People tend to fall back on hierarchical modes of working, notes Laszlo Bock, vice-president of people operations at Google, the California-based Internet search and advertising technologies corporation. “As you get bigger as an organisation, you have to work harder and harder, and more deliberately, to unpack the biological and cultural trappings that people normally bring with them,” he says. The company has a leadership training programme—the Advanced Leadership Lab—designed to create meaningful personal connections across its global operations.
The programme aims to have people “think like owners” rather than employees. Employees, Mr Bock explains, “assume other people will take care of things. They assume there’s some infrastructure
for them. They don’t look at every activity in the company and think fi rst, ‘I’m responsible for everything, whether it’s my job or not.’” As “owners”, participants are expected to bring their own leadership challenges to the training. “By actually reinventing the course content, they have an immediate practical application of it,” he says.
The programme assembles people across functions and geographies, each cohort a microcosm of the larger company. For many, this is their only experience working with people outside their function. The close relationships that result tend to last, even when participants return to their home offices.
Formal mentoring can feel contrived. “We find it’s more helpful to create an environment where you allow people to discover that even though they do completely different jobs (one’s in engineering, one’s in sales and one’s in finance), there is actually a lot they’re experiencing in common and they form their own networks,” says Mr Bock. “That also runs more efficiently from a company perspective because you don’t need hundreds of coaches. You have your leaders becoming coaches for one another, which also has the virtue of letting them develop a new skill for themselves.”
