Communications - Be a damn good router. Chapter 5 of "How Google Works"

Google does not limit information based on seniority, it believes in sharing information on all levels. A quarterly briefing of the board was initiated by Eric Schmidt involving all areas of Google and containing a lot of proprietary information. This gets shared with all employees in a presentation after the board briefing. Everything is shared except if it is prohibited by law – which is not the same as the red marker of death lawyers use for anything containing a risk. As the material is not only share with the board but with the entire company, people work hard to make the material great.

So far leaking has not been a problem – “We trust our employees with all sorts of vital information and they honor that trust”.

People post their personal strategic goals in a document called OKR – Objectives and Key Results.  This is not a description of role or title, but what a person cares about and is working on. The top level shares and reviews their own performance against the OKRs and discusses the ambitious goals they did not achieve. Employees are expected to create their own OKRs in light of this with the company’s best interest in mind.

Google’s leadership style is question based: “The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them” John Seely Brown Xerox. Rather than managing, Eric Schmidt would regularly ask questions of the executives and expect them to be on top of the details. People are also expected to understand the big picture – not just the details.

It is important to get bad news out in the open. Google does not punish the miner that brings the dead canary up into the light. Googlers are expected to ask tough questions and a voting system ensures the toughest questions climb to the top of the list and gets answered. When bad news is delivered it is important that it is not sugar coated and that you don’t have all of the answers yet. "If everything seems under control, you are just not going fast enough" Mario Andretti.

Google’s transparency approach: Climb Confess and Comply. This is an analogy for Pilot errors. The first thing a pilot need to do is to climb to get out of danger. Then tell the tower about the mistake and lastly comply with the towers advice on how to do better.

Instead of staff meetings that reinforces the functional boxing of people Google encourages people to present in a more holistic and interesting way – like trip reports or what I learned in my vacation. These kinds of presentations often are more relevant to the business issues at hand than the functional update.

Communication should reinforce, be effective, be fun, be inspirational, authentic, directed at the right people use the right media and finally be true.

In 1:1 meetings it is important that both the leader and the employee bring their top 5 issues to discuss. Hopefully there is an overlap - if not there is a bigger issue at hand. 4 main topics should be discussed: Performance, Relationships Leadership and innovation (Best practices).

Communication with partners has to be handled diplomatic. Many of Google’s partnerships are also competitive in other areas and needs a diplomatic approach. Differences in objectives are fine and should be acknowledged. The communication should be pragmatic rather than ideological and the relationship should be based on the partner’s actions.