Amazon's Leadership Principles

Due to this being a super long talk, we have split episode 3 into two parts! Please enjoy part 1 on Amazon's Leadership Principles.

To see the Principles go to:

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles

Transcript

Deanna 0:00

Hi, this is Deanna, and this is a special episode about Amazon's leadership pricipals. I decided that since it was too long, and I was sick of editing it, this will be a two part episode! So please listent o an overview of Amazon's leadership principas this week, and a follow on episode where we do a deep dive into a couple of them next time! Hi, I'm Deanna.

Kara 0:24

And I'm Kara. And this is the Got PS? Podcast, where we talk about all things psychological safety. And this week, we are going to be talking about the Amazon leadership principles. Deanna, what do you know about the Amazon leadership principles? I don't know a lot, other than the fact that they rank people, with the bottom 10% always getting laid off, which I think is utter crap, because just 'cause you had a bad year doesn't mean you're a bad, employee. But that's it. All right. I have to say, I wasn't very aware of them until I came across them, a few months ago. I know that they're very popular. They have been in the Amazon culture for going on almost 30 years. As an outsider, someone who has never worked at Amazon, wasn't very aware of them until, I got a Business Insider article pushed at me from the, Google Bot. It was like, "Hey, I'm gonna be looking at this. Let me see what they got to say." I'm always interested in how other companies think about success, groom their people. Because how they define success really is an eye into kind of what psychological safety might be in there. If they have very stringent standards, it's probably a hard place to work, and if they have more, feel-good, friendly, emotionally sensitive standards, then it's probably more a place that I'd probably like to work. It's more supportive and collaborative. My understanding is, they are not particularly- psychologically safe. I would say that's very fair. There were other aspects of Amazon that we could get into later, but we talked about, over COVID time, I remember, about, like their return to office policy, a lot of restructuring that they did, late '22, early '23 timeframe, I'm thinking. We could dive into some of those things, in later podcasts, for sure. So but you're right, they do not have the best track record when it comes to, being a supportive, uplifting place to work. Shall we talk about the way they treat their warehouse workers?

Deanna 2:26

Why not? Why not? Because I think an organization, how they treat people across all areas is really reflective of how they are. So yep, shoot, Deanna. And that's important, because too many times we take a look and see how a company treats its white collar people, and rate them that way, and we ignore what they do With the people who are just earning an hourly wage. It seems like we're perfectly okay if they're treated like crap, so long as the college-trained knowledge workers get treated well. And this is something that really ought to change. The way Amazon treats its warehouse workers is highly questionable. The number of injuries that people end up getting on the workplace, the lack of any real break time, the punishing schedule, it's just insane. It is absolutely insane, and I completely agree with you. That's why Undercover Boss ever became to be as a show, right? Is because, the boss got so elevated into the white collar echelon of their company, that they had no idea who the people who actually were the face of the company delivering some of their services, what their life was like, how they were treated. It provided that opportunity for them to kind of wake up. Yeah. And no matter how important all those white collar info workers are, they still would never have gotten where they are or maintain their market dominance if it wasn't for all the poor hourly wage people that they treat like crap.

Kara 3:57

So when you're thinking about how psychologically safe a company is, don't just look at the people like you. Look at the people who are under. And I'm gonna stick a pin in, at some point we should talk about, if we wanna come back to Amazon. I believe that the hourly workers wanted to create a union, and Amazon did everything in their power to kibosh that. Yeah, all the tech companies are doing seriously anti-union behaviors. I can tell you about what Wikipedia's doing. Someone tried to start a union there, and they just got rid of one of their biggest, contributors because of that. Oh my gosh. So yep, I think we're gonna stick a pin in it, but talking about corporate anti-union behavior definitely has to be a future podcast, yes. Before we jump into the leadership principles, or LPs as they're called in the streets of Amazon, let's talk about the current CEO, Andrew Jassy. There's a reason I wanna talk about him to start, and I'll kind of weave that in as we talk about the leadership principles in general. But what do you know about Andrew Jassy? Absolutely nothing. I didn't even know his name. Okay. Fair. Neither did I until I started looking into the leadership principles. I was looking at the language and I'm like, "Hmm, who's the person that's delivering the message related to these leadership principles? Who's the one that's currently pushing the way that, behavior and success is measured within Amazon?" So I went to Wikipedia and started looking at Andrew Jassy's, CV. And something that's interesting about him is he actually has been at Amazon for almost 30 years, which I would think that's highly unheard of in higher echelon- I will give Amazon kudos for that. I appreciate companies that hire from in rather than creating an executive talent search and getting rid of everyone who understands the company, the culture, and everything like that.

Deanna 5:53

I much prefer when companies hire within most of the time. Sometimes if the culture's really bad, it'd be better to hire from without. But in general, hiring from within tells people that they have a long-term career at a company available to them, and that they too can grow to be anything. Oh, that's very fair.

Kara 6:12

Very fair. So it was only his second company that he worked at. He graduated from Harvard, I believe with a political science degree or a government degree. Oh, good Lord. It actually was not a technical degree. He worked for five years, and then he went back to Harvard to get an MBA. Of course. I will say too, he is also white male. I feel like I need to put that in there. When we start reviewing some of the language around some of these leadership principles, I think his long-term, tenure at Amazon, and the fact that he's a white male factored into some of the language that's used in leadership principles. But anyway, he started at Amazon after he got his MBA, and he's been there ever since. He is actually the person that pushed Jeff Bezos to make AWS a product. They were building their infrastructure inside of Amazon to be able to support the growing business, and he was the one that said, "Hey, we should really make this another product in and of itself." He is the first person that, pushed that out and made that be a business unit in and of itself. He became CEO in 2021. So he's been CEO for six years now, and in fact, that's another very longstanding tenure. He's the only second CEO right behind Jeff Bezos. Next year he'll be celebrating his 30th anniversary. Right hand man to Jeff Bezos, very trusted, very admired, by C-suite and Jeff Bezos in general. This is probably why Jeff Bezos can now blow up rockets and do all the other things he can do because he has somebody at the helm that he highly trusts. Let's move on to their leadership principles Now the first time we talked about this, I thought there were 14 leadership principles, and Oh my God, that's way too many full disclosure, Deanna and I, whenever we talk at conferences or teach classes, we usually do it with the mindset of we should be able to summarize the talk or the message in one, two, or three key points and that's it, because that's all your mind can walk away with.

