In 2016, Reed asked me to give a keynote address at the company’s quarterly leadership conference in Cuba. This was the first time I’d done work for Netflix, but the participants had all read my book, The Culture Map, and I wanted to present something fresh. I worked extensively to prepare a customized presentation full of new material. Normally when I speak to large audiences, it’s with tried-and-tested content. This time, when I walked out onstage I could hear my heart beating faster than normal. The first forty-five minutes went well. The audience of around four hundred Netflix managers from around the world was engaged, and each time I asked a question dozens of hands flew up.
I then invited the participants to form small groups for five minutes of discussion. As I came down from the stage and walked among the participants, hearing snippets of conversation, I noticed one woman speaking with particular animation in an American accent. When she saw me observing, she beckoned me over. “I was just saying to my colleagues,” she explained, “that the way you are facilitating the discussion from the stage is undermining your message about cultural diversity. When you ask for comments and call on the first person who raises a hand, you’re setting just the type of trap your book tells us to avoid—because only Americans raise their hands, so only Americans get the chance to speak.”
I was taken aback. It was the first time anyone had given me negative feedback smack in the middle of a presentation and in front of a group of other participants. I started to feel queasy—especially when I realized that, of course, she was right. I had two minutes to make an on-the-fly adjustment. When I resumed my talk, I suggested that we hear a comment from each country represented in the audience—first the Netherlands, then France, then Brazil, the US, Singapore, and Japan. It worked beautifully, and there’s no way I would have used this technique at that moment without that feedback.
This set the pattern for other interactions to follow. At moments when I was supposed to be interviewing Netflix employees, they would offer feedback to me about my own actions, sometimes before I’d even had a chance to ask a question.
For example, when I was interviewing Amsterdam-based Danielle Crook-Davies, she greeted me warmly, told me she loved my book and then before we even had a chance to sit down, said, “Can I offer you some feedback?” She continued to tell me that the reader on the audio version of my book was startlingly poor and was undermining my message with her tone of voice. “I hope you’ll find a way to get it re-recorded. The book has so much great content, but the voice spoils it all.” I was taken aback, but upon reflection, recognized she was right. I made the call that evening to get the book re-recorded.
Another time, while conducting interviews in São Paulo, a Brazilian manager began his interview with a friendly “I’d love to give you some feedback.” We’d only just said hello, but I tried to act like I felt this was normal. He proceeded to tell me that the preparation email I’d sent out to interviewees was so structured it came off as bossy. “You told us yourself in your book how we Brazilians often prefer to leave things more implicit and flexible. But you didn’t follow your own advice. Next time, you might send out an email with themes but not specific questions. You’ll have a better reaction.” I found myself gulping uncomfortably while this manager pulled out my email to show me where the problem sentences lay. Again, that feedback helped me. On following trips, before I sent a pre-interview preparation email out I ran it by my local contact, who often had useful ideas for how to get the local interviewees on board.
Given all the benefits of candid feedback, you might wonder why in most companies we give and receive so little of it. A quick look at human behavior explains why.
WE HATE CANDOR (BUT STILL WANT IT)
Few people enjoy receiving criticism. Receiving bad news about your work triggers feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and vulnerability. Your brain responds to negative feedback with the same fight-or-flight reactions of a physical threat, releasing hormones into the bloodstream, quickening reaction time, and heightening emotions.
If there is one thing we hate more than receiving criticism one-on-one, it is to receive that negative feedback in front of others. The woman who gave me feedback in the middle of my keynote address (and in front of her colleagues) helped me a lot. She had input that could benefit me and it couldn’t wait. But receiving feedback in front of the group sends off danger alarms in the human brain. The brain is a survival machine, and one of our most successful survival techniques is the desire to find safety in numbers. Our brain is constantly on the watch for signals of group rejection, which back in more primitive times would have led to isolation and potentially death. If someone calls out a mistake you are making in front of your tribe, the amygdala, the most primitive part of the brain, which is on constant watch for danger, sets off a warning: “This group is about to reject you.” Our natural animalistic impulse in the face of this is to flee.
At the same time, there’s a wealth of research showing that receiving positive feedback stimulates your brain to release oxytocin, the same feel-good hormone that makes a mother happy when she nurses her baby. It’s no wonder so many people prefer to dish out compliments rather than give honest, constructive feedback.
Yet research shows that most of us do instinctively understand the value of hearing the truth. In a 2014 study, the consulting firm Zenger Folkman collected data on feedback from almost one thousand people. They found that, despite the blissful benefits of praise, by a roughly three-to-one margin, people believe corrective feedback does more to improve their performance than positive feedback. The majority said they didn’t find positive feedback to have a significant impact on their success at all.
