I also reflected on a situation I’d had in 1988, when I’d spent a year working for Schlumberger in Palo Alto. Schlumberger is a big French multinational, yet the corporate culture in the Silicon Valley office had clearly been imported from France. All the department leaders were French expats and, if you wanted to succeed, you needed to learn to navigate the decision-making systems and hierarchical patterns that originated from the headquarters in Paris. There were training programs for new employees on how to debate effectively and how to analyze situations using a principles-first approach—so typical of French culture.
Both Google and Schlumberger seemed to have had success keeping a uniform corporate culture around the world. So, with only a bit of trepidation, I felt we could do the same. Like Google, we would seek to hire for fit, selecting individuals in each country who were attracted to and comfortable with the corporate culture we had spent so long cultivating. And like Schlumberger, we would train our new employees in other countries to understand and work in the Netflix way.
At the same time, we would seek to be humble and flexible, tweaking our culture as we went and learning from each country we moved into.
In 2010, we began the internationalization process, first opening in neighboring Canada, and a year later in Latin America. Between 2012 and 2015, we made bigger moves into Europe and Asia Pacific. During this period, we opened our four regional offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, and São Paulo. Then, in 2016, we took a big international leap and made our platform available in a total of 130 new countries all in one day. The expansion was overwhelmingly successful and over the course of just three years we saw our non-US subscriber base skyrocket from forty to eighty-eight million.
During this same three years we doubled the number of Netflix employees overall, most of them still located in the United States, but of increasingly diverse backgrounds. We added inclusion as one of our cultural values, recognizing that our success would depend on how much our employees reflected the audiences we were trying to reach, and the ability of people to see their lives and passions reflected through the stories we told. In 2018, we added our first head of inclusion strategy, Vernā Myers, in order to help us identify and learn from our increasingly diverse employees.
As we grew our operations in other countries, and our employees became increasingly diverse, it didn’t take long to recognize that some parts of our corporate culture would work well around the world. To my great relief, the freedom our employees thrive on in the US showed early signs that it would, without question, be successful everywhere. Some cultures had a little more difficulty getting in the swing of making decisions without checking a rule book or asking for approval, but once they get the hang of it, they love the autonomy and lack of rules as much as Californians do. It’s not only Americans who love to be in control of their own lives and work. Nothing cultural about that.
Some of the other parts of our culture quickly proved less easy to export. One early example was the Keeper Test. We soon learned that, although we can follow our mantra “Adequate Performance Gets a Generous Severance” in every country, what is considered generous in the US is often seen as stingy—if not illegal—in some European countries. In the Netherlands, for example, the amount of severance required by law depends on how long the employee has been with the company. So we had to adapt. Now in the Netherlands, if firing someone who’s been with us for a while, Adequate Performance Gets an Even More Generous Severance. The Keeper Test and all the elements that go with it can work internationally but require adaptation to the local employment practices and laws.
Beyond these quickly apparent elements, given how fast we were expanding around the globe and how important our corporate culture is to our success, I wanted to do all we could to understand the cultures of the countries we were moving into, and to find the similarities and potential challenges between the local culture and Netflix culture. I believed just being aware of that would prompt important discussions and ultimately improve our effectiveness.
ENTER THE CULTURE MAP
At about that time, a manager in our HR department lent me Erin’s book, The Culture Map. The book outlines a system for comparing one national culture to another on a set of behavioral scales. It looks at issues like how much employees defer to the boss in different countries, how decisions are made in different parts of the world, how we build trust differently in different cultures, and most important for us at Netflix, how candid versus diplomatic people tend to be with critical feedback around the globe.
I did a bit of reading around the scales. The framework was based on an enormous amount of research and struck me as simultaneously robust and simple. I shared the book with our executive team and someone suggested that we look at the cultural “maps” for the various countries of our regional offices, compare them with one another, as per the chart above, and discuss what we felt the maps revealed.
The exercise was a revelation to many of us. The framework offered a convincing explanation for a number of things we had already encountered, such as why our experience with feedback in the Netherlands had been almost diametrically opposed to our experience in Japan (dimension 2 on the graph). We decided to get our executive team together to map out our corporate culture on the same scales. Once we’d done that, we could compare the corporate culture to the national cultures we were working in.
As I mentioned, before the Quarterly Business Review meeting, we run our “Estaff” meeting for all of our vice presidents and above. In the November 2015 Estaff, we divided the sixty participants into ten groups of six. We led a two-hour session where we worked at round tables to map out our corporate culture on The Culture Map scales.
Each group mapped the corporate culture a little differently, but some clear patterns emerged, as you’ll see from the three examples below.
Group 1:
Group 2:
Group 3:
We then collected and studied the maps from the ten groups and aggregated them into a single Netflix corporate culture map, which looked like this:
Next, using Erin’s Country Mapping tool we compared our Netflix culture map to that of each of the countries where our regional hubs were located.
