The 7 Big Ideas:

• Importance of Life-Long Learning

• Autonomy Isn’t Letting People Go It Alone

• Give Employees Options to Choose To Establish Accountability

• Personalized Learning, Not Treating People Like Commodities

• People Who Want Feedback Usually Want Validation

• Importance Of Building Trust in Teams

• Why Cross-Training and Investing In People Is Important

My Highlights From the Book:

Importance of life-long learning:

Developing your employees’ skills at a rate equivalent to the rate of change is the key to a sustainable competitive strategy.

Another interesting point Nadella makes is that the employees who are the smartest now may not be the smartest in the long term, depending on their mindset, something that companies should take into account during the hiring process. During the interview process you can identify which people are lifelong learners with the growth mindset; for example, when you ask lifelong learners what they learned the previous year, they tend to respond straight away.

Autonomy isn’t letting people go it alone:

As Pink says, “Autonomy is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.”

Autonomy and flexibility only work if managers frequently connect with their employees to discuss tasks, set goals, set expectations, and provide feedback. If a remote-working situation isn’t working out, surely the manager should take accountability for the employee’s failure to deliver.

Give employees options to choose to establish accountability:

For example, in the office in Leiden, the team agrees to come into the physical office Tuesdays and Thursdays, but doing so is not mandatory. Why is it not mandatory? Because giving people an option provides them with a sense of autonomy, a sense of choice. It drives motivation, but also, interestingly, it instills a sense of accountability to their coworkers.

In Reid Hoffman’s book The Alliance, he describes a new employer-employee relationship emerging in the workplace. While people are certainly changing jobs more often than they used to, Hoffman believes that managers and employees need to be more upfront about what they expect from their working relationship regardless how long it lasts.

Personalized learning, not treating people like commodities:

Todd Rose, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education graduate program at Harvard, believes that companies and schools are hampered from implementing personalized learning because of outdated theories originating from the standardized models implemented during this industrial age.

He says, “Many of our existing assumptions about education are based on a highly constraining notion of ‘average-based’ approaches to understanding individual learners. Every day we are measured against a fictional ‘average person,’ judged according to how closely we resemble the average—or how far we exceed it.”

People who want feedback usually want validation:

While Google’s Casap believes that exchanging honest feedback is a key part of peer-to-peer learning, he acknowledges it’s not an easy concept to apply: There is an old saying “be careful when someone asks you for feedback, because what they are really looking for is validation.” So if you show me an article you are writing for a magazine and you ask me to review it for you, I’m usually going to give it back to you with some statements like “it was well written,” or “don’t take it personally,” or, “I just have a couple of edits.” I might not even dive deep because I don’t want to offend you or make you feel bad about what you wrote versus really giving you feedback and really giving you assessments.

Importance of building trust in teams:

The members of the most successful teams trusted each other enough to take risks and shared the same sense of confidence that they would not be mocked, embarrassed, or punished for expressing themselves in front of their peers. As one Google engineer told the researchers when speaking about his team leader, “[He] is direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.”

Why cross-training and investing in people is important:

If you think company strategies focused on building employee skills are just for CEOs of technology companies, think again. Drew Greenblatt is the CEO of manufacturing company Marlin Steel Wire Products and he’s known the power of having as many employees as possible cross-trained in as many skills as possible for years.

It’s given his company the flexibility required to respond to the constant changes at work and in the world. He’s evolved the company from one that makes wire baskets for bagel retailers to a fast-growing manufacturer of specialty precision metal fabrications used by auto companies like Toyota and multi-national defense contractors like BAE.

Greenblatt has made a huge investment in the skills of his front-line employees providing them with the tools, training, and incentives that help them earn a strong middle-class living. Instead of competing on price, driving down wages, and offering fewer benefits, Greenblatt values his people and invests in their skills, motivates them, and then compensates them based on the new skills they learn and the proficiency that they’ve achieved in those skills. What he’s gotten in return are loyal employees who are learning how to operate computer-controlled routers, presses, and robots that have taken over some of the automated tasks. Greenblatt is ahead of his time. While some are just starting to think about how humans and machines will co-exist in the workforce, he’s been doing it for years. His forward-thinking approach to investing in his people is not really new.