How Netflix builds a culture of excellence | Elizabeth Stone (CTO)

1. Prioritize High Talent Density

Build a company culture starting with high talent density, as it’s a prerequisite for other positive cultural aspects like candor, learning, excellence, and freedom and responsibility. This focus ensures a foundation for people to thrive and derive fulfillment from their work.

2. Apply the Keeper Test

Regularly ask yourself the “keeper test” question for each team member: “Would I fight hard to keep this person if they told me they were leaving?” If the answer is no, initiate a candid conversation about their fit or role, ensuring the team maintains high talent density.

3. Hire for Additive Strength

When hiring, seek candidates who bring additive skills, new perspectives, and will push the team’s thinking, rather than just filling a box of existing skills. This strategy ensures continuous up-leveling of the team’s overall talent density.

4. Grant Freedom with Judgment

Empower highly talented individuals with freedom and responsibility, minimizing prescriptive processes and strict guardrails, but only if they possess strong judgment. This approach fosters innovation and allows for tackling highly impactful problems.

5. Commit to High Standards

Cultivate dedication to your work and team by holding yourself to a very high standard of excellence, less for personal ambition and more for delivering for the team. This means being responsive, following through on commitments, and being on time.

6. Master Technical Translation

Develop communication fluency to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences and vice-versa, fostering effective cross-functional partnerships. This skill is crucial for connecting different business areas and driving effectiveness.

7. Foster Collaborative Success

Actively build strong partnerships by caring about setting others up for success and being a desirable collaborator. This approach leads to mutual learning and better business outcomes.

8. Clearly Define Expectations

As a manager, clearly communicate expectations for high performance and excellence to your team members. Do not assume they are understood without explicit sharing.

9. Provide Specific Feedback

Deliver direct and specific feedback when work doesn’t meet the expected standard of excellence, detailing what is needed to reach the desired bar. This helps individuals understand areas for improvement.

10. Actively Support Improvement

After providing feedback, actively help team members fill the gap by jumping in and working alongside them to improve the quality of their work. This hands-on support up-levels their skills for future tasks.

11. Give Feedback Privately

Deliver constructive feedback in a private, safer space rather than publicly, allowing individuals to absorb it without feeling exposed or on a stage. This fosters trust and encourages open reception of feedback.

12. Embrace Continuous Feedback

Shift from formal performance reviews to a culture of ongoing, timely, and direct feedback as part of the daily operating rhythm. Utilize annual 360 feedback for broader themes and development, not as a rating input.

13. Practice Transparent Leadership

Act as a transparent leader by sharing information freely and openly, providing context to your team rather than attempting to control them. This includes sharing notes from leadership meetings to keep the organization informed and build trust.

14. Conduct Candid Change Retrospectives

After implementing significant organizational changes, conduct candid post-mortems or retrospectives to openly discuss what went well and what didn’t. This builds community and trust by acknowledging imperfections rather than pretending everything went perfectly.

15. Centralize Diverse Data Teams

Structure data and insights teams as a centralized, functionally diverse unit that serves nearly all business areas, rather than embedding them. This fosters functional expertise, better career paths, cross-pollination of ideas, and objective truth-telling.

16. Integrate Research Methodologies

Combine qualitative (attitudinal, user research) and quantitative (behavioral, data science, analytics) research expertise within a single team to tackle problems comprehensively. This integrated approach offers a “superpower” for deeper insights and problem-solving.

17. Prioritize Presence in 1-on-1s

Treat one-on-one conversations as sacred, dedicating your full presence and genuine curiosity to understanding the other person and their needs. This fosters authentic human connection and strengthens professional relationships.

18. Cultivate Professional Relationships

Actively invest in building positive relationships with colleagues and professional contacts, as these connections can become valuable friendships and community over time. The effort you put in often returns benefits later in your career and life.

19. Learn Through Observation

Actively observe and learn from the actions and styles of colleagues and leaders, using introspection to determine what to adopt or adapt for your own authentic style. This helps in continuous personal and professional growth.

20. Anticipate Unintended Consequences

When making decisions, especially in leadership or business strategy, actively consider potential incentives and their unintended consequences to better understand cause and effect. This proactive thinking helps avoid unforeseen negative repercussions.

21. Leverage Economics Perspective

Apply an economics background or perspective to simplify complex business problems, making them more tractable and adding a valuable viewpoint to challenges. This approach can be particularly useful in understanding incentives and unintended consequences.

22. Focus on Outcome, Not Just Polish

Prioritize achieving the desired outcome and thoughtful iteration over excessive polishing of documents or presentations, especially if the latter doesn’t serve the core objective. This prevents wasted time and potential burnout while maintaining a high standard.

23. Practice Morning Self-Reflection

Dedicate quiet time, such as early mornings, for daily self-reflection to check in on your feelings, anxieties, and excitements. This practice helps build self-awareness and grounding, contributing to better leadership and presence.

24. Adopt Morning “Puttering” Time

Allocate dedicated morning time for “puttering around” – engaging in low-stress activities like reading or checking emails without scheduled meetings. This allows for a relaxed start and personal reflection before the demands of the day.

25. Embrace Calming Morning Rituals

Incorporate calming, analog rituals into your morning routine, like a detailed coffee-making process, to create a protected time for quiet reflection and a grounded start to the day.

26. Appreciate Daily Small Joys

Be mindful of and enjoy the small positive things that happen every day, rather than getting solely caught up in the business or stress. This practice encourages a more grounded and appreciative perspective on life.

27. Build Mental Resilience Through Endurance

Engage in endurance sports or similar challenging activities to build mental resilience, learning to navigate highs and lows, sustain effort, and recover from challenges. These skills are universally applicable in both career and life.