Deanna 8:19

So yeah, second I said 14, what did you say, Deanna? That's way too much. If it's more than about five, you've gone too far, because people aren't going to remember them.

Kara 8:29

Absolutely. The leadership principles, have a long history in and of themselves. They were actually created starting back in 1998 just on a whiteboard with Jeff Bezos moving the Sharpie, and, they wrote down and codified them in 2002. It must have been like word of mouth before they actually codified them. I don't know how many there were when they started, but, up through 2021, there were 14. It's just in the last couple of, years that they've added, the last two, and now they are up to 16, Deanna. 16.

Deanna 9:07

The tech geek in me appreciates 16 'cause it is a hexadecimal 10, but that being the case, it's more than anyone in their right mind is going to remember. Most people are gonna remember one or two, and muddle through two or three more, and that's it. Nobody's going to keep 16 in their head.

Kara 9:25

I agree. What I'm gonna do right now is I am going to send you the list of 16. Can you please read them for our listeners?

Deanna 9:35

Oh, boy. Number one, customer obsession. Number two, ownership. Number three, invent and simplify. Number four, are right a lot. That one makes no sense. Number five, learn and be curious. Six, hire and develop the best. Seven, insist on the highest standards. Eight, think big. Nine, bias for action. 10, frugality. 11, earn trust. 12, dive deep. 13, have backbone, disagree and commit. 14, deliver results. 15, strive to be the Earth's best employer. 16, success and scales brings broad responsibility. I have got to say, in general, these sound good and reasonable and not at all what I think about when you ask me about Amazon as an employer And why do you say that? Because from what I can tell, several of these principles aren't actually approved for the rank and file. For instance, disagree and commit. Oh, you wanna see yourself get fired? You disagree with upper management. You disagree with middle management, and you're probably gonna get your butt fired. Learn and be curious. I don't see that being a huge thing from the various different articles I've read about Amazon. Invent and simplify, I think they try, but simply because of their size, it's not likely. Customer obsession, well, in some regards, yeah. But you just try and get a problem solved and see how good their customer obsession is. This is an incredibly tiny, minor, nonexistent nit, but several years ago, for some reason, Amazon didn't clock me reading my Kindle for a couple days, which should be no big deal, except for the fact that I had this streak going of more than 10,000 days, and it killed my streak. And I contacted their customer service to get this fixed about six times, and every time they said they fixed it, it did not get fixed. So where the heck is the customer obsession there? Hmm? Interesting. I have to say that the first thing I noticed, besides the length of the list and how ridiculous the length is how uninspired I was reading this list. I felt like the language was, plain and sure, but in a way that was just frankly boring. Not inspiring. Yeah, no. I am not inspired by it at all. What are the two, when you look at this list, I picked out two that I had visceral reactions to. You had to look through these two, what two would you say you have visceral reactions to? Like, you just think they sound ridiculous, you might not understand what they mean, they seem like, yeah, sure, you're saying that, but, mm, not really. What two would you pick? Are right a lot, because I have no idea what the heck that means. So I'm very interested in finding out that. And then the other one, is going to be a personal nit, but success and scale brings broad responsibility. When you take a look at what's being done with these huge data centers poisoning the water and destroying the ecosystem, I do not see any sort of broad responsibility going on.

Kara 13:14

Oh, wow. Okay. I didn't even clock that one. And just full disclosure, I live in data center alley, so I should've clocked that one, because data centers are being built left and right, around where I live. I saw a TikTok last night from somebody who's local in my area, and various data center owners paid for crafts for Memorial Days in the schools, had them, completed by kids in the class, and then those kids were also sent home with a flyer that said why data centers are so great and what they do for the community.

Deanna 13:48

Boo. I do not approve of that.

Kara 13:51

I was shocked. I stayed home for 15 years. I was in the schools when my kids were in kindergarten almost every single day volunteering I did not see things like that happen at that time. I also know, though, that, if the school was able to get more money for more PE equipment, technology, whatever, sometimes they do allow some of that stuff. But my stomach boiled, just hearing that. So I've gotta say, I'm not seeing broad responsibility.

Deanna 14:19

I'm also not seeing, again, the world's best employer. Shall I once again mention the way they treat their warehouse workers? It sounds like 15... Strive to be the Earth's best employers for those making six figures.

Kara 14:33

Absolutely. Those last two were the last two that were added in the past five years. And a lot of people felt that those two were marketing ploys more so than they were actually anything that they were trying to live up to. There is a lot of skepticism both inside and outside of Amazon as to why they were added in the first place. That I can believe. When I read them, I, clocked the same first one, which was Are, Right a lot. I'm like, "What in God's name?" That's not even English. And the other one that I did not care for was have backbone and disagree and commit. Oh, yeah, definitely, from everything I've read about Amazon and the people who work for Amazon, I do not see that being an actual principle anyone wants to follow.

Deanna 15:21

Thanks for listening to part one of our episode on Amazon's Leadership pricipals! We'll be back soon with part two.