognize a lot of people don't hire actually that way. But at Netflix we try really hard to say we're looking for the new perspective or the person who's actually going to make us stronger as a team. So thinking about additive skills, additive perspectives, people who are going to push our thinking on something. That tends to help us with thinking about talent density because you're constantly introducing people to the team who uplevel. So then the questions you have to ask in an interview might be different because yes, we're trying to assess do you have the baseline skills to be successful here, but we're also looking for the things that make people exceptional or even stronger than the team we've got. And then you think about making the magical teams comprised of all those amazing minds and what can you get out of that. And that feels like more that the talent density and practice.…

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