I stumbled upon this gem today: our friends at Netflix bragging about their “Keeper Test”. Hmmm. You can see the discussion of it here:
A little history first. You may remember that Netflix’ culture deck went viral back in 2009 or so The gist of that long powerpoint tome was all about high performance, removing dead weight and that they were relentless in pursuit of such. Netflix was one of the first to start paying people to leave who were not bad employees, just not great. You can catch up on that powerpoint deck here:
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/culture-1798664/1798664
As with most other powerpoint decks throughout history, that one is filled with great intentions. Netflix has also had an impressive run, transforming themselves to a streaming service and disrupting network TV. Due respect offered.
Let me offer a few counterpoints, based on my humble career in a bricks and mortar profit machine.
Sorting out your talent is a good thing and even culling the herd occasionally can be healthy. As with all things, entropy creeps into any enterprise and must be routed out. The method, however, is something we should be thoughtful about. Per the article attached, the approach Netflix takes, with it’s ‘Keeper Test’ , is summarized as “…if a manager wouldn’t actively try to retain an employee or rehire them later, ‘we feel it’s more just for all parties involved to separate promptly.”
I learned over the years as an HR leader that multiple lenses are critical when evaluating talent. Giving one person, the manager, the sole evaluation criteria strikes me as having many undesirable unintended consequences. These can include managers who have biases, cover up incompetence, and cover up malfeasance with the keeper test, for starters. Years ago most large organizations moved to using various forms of validation of talent via cross functional feedback in open discussions when assessing talent. Foolproof? No. More likely to surface the aforementioned issues? Yes.
Who is the umpire in these situations? Is there one? These ‘survival of the fittest’ cultures usually have a CEO driving them; pushing back on the process can be career ending, even for the HR people running the program. I was aware of several ‘unfixable’ departments and factories in my career at Nestle, requiring multiple managers to rotate through them to get them straightened out. Usually inherited from acquisitions, they had macro problems like insufficient capital, poor initial design, or multiple incompetent players. If we exited each leader who failed to fix it all in one assignment, no smart leader would have ever been willing to go in next. But we factored the complexity in, usually through lots of arguing among multiple executives. Each leader would be rotated out – for a rest – while the next one came in. I am not sure a ‘Keepers Test’ would have allowed us to get these situations fixed, like they eventually were.
Next, I have learned to scrutinize ‘the latest thing’ coming out of Silicon Valley. Recently I dissected Meta’s announcement that they were offloading ‘poor performers’ as being low brow and disingenuous, as well as a kick in the backside to those leaving the company for any reason. See that here:
This ‘Keepers’ policy has some shades of the Meta approach, and I have to question why they’d want this in the media. I do believe it is intentional and part of their employment branding. Bragging about this policy seems like an updated Jack Welchian ‘rank and yank’ from years gone by.
If you want high performance, manage for it. The tactics are as old as time. Establish high standards, hold people accountable and all the while, make sure you have a strategy and business model that works. Bragging about how you manage talent? I believe that’s a mistake. Why tell your competitors what you are doing? Furthermore, your business will have an inevitable downturn regardless of who you promote. Then what do you tell your stakeholders? We promoted all the good ones but they still stink? Be discreet. Let your results speak for themselves; never talk smack about your people. Just don’t.
We who lived through the initial onslaught of the tech boom talent wars are now seeing the Silicon Valley whiz kid managers have their digital chickens come home to roost. Its amusing, but also instructive for all of us. They were not wrong on everything, but they did get some big things very wrong. We can pay attention and learn from them. Schadenfreude anyone?