As we studied the maps, we realized that some of the issues we were having in our regional offices were due to cultural differences. For example, in comparison to Netflix culture, both the Netherlands and Japan fall to the consensual side of the decision-making scale (dimension 4) . That explained why many employees in our Amsterdam and Tokyo offices had been struggling with the Netflix Informed Captain model, where there is always one individual responsible for a decision (see chapter 6). As we looked at dimension 4, which measures how much a culture defers to authority, we saw Netflix falling to the right of the Netherlands (we learned that the Netherlands is one of the more egalitarian cultures in the world) and to the left of Singapore (more hierarchical). That helped us understand why our Dutch employees had no problem overruling their bosses’ suggestions, while our Singaporean employees required more encouragement to make a decision if the boss didn’t agree.
We were also struck by the trust dimension (dimension 5) where the Netflix culture was so clearly more task-oriented than almost every local culture we were moving into. The graph below zooms in on that specific dimension, so you can see the problem. We’ve added the US position for interest.
At Netflix, our emphasis had always been on watching the clock. The vast majority of meetings are thirty minutes long and we generally believe that most topics, even important ones, can be settled in a half-hour time frame. We try to be friendly and helpful, but until this culture mapping exercise, we avoided spending much time on nonwork discussions. Our goal was efficiency and speed, not on spending time chatting over a cup of coffee. But as we increasingly hired employees around the world, we found that our obsession with investing every minute in the task was hurting us in myriad ways. Here is one pertinent example
recounted by one of our very first employees in Brazil. Leonardo Sampaio, business development director for Latin America, joined Netflix in October 2015:
After dozens of phone and video interviews, I came to Silicon Valley for a full day of face-to-face interviews. The recruiter set me up in a conference room and between nine and noon I had six thirty-minute interviews with all sorts of interesting people, who would later become my colleagues. My agenda included just a half-hour lunch break.
In Brazil, lunch is a time to build friendships with your colleagues. It is a period to set the work aside each day and get to know one another beyond the tasks we have to complete. The trust we build during this time is critical to collaboration. It’s also these relationships that, for a Brazilian, make coming to work enjoyable. I was surprised that lunch was scheduled for only thirty minutes and I wondered who would be coming to share this time with me.
A woman I didn’t know came into the conference room where I was sitting. I stood up to greet her. Perhaps this was my lunch partner. She said in a friendly way, “Sarah asked me to bring you some lunch, I hope you like it.” There was a nice meal in a bag including a couple of salads, a sandwich, and some fruit. She asked me if I needed anything else to feel comfortable. When I said no, she left, and I sat all alone eating my lunch. I understand now that to Americans, eating lunch during the work day is just a task to complete. But to a Brazilian, to be left alone eating lunch was shocking. I thought, “Isn’t the guy who will be my boss at the very least going to come in and chat with me—ask how I’m feeling and ask about my life back in Brazil? I guess this is what Netflix means when they say, ‘We are a team, not a family.’”
Of course, I wasn’t alone for long because thirty minutes passes fast, and my next interviewer arrived.
When I heard this story, I was uncomfortable. “We are a team, not a family” is about insisting on high performance; it’s not about investing every minute in the work, avoiding getting to know one another deeply, or not caring about the people you work with. Most Americans sitting for a full day of interviews would welcome thirty minutes alone over lunch to review their notes, but I understand now that to our Brazilian interviewees, leaving them alone over a meal just feels like bad manners. Now when our Brazilian colleagues come to visit, we remember the importance of investing more time in getting to know them at a personal level and we also know to ask our Brazilian colleagues to help us to adapt our own relationship-building approach when negotiating with providers in Brazil.
Having the Culture Map in front of us helped us to be more prepared and more effective, not just in this situation, but at many other important moments. Much of the awareness we developed from the culture mapping exercise led to critical discussions resulting in not-so-difficult solutions.
But not all of the elements highlighted on the culture maps were easy to address. The dimension linked to candor, what is referred to as the Evaluating scale on The Culture Map, has led to ongoing challenges big and small. It built our awareness of the differences, but what to do about those differences was anything but obvious.
IDEAS ABOUT CANDOR DIFFER GREATLY AROUND THE WORLD
As anyone who has worked internationally will tell you, feedback that’s effective in one country doesn’t necessarily work in another. For instance, the direct corrective feedback given by a German boss might seem unnecessarily harsh in the US, while an American’s tendency to give copious positive feedback might come off as excessive and insincere in Germany.
That’s because employees in different parts of the world are conditioned to give feedback in dramatically different ways. The Thai manager learns never to criticize a colleague openly or in front of others, while the Israeli manager learns always to be honest and give the message straight. Colombians are trained to soften negative messages with positive words, while the French are trained to criticize passionately and provide positive feedback sparingly. Positions of the Netflix corporate culture and the local cultures where their primary offices are located looks something like this:
When it comes to delivering criticism, the Netherlands is one of the more direct cultures in the world. Japan is highly indirect. Singapore is one of the most direct of the East Asian countries, but still to the indirect side of a world scale. The US average falls a little left of center. Brazil (with strong regional differences) is just a bit more direct than Singapore. The Netflix positions come from the culture-mapping exercise Reed led in 2015.
One of the reasons for the country placements on this scale has to do with the language people use when they provide criticism. More direct cultures tend to use what linguists call upgraders, words preceding or following negative feedback that make it feel stronger, such as “absolutely,” “totally,” or “strongly”: “This is absolutely inappropriate” or “This is totally unprofessional.” In contrast, more indirect cultures use more downgraders, when giving negative feedback. These are words that soften the criticism, such as “kind of,” “sort of,” “a little,” “a bit,” “maybe,” and “slightly”. Another type of downgrader is a deliberate understatement, such as, “We are not quite there yet,” when you really mean, “We are nowhere near our goal.”
The Japanese, as the most indirect of the cultures where Netflix has an office, tend to use plenty of downgraders when giving negative feedback. But this isn’t the only technique they use to make the criticism feel softer. Often feedback is passed implicitly and barely spoken at all. When Netflix opened in Japan in 2015, it didn’t take long to see that the explicit, frequent, and often upward feedback expected by Netflix management was neither natural nor comfortable for the newly-hired local employees. Vice president of business and legal affairs Josephine Choy (an American) remembers one experience:
I was one of the early employees in Tokyo and, as the then-General Counsel for Japan, my first duty was to hire a team of legal professionals. I sought Japanese people who were bilingual (Japanese/English) and seemed to embody—or at least be attracted to—the Netflix culture.
The hiring was successful, but challenges popped up early. One of the first was during those difficult moments when discussing a problem or a mistake, Josephine’s staff appeared to discuss the situation openly, while simultaneously finessing the most important pieces of information between the lines. Josephine explains:
In English we usually state the subject followed by a verb and an object. We rarely drop the subject, or the sentence doesn’t make sense. In Japanese, however, the syntax is flexible. The subject, verb, and object are all optional. It is possible to have a sentence in Japanese with only a noun. Often the sentence might start with the main topic, followed by some content, and the verb at the end. Sometimes the speaker assumes everyone knows what the subject is, so he drops it. And this aspect of Japanese language lends itself nicely to a conflict-avoidant culture. At these moments, you have to consider what is being said in context in order to know who did what.
For example, on Josephine’s team, when someone made a mistake or a deadline was missed, they would use Japanese-style linguistic techniques to avoid pointing fingers even while speaking English.
In a meeting, when discussing something that had gone wrong, my team would often use the passive voice. They might say, “The assets didn’t get created and therefore the commercial couldn’t air,” or “Approval wasn’t given so there was surprise and the bill didn’t get paid.” In this way they avoided embarrassing someone in the room or placing explicit blame, while having a completely open discussion amongst themselves.
It also meant that I—as the only non-Japanese—frequently would have to stop them in order to figure out what was going on. “Wait, who didn’t create the assets? We didn’t, or the agency didn’t?” Sometimes a passive construction seemed to allude to something I had failed to do but no one dared mention. “Wait, was I supposed to give the approval? Was it my fault and how can I help?”
This tendency
to speak and read between the lines is most common when giving corrective feedback, expressing disagreement, or communicating negative impressions. Conveying an unpleasant message indirectly allows the feedback giver to preserve a harmonious relationship with the feedback receiver. In Japanese culture, explicit constructive feedback is rarely voiced—and certainly not to someone further up the hierarchy. Josephine remembers the difficulties that arose the first time she solicited feedback from one of her Japanese employees:
One of my first hires in Tokyo was a director-level attorney named Miho. Once we got through our initial onboarding, I set up a weekly one-on-one meeting. For the first meeting I sent out an agenda and the last item was feedback. The one-on-one went very well until we got to that last item. I said, “As you know Netflix has a culture of feedback and candor. I would like to begin by asking for your feedback. How has the onboarding process been and are there any changes I can make in my approach to be a more effective manager to you?”
Having used this same method with dozens of employees in the US, Josephine didn’t expect what happened next:
Miho looked at me and tears started running down her face. Not out of fear or anger. It was just like, “Oh my goodness, my boss is asking me to give her feedback. This is happening!” She said, “Oh. . . . I’m sorry. I’m crying. I really want to do this. I just don’t know how. We don’t give feedback to the boss like this in Japan.”
I decided to start the process gently. “I’ll go first this time. My feedback to you is that when I send out meeting agendas in the future, you can add anything you like to the list of topics to discuss.” She dried her eyes and said, “Okay, that is helpful feedback. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you with my feedback at the next meeting.”
No Rules Rules Page 25