Amazon's Leadership Principals - part 2

Due to this being a super long talk, we have split episode 3 into two parts! Please enjoy part 2 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 part2 of our discussion about Amazon's Leadership principles. To recap Amazon has 16 leadership priciples that sounds okay on paper, but how does it work in reality? Kara and I dive deep into a couple of principles and discuss the reality of them.

Kara 0:25

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 0:33

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. 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 2:24

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. You can search Amazon leadership principles, and you will come on a page on Amazon's site that lists these principles, all 16 of them. They each have a one- to three-sentence description underneath them, and then they are accompanied by a video that Andrew Jassy recorded where he explains, say, in two to five minutes what is meant by that principle, why he feels it's important, and maybe an antidote as to, how he's seen it applied over the course of his career, how it's helped him be a leader. We're going to include a link to the Amazon principles and the video explanations in our show notes. Absolutely. Have fun, grab a cup of coffee. I am going to send you the Are right A Lot Two-sentence description. Go ahead. Why don't you read that?

Deanna 4:09

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. That's crap. I'm not sure I've ever seen high-level leaders really work to disconfirm their beliefs. Leaders are right a lot, they have strong judgment and good instincts. If they have strong judgment and good instincts, why do they need diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs?

Kara 4:36

They've got strong judgment and good instincts. They're right a lot, damn it. I know. I just felt like there couldn't have been a bigger disconnect between what the principle title conveys and then the backpedaling that goes on in this description. It just was very odd. One thing that Andrew Jassy said in his recorded statement is that this principle is a proxy for having good judgment and instincts. It doesn't mean that you have to be the smartest person in the room, but you need to be the one that can see the best result or the best answer, and move forward with it. But that is not what that principle says in its title, and even so, maybe you're not picking the right one. Basically, this says your job as a leader is to spin whatever decision you had as the best possible decision ever, even if it isn't, and if that means squashing down people who disagree with you, go for it. Honestly, yes. So one thing I did in preparing for this podcast is I took my top two, leadership principles that I just couldn't stand- and I ran them through AI, and I said, "Okay, I have a problem with this principle. It is not very human-friendly. Can you rewrite this so that it conveys it in a more human-centric and positive spin?" And I will tell you that it reworded this principle to make high-quality decisions. I know it's not exciting, the reason the AI said that they suggested reframing it this way is that it removes the egocentric I'm right tone. Yes. It emphasizes judgment, humility, and collaboration. Hmm, to a certain degree To a certain degree. Yeah, you got or five words to work with in these titles, so, you can only do so much. Right. It reflects how high ambiguity environments actually work, which means, you're pulling data from a bunch of people that know different aspects of the problem, but not the entire aspect, and then you're using all of that to be able to make a good decision. And it reinforces customer-centric decision-making. I'm not really sure of that last one, but that's what they said. I think it's a lot better way to state it. It honestly puts the onus on the leader that might be making the final decision, but with the term high quality, that means, he's pulling other people in to help him or her make those decisions.

Deanna 7:25

It's definitely better than the way it's written right now. Come on. Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. Basically telling you, you are awesome because you are a leader. Whatever you do must be good judgment.

Kara 7:41

And this was the problem I had with these. Some of these are not guiding stars help you make decisions. They're statements. Yes. Like you said, that's a statement. It's something that you can whip out and weaponize when you're a leader and people disagree with you. Yeah. No, that's a good point. It's like you're not allowed to disagree with me. I'm a leader. Leaders are right a lot. We have strong judgment and good instincts, so shut the heck up. Yeah. Which then leads to my other ick one. It perfectly bookends it, which is have backbone, disagree, and commit. My first reaction, I viscerally hate the almost abusive language of using have backbone. I'm not sure why it bothers me so much. It's very negative.

Deanna 8:34

I'm looking at the description right now, and it says "leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly." First of all, we've got are leaders challenging decisions, made from above them or below them? I'm willing to bet they're far more likely to challenge decisions below, especially since once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. That first sentence and the last contradict each other, because once there's a decision, you're supposed to commit wholly. You're not supposed to respectfully challenge decisions. And the idea that you won't compromise for the sake of social cohesion is crap. Sometimes you need to compromise for social cohesion, or you're going to lose your best people, or they're not gonna work very hard, or one of a number of things. By simply saying that you're going to commit wholly to a decision and there's going to be no compromise makes you an asshole.

Kara 9:44

I completely and utterly agree. This is just the worst written thing on the planet. I will say there is some language in his description of this principle that I've heard from Amy Edmondson as well- you don't compromise just to make somebody else feel better. That's something he says in there, and that is true.

Deanna 10:10

Maybe. I'm gonna disagree. It depends. If it's a minor compromise and it makes people feel better, then heck yeah, you really ought to do it, because it's not making a significant impact, and it will help your people. Now, I don't say you should compromise on the big things, but if you can make things go better for your team with small compromises, you better believe that you should be doing it.

Kara 10:33

What I was reacting to when I was reading some of what Andy Jassy said was that, Amy Edmondson was talking about psychological safety doesn't always mean that you get along all the time. You can have, and you should have, disagreements. In fact, when you have high psychological safety, you're more likely to have, out in the open disagreements, because everybody is willing to express their opinions, but they also do it with a lot of, respect, and usually, they're trying to get to a compromise. The way that Andy Jassy is saying it, there is this, language around you commit wholly. That means if you get down the line and it turns out it was the wrong decision, I'm thinking you still keep going forward, because my God, you would never turn around. The language I'm seeing there too, is if a decision is made, all bets off. That's because leaders have good judgment and are almost always right. Oh, my God. Yeah. I threw this through AI, and I said "This is really, negatively written. It doesn't have a lot of emotional intelligence around it. Hey, can you rewrite this principle to me?" And they retitled the principle Speak the Truth, Then Unite Behind the Decision. That's better. I'm still not loving it. Yeah. I'm not loving it, but it is better AI said that it chose to do this to make it more positive because it emphasized courage, clarity, and unity rather than conflict. The disagree and commit, that's, more conflict focused language. This way it's more positive language. It has a little bit more of a human spin on it. It talks about speak the truth, and underneath the covers of that is that it's hard to speak the truth. There's some emotional, difficulty in doing that. And it is scary to speak up and disagree. Something we did discuss in psychological safety, is having the courage to speak up and say, "I don't think this is the best idea," is a sign of a highly psychologically safe team. Now, whether this actually happens at Amazon or not is another thing. Right. So one thing I, wanna circle to right now is- When it comes to performance review time, obviously leaders are measured against these principles. They can't be. From my very unscientific, wanderings in the Google sphere, yes they are. Leaders are also measured against KPIs like, how much software their team developed, those kinds of things, those hard and fast things. But they are also, measured against these, and as we look through some of these, especially how about something like have backbone, disagree and commit. How do you measure somebody has a backbone? And are you going to measure how much somebody disagrees with others? Using negative language for some of these things, you are going to measure negative behavior. Yes. Congratulations Kara, you did not compromise with anybody this year, so you have a backbone. Two gold stars for you. And who cares what you do to the psychological safety of your team and your organization in the process? It's crazy. There was a lot of discussion, online, from ex-Amazon employees and current ones, about how it's so hard to measure against these. Some other complaints about them were that they weren't clearly action-oriented in a way. Like have a backbone is not action-oriented. The disagree and commit, I guess there are action words in there, but it's still not great. It's not crisp. It's like frugality, ownership, those things, they don't have, verbs in them. They don't give a little bit of a description of how you should behave in order to... How do you achieve ownership? It's fine to have a leadership principle of ownership, but the way it's phrased, it doesn't give you a way to behave. It doesn't indicate how ownership should be. Well, you shouldn't need to know that because you're a leader, and leaders are almost always right. Oh my God. You are gonna stamp all over that one. It bugs me. Now you understand why I had to bring this for us to talk about. Imagine being somebody who comes into this organization, and you love the work that Amazon does. You like working in the cloud. You wanna develop, new, technology within there, so you're really excited to join them. Maybe you're gonna make some good bucks in the process, and you see this list of leadership principles. I would run screaming the second I saw these and knew that I was going to get measured against these. How would you feel in terms of your place in the company and how you were gonna be measured and your own psychological safety in the organization if you saw these 16 principles, Deanna? Oh, these do not make me feel psychologically safe at all.

Deanna 15:58

They basically tell you that you will follow the leaders. The leaders are God. All hail our leaders. Our leaders are almost always right. Do not disagree with your leader. You might be able to say "I'm not 100% sure this is good," and watch yourself get smacked down, because leaders have conviction and are tenacious.

Kara 16:19

This tells me keep your head down, get your work done, and don't expect anything. Absolutely. It's impossible to be able to align to all of these things all at once. There's absolutely no way to do it, which actually brings me back to why I brought up Andrew Jassy in the first place and his career trajectory at Amazon. He can confidently speak about these things because he's been at that corporation for almost 30 years. He knows so many people. He knows how that whole organization works. If he wants to get something done, he knows exactly what phone to pick up, who to call. He's CEO too, so obviously he has, power beyond anybody else in that organization. He can behave in this way because he can just make anything happen. He also understands where they've grown, where they've come from. He's got friends in the company. Jeff Bezos has his back. You can act this way when you've been there that long. Their typical employees stay there three to five years maybe? Something a lot like that. I'd have to actually look it up to 100% correct, but it's not for their entire careers. We'll just put it that way. I know that I can have confidence and feel safe enough to be able to execute on this level only when I've been someplace for a long time. So it just seems ridiculous that somebody who has spent 30 years at this place, are telling people who are coming off the street, new to the You have to do all this stuff like I do." But hey, he's got a Harvard MBA. This man knows things. Speaking of walking on water. So the last thing I wanted to say is, because I did AI all the things, I then put all 16 in with their little descriptions and I said, "Hey, AI, 16 seems a little much. How would you whittle this down to, say, five? What would be a good five principles to have?" I am going to send them to you, and you don't have to read the descriptions, but read them out and then tell me what you think.

Deanna 18:35

Customer obsession, ownership and high standards, innovate, simplify, and act, grow people and build trust, deliver results responsibly. That's better. I think I'd probably cut it down to only a couple or three, 'cause I would argue that developing results, can cover customer obsession and ownership and high standards together. Innovate, simplify, and act probably could get covered under that too. I would probably change it to grow people and build trust, deliver results responsibly.

Kara 19:12

Those two cover it all in my opinion. That is fantastic. And boy, can you not remember those two? That's much easier. I could see a couple of measures under each that, how people in different parts of the organization would achieve those two would be a little bit different depending where you are in the organization. But you could have one, two KPIs related to it, and there you go. That seems reasonable. Yes. And I definitely would start with the grow people and build trust option, because I think companies ought to be people-focused. I don't care what your product is. If your people aren't happy and aren't safe, they're not gonna be delivering the product as well as they could be. So your first focus really should be on making sure that everyone at your company has the tools they need in an environment that they feel safe and can grow in so that they can do the best work so they can deliver those results responsibly. Which actually leads us to what we're gonna be talking about next time. So Deanna, you're gonna be leading the conversation next time. You wanna give a little teaser?

Deanna 20:23

I am going to be talking about an old essay from the 1990s that I have loved since it came out about how software companies can be killed through management principles. It's focused on the high tech IT software development people, but it can be extrapolated to pretty much any knowledge work situation. And it's going to be talking about how there's a difference between what knowledge workers want and need, and what management wants and needs, and how that conflict can destroy a company.

Kara 21:03

Well, that sounds awesome. I hope you have enjoyed doing a deep dive with me today on something that has just driven me nuts ever since I discovered them about three, four months ago. Thank you everybody for joining us today. Have a good week, Deanna.

Deanna 21:20

You too, Kara, and to everyone out there, goodbye.