Here are a few more telling statistics from the same survey:
57 percent of respondents claim they would prefer to receive corrective feedback to positive feedback.
72 percent felt their performance would improve if they received more corrective feedback.
92 percent agreed with the comment, “Negative feedback, if delivered appropriately, improves performance.”
It’s stressful and unpleasant to hear what we are doing poorly, but after the initial stress, that feedback really helps. Most people intuitively understand that a simple feedback loop can help them get better at their jobs.
THE FEEDBACK LOOP: CULTIVATING A CULTURE OF CANDOR
In 2003, the people of Garden Grove, California, a small community south of L.A., were struggling with a problem. Accidents involving cars and pedestrians were alarmingly frequent on streets with elementary schools. Authorities put up speed limit signs in order to get drivers to slow down, and police doled out tickets to violators.
Accident rates barely budged.
City engineers tried another approach, putting up dynamic speed displays. In other words, “driver feedback.” Each included a speed limit sign, a radar sensor, and a readout announcing, “Your Speed.” Passing drivers got real-time data on their speed and a reminder of how fast they should be going.
Experts were doubtful that this would help. Everyone has a speedometer on their dashboard. Furthermore, law enforcement doctrine has long held that people obey rules only when they face clear consequences for breaking them—why would the displays influence driving behavior?
But they did. Studies showed that drivers slowed down 14 percent—at three schools, the average speed fell below the posted speed limit. Fourteen percent is a big improvement from something as simple and low-cost as feedback.
A feedback loop is one of the most effective tools for improving performance. We learn faster and accomplish more when we make giving and receiving feedback a continuous part of how we collaborate. Feedback helps us to avoid misunderstandings, creates a climate of co-accountability, and reduces the need for hierarchy and rules.
Yet encouraging candid feedback in a company is a lot more difficult than putting up traffic signs. To foster an atmosphere of candor requires g
etting your employees to abandon years of conditioning and firmly held beliefs such as, “Only give feedback when someone asks you for it” and “Praise in public, criticize in private.”
When considering whether to give feedback, people often feel torn between two competing issues: they don’t want to hurt the recipient’s feelings, yet they want to help that person succeed. The goal at Netflix is to help each other succeed, even if that means feelings occasionally get hurt. More important, we’ve found that in the right environment, with the right approach, we can give the feedback without hurting feelings.
If you would like to develop a culture of candor in your own organization or on your own team, you can take several steps. The first is not the most intuitive. You might think the first step for cultivating candor would be to begin with what’s easiest: having the boss give copious feedback to her staff. I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.
TELL THE EMPEROR WHEN HE HAS NO CLOTHES
Like many people, growing up I heard the famous tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” about a foolish man in power so convinced he was wearing the finest costume ever made that he paraded naked in front of his subjects. No one dared point out the obvious—except for a child with no understanding of hierarchy, power, or consequences.
The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to “come to work naked” or make another error that’s obvious to everyone but you. This is not just dysfunctional but dangerous. If an office assistant screws up a coffee order and no one tells him, it’s no big deal. If the chief financial officer screws up a financial statement, and no one dares to challenge it, it sends the company into crisis.
The first technique our managers use to get their employees to give them honest feedback is regularly putting feedback on the agenda of their one-on-one meetings with their staff. Don’t just ask for feedback but tell and show your employees it is expected. Put feedback as the first or last item on the agenda so that it’s set apart from your operational discussions. When the moment arrives, solicit and encourage the employee to give feedback to you (the boss) and then—if you like—you can reciprocate by giving feedback to them.
Your behavior while you’re getting the feedback is a critical factor. You must show the employee that it’s safe to give feedback by responding to all criticism with gratitude and, above all, by providing “belonging cues.” As Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code, describes them, such cues are gestures that indicate “your feedback makes you a more important member of this tribe” or “you were candid with me and that in no way puts your job or our relationship in danger; you belong here.” I speak with my leadership team frequently about displaying “belonging cues” in situations when an employee is providing feedback to the boss, because an employee who is courageous enough to give feedback openly is likely to worry, “Will my boss hold it against me?” or “Will this harm my career?”
A belonging cue might be a small gesture, like using an appreciative tone of voice, moving physically closer to the speaker, or looking positively into that person’s eyes. Or it might be larger, like thanking that person for their courage and speaking about that courage in front of the larger team. Coyle explains that the function of a belonging cue “is to answer the ancient ever-present question glowing in our brains: Are we safe here? What’s our future with these people? Are there dangers lurking?” The more you and others in your company respond to all candid moments with belonging cues, the more courageous people will be in their candor.
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Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, is a leader on Reed’s team who solicits feedback openly and displays belonging cues when he receives it.
