Peer Conflict
What is the manager’s responsibility?
I recently read No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, and Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD and author of the 2014 book The Culture Map. As someone who has a kind of visceral reaction to bureaucracy, I really appreciated the stories about things like their travel and entertainment policy. Netflix’s is just five words: “act in Netflix's best interest.”
The other interesting part of the book was the feedback culture at Netflix. Hastings and Meyer referred to this as the 4A feedback principles, which were Aim to Assist, Actionable, Appreciate, Accept or Discard. These are all pretty self explanatory, the feedback should be aimed at assisting the other person to improve, it should be actionable, the receiver should acknowledge and show appreciation for the feedback, and then they should accept it and take action or discard it. I do take objection to the last part of those principles…discarding feedback. I suppose there are times when you should discard someone’s feedback. For example, if you just put someone on a performance improvement plan and they take the opportunity to give you feedback that your standards are too high. That might be a case when you want to discard the feedback. However, in most professional environments where there isn’t a clear reason for someone to have a strong bias against you, my philosophy is whether you agree with the feedback or not, you should own it. Either the feedback is accurate or it’s not accurate but you’re giving people that perception. Either way, you own the responsibility to fix it. If someone says that I’m not good at collaborating but I think I’m great at collaborating, I need to stop and think why do they have that perception. Maybe all of my collaboration happened away from this person and I need to demonstrate it more around them.
The other aspect of the feedback culture that I take umbrage with is what appears to be a reluctance of Hastings and other top managers to get involved in issues between peers. In a 2020 a16z Podcast: Designing a Culture of Reinvention, Hastings says:
Another thing we say is don’t say something about a colleague that you haven’t or won’t say to them. If you are working at Netflix at any level and you come to me and say, “You know, Ted Sarandos, my co-CEO, he’s got this, this, and that problem.” Then I say, “Well, that’s interesting. What did he say when you told him that?” And then, they will look at me all frozen. “Well, I can’t tell them that.” And I’m like, “Yes, you can.” And that’s the first line.
When people are talking about other colleagues, which is normal and fine, just keep pressing them with, “Oh, and what did they say when you asked them about that?” That stimulates directness.
In the book, Hastings reiterates that point about “just keep pressing them.” I’m all for asking someone to give a peer direct feedback as a first step. In fact, often managers can suggest alternative approaches such as “have you tried phrasing it this way…” But, at some point it becomes that manager’s responsibility to step in and help fix things between colleagues. In the past, for issues between colleagues that were more personality-based, I’ve had external coaches mediate. For issues that were more technical disagreements, we’ve used red-hat/green-hat decision meetings. There are a number of tools that managers can use to help these situations and I think it is their responsibility to do so. Not stepping in at some point and just reiterating “what did they say when you asked them” is abdicating a major part of a manager's responsibilities.
I don’t have first hand knowledge of how this actually happens at Netflix. If you do, feel free to clarify this for me. The book and the podcast both seem to imply that Hastings and other managers are very reluctant to step in between colleagues. If that’s truly the case, I think it tends to leave many issues unresolved and could lead to animosity between teammates.