If you work for Reed Hastings, you better be prepared to voice your displeasure.
Good leaders seek critical feedback whenever possible, the Netflix co-founder and chairman recently told entrepreneur Tim Ferriss’ podcast, “The Tim Ferriss Show.” Hastings even has a simple three-word term for the practice: “Farming for Dissent.”
“If you’re a leader, it’s important to cultivate dissent, because it’s not normal to disagree with your boss, right? (Normally) we learn deference,” said Hastings. But because companies often need new ideas and strategies to grow, employees sometimes need to be “ready to talk” with their managers, he added.
“Because it is emotionally difficult in most companies to disagree with your manager, we call it dissent farming,” he added. “We have managers who do things like (ask), ‘What three things would you do differently if you were at my job?'”
Hastings, who was CEO of Netflix for more than two decades before becoming chairman last year, said he would ask “50 senior executives” every year or two to “write down what would be different” if they were at the head of the company. He used their feedback to experiment with different business strategies, some of which worked.
Strategies that didn’t work served as learning opportunities, he added.
“A lot of people had serious doubts”
Hastings was inspired to solicit critical feedback in the wake of one of Netflix’s biggest debacles, he said: a failed 2011 attempt to rebrand the company’s DVD-by-mail service as a separate company called Qwickster.
Customers were outraged at the idea of dismantling the company. Netflix shares fell. Hastings publicly apologized and reversed the decision. Still, he said the Qwickster disaster was his “favorite failure” of his career because it taught him to ask for more information, positive or negative, before making an important decision.
“We didn’t do a lot of farming for dissent in those days,” Hastings said. “I was messianic, convinced that it was the right decision…and it turned out that a lot of people had serious doubts, but they didn’t know that the other leaders had doubts.”
Hastings instituted a process by which he would ask dozens of Netflix executives and managers for their honest feedback on any “big decisions” the company had in the works, he said.
“We’re asking everyone (to submit a rating), from 10 to -10, if they think it’s a smart idea,” Hastings said. “If we had done that back then (with Qwickster), we would have seen tons of -7, -6, -8, and that would have been shocking.”
This was a “very positive step” that helped Netflix make stronger decisions going forward, he added. Today, the company has