The Times Magazine 13n my first few years as CEO at Pure
Software [the first company Hastings
founded], I managed the technology
well. But I was still pretty miserable
at the people part of leadership. I was
conflict-avoidant. People would become
upset if I addressed them directly
with a problem, so I would try to
work around issues when they arose.
I trace this personality trait back to my
childhood. When I was a kid, my parents
were supportive, but we didn’t talk about
emotions in our house. I didn’t want to
upset anyone, so I avoided any difficult
topics. I didn’t have many role models
for constructive candour, and it took me
a long time to get comfortable with it.
Without much thought, I carried this
attitude over into my work. At Pure
Software, for example, we had a very
thoughtful senior leader called Aki, who
was, I felt, taking too long developing a
product. I got frustrated and upset. But
instead of talking with Aki, I went outside
the company and struck a deal with another
set of engineers to get the project going.
When Aki learnt what I’d done, he was
furious. He came to me and said, “You’re
upset with me, but you go around my back
instead of just telling me how you feel?”
Aki was dead right – the way I’d handled
the problem was terrible. But I didn’t know
how to talk openly about my fears. The
same problem affected my personal life. By
the time Pure went public in 1995, my wife
and I had been married for four years and
we had one young daughter. It was the
pinnacle of my professional life, but I didn’t
know how to be a good spouse. The next
year when Pure acquired another company
3,000 miles away, it got harder. I spent
half of each week away, but when my wife
expressed her frustration, I would defend
myself, saying that everything I did was for
the good of the family. When friends would
ask her, “Aren’t you excited about Reed’s
success?” she wanted to cry. She was distant
from me, and I was resentful of her.
The problem turned around when we
started going to a marriage counsellor. He
got each of us to talk about our resentments.
I began to see our relationship through my
wife’s eyes. She didn’t care about money. She’d
met me, in 1986, at a party for returned
Peace Corps volunteers and had fallen in
love with the guy who’d just spent two years
teaching in Swaziland. Now she found herself
hitched to a guy obsessed by business success.
What was there for her to be excited about?
Giving and receiving transparent feedbackhelped us so much. I saw I’d been lying to her.
While I was saying things like, “Family is the
most important thing to me,” I’d been missing
dinners at home and working all hours of the
night. I see now that my words were worse
than platitudes. They had been lies. We learnt
what we could do to be better partners, and
our marriage came back to life. (We’ve been
married 29 years and have two grown kids!)
Afterwards, I tried to take this same
commitment to being honest back to the office.
I began encouraging everyone to say exactly
what they really thought, but with positive
intent – not to attack or injure anyone, but to
get feelings, opinions and feedback out onto
the table, where they could be dealt with.In 1989, after the Peace Corps but before Pure
Software, I was a 29-year-old software engineer
at a struggling start-up called Coherent
Thought. One Friday, I arrived at my cubicle
and, through the glass wall of the conference
room in front of my desk, I saw the senior
management standing huddled next to the
window with the door closed. What startled
me was how still they were. On a recent trip,
I had watched a gecko that was about to be
devoured by a large white egret. He froze in
terror with one leg midair. That was how these
managers looked. Their lips were moving
frantically but their bodies were completely
still. Why didn’t they sit down? That image
made me uncomfortable and I started to worry.
The next morning, I arrived at work early
and the managers were already back in the
conference room. That day they sat in chairs
but every time someone opened the door to
get coffee, I could hear the fear escaping from
the room. Was the company in trouble? What
were they talking about?
To this day, I still don’t know. Maybe I
would have freaked out if I had been told. But
back then, I resented bitterly that they didn’t
trust me enough to tell me what was going on,
despite the fact that I was working hard andcommitted to the company’s success. They
had some big secret that they were keeping
from the entire workforce.Just about all managers like the idea of
transparency. But if you’re serious about
creating a high sharing environment, the
first thing to do is to look at the symbols
around your office that may accidentally
be suggesting that secrets are being kept.
I once went to visit a fellow CEO at another
Silicon Valley company. This guy talks a
lot about the importance of organisational
transparency, and there have been articles
in the news about the bold steps he’s taking
to increase openness in the workplace.
When I arrived, I took the elevator to the
top floor of the corporate headquarters. The
receptionist led me down a long corridor.
The CEO’s office was in the corner. His
door was open (as he talks about having an
“open door policy”), but sitting outside was
a secretary, who looked like she was guarding
him. I’m sure this guy had a good reason for
having a quiet corner office with a door that
he locks at night and a guard who makes
sure no one slips in unnoticed. But that office
screams, “We are keeping secrets in here!”
That’s why I don’t have my own office
at Netflix or even a cubicle with drawers
that close. During the day, I might grab a
conference room for discussions, but my
assistant knows to book most of my meetings
in other people’s work spaces. I always try
to go to the work spot of the person I’m
seeing, instead of making them come to me.
One of my preferences is to hold walking
meetings, where I often come across other
employees meeting out in the open.
It’s not just about offices. Any locked
area is symbolic of hidden things, and
signifies we don’t trust one another. On
an early trip to our Singapore offices, I saw
that our employees had been given lockers
in which they could lock their things every
evening. I insisted we get rid of the locks.
But these kinds of signals are not enough
on their own. It’s up to the leader to live
the message of transparency by sharing as
much as possible with everybody. Big things,
small things, whether good or bad – if your
first instinct is to put most information out
there, others will do the same. At Netflix, we
call this “sunshining”, and we make an effort
to do a lot of it. nExtracted from No Rules Rules: Netflix
and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed
Hastings and Erin Meyer, published by
Virgin Books on Tuesday (£20)‘MY WIFE FOUND HERSELF HITCHED TO A GUY OBSESSED WITH BUSINESS SUCCESS’
EXTRACT
I
Reed Hastings with his wife, Patty Quillin, in 2014