Ted is responsible for every television show and movie available on Netflix. Ted has played a pivotal role in reshaping the entertainment industry and is frequently described as one of the most important people in Hollywood. Ted is not a typical media mogul. He didn’t finish college, and he acquired his film education working in Arizona video stores.
An article in the May 2019 Evening Standard described Ted like this:
If Netflix were to make a mini-series about Ted Sarandos, its multi-millionaire chief content officer, it would surely start with him as a kid in the sixties, sitting cross-legged in front of the blue flicker of a TV screen in a poor neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, oblivious to the chaos of four siblings playing around him. He spent hours like this, the TV schedule his only routine.
In his teens, he took a job in a video store and, during long, empty daytime hours, he began ploughing through the nine hundred films it stocked. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of film and TV—plus a pretty good instinct for what people liked (someone once called him a “human algorithm”). So much for too much TV rotting your brain.
In July 2014, Ted tapped Brian Wright, a senior vice president at Nickelodeon, to lead young adult content deals. (Brian’s first Netflix claim to fame is signing the deal for a show called Stranger Things just a few months into the job.) Brian tells this story about Ted receiving feedback publicly on Brian’s first day at Netflix:
In all my past jobs, it was all about who’s in and who’s out of favor. If you gave the boss feedback or disagreed with her in a meeting in front of others, that would be political death. You would find yourself in Siberia.
Monday morning, it’s my first day of this brand-new job, and I’m on hyperalert trying to find out what are the politics of the place. At eleven a.m. I attend my first meeting led by Ted (my boss’s boss, who is from my perspective a superstar), with about fifteen people at various levels in the company. Ted was talking about the release of The Blacklist season 2. A guy four levels below him hierarchically stopped him in the middle of his point: “Ted, I think you’ve missed something. You’re misunderstanding the licensing deal. That approach won’t work.” Ted stuck to his guns, but this guy didn’t back down. “It won’t work. You’re mixing up two separate reports, Ted. You’ve got it wrong. We need to meet with Sony directly.”
I could not believe that this low-level guy would confront Ted Sarandos himself in front of a group of people. From my past experience, this was equivalent to committing career suicide. I was literally scandalized. My face was completely flushed. I wanted to hide under my chair.
When the meeting ended, Ted got up and put his hand on this guy’s shoulder. “Great meeting. Thanks for your input today,” he said with a smile. I practically had to hold my jaw shut, I was so surprised.
Later I ran into Ted in the men’s washroom. He asked how my first day was going so I told him, “Wow Ted, I couldn’t believe the way that guy was going at you in the meeting.” Ted looked totally mystified. He said, “Brian, the day you find yourself sitting on your feedback because you’re worried you’ll be unpopular is the day you’ll need to leave Netflix. We hire you for your opinions. Every person in that room is responsible for telling me frankly what they think.”
Ted clearly demonstrated the two behavioral necessities to get employees to give the boss candid feedback. Don’t just ask for feedback but tell and show your employees it is expected (such as his instructions to Brian). Then when you receive the feedback, respond with belonging cues; in this case, the hand Ted put on that guy’s shoulder in the meeting.
Reed is another Netflix leader who frequently displays these two behaviors. And in return he receives more negative feedback than any other leader in the company. The proof is his 360-degree written assessment, which is open for everyone to contribute to, and where he consistently gets more feedback than any other employee does. Reed solicits feedback continually and religiously responds with belonging cu
es, sometimes even speaking publicly about how pleased he’s been to receive a piece of criticism. Here is a paragraph from a memo he shared with all Netflix employees in spring 2019:
360 is always a very stimulating time of year. I find the best comments for my growth are unfortunately the most painful. So, in the spirit of 360, thank you for bravely and honestly pointing out to me: “In meetings you can skip over topics or rush through them when you feel impatient or determine a particular topic on the agenda is no longer worth the time... On a similar note, watch out for letting your point-of-view overwhelm. You can short-change the debate by signaling alignment when it doesn’t exist.” So true, so sad, and so frustrating that I still do this. I will keep working on it. Hopefully, all of you got and gave very direct constructive feedback as well.
Rochelle King remembers clearly what it’s like to give the CEO of the company constructive feedback. It was 2010, and she had been working as creative product director at Netflix for about a year. She reported to a vice president, who worked for the chief product officer, who in turn worked for Reed, so she was three levels below him. Her story of upward-facing candor at Netflix is a typical one:
Reed was leading a meeting with about twenty-five directors, VPs, and some of the executive team. Patty McCord said something Reed didn’t agree with. Reed got visibly irritated with Patty and sarcastically dismissed her comment. When he spoke, there was this sort of collective, public flinch and an under-the-breath gasp. Maybe Reed was too frustrated to notice the audience reaction, but I felt it was not a great leadership moment for him.
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