Our leadership team recently read the book “No Rules Rules” written by the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings. It was great insight into the Netflix organizational structure and helped us identify an important area of improvement for our team: lack of feedback within our company culture.
We are fortunate to work in an environment where many of us are not only colleagues, but also considered friends. This is a big win because it highlights the culture we have been cultivating at LegalTemplates, but ironically enough, this friendly-natured workplace actually becomes an obstacle when it comes to giving critical feedback. Now why is that?
It’s hard to give critical feedback because people don’t want to hurt their teammate’s feelings, this means the most valuable feedback is never given.
That makes sense! No one wants to make their teammates feel bad, but on the flip side we might be causing more harm in the longterm by not helping each other develop our full potential. This not only impacts us as individuals but our organization as a whole, which is why we want to dive into what Netflix has to say about cultivating a healthy feedback culture.
A key takeaway from the book is how the Netflix feedback culture fosters honesty, trust and responsibility by using what they call the ‘4A feedback guidelines’. These guidelines are divided into two sections: Giving Feedback and Receiving Feedback
LegalTemplates’ leadership team has seen great improvements by following these guidelines which is why we hope that all of you can take some time to understand and internalize the 4As. This is especially relevant as we roll out a new Employee Feedback app called Fellow. By using this app we hope to encourage continuous improvement by building a feedback culture, ****running effective meetings and fostering accountability through all levels of our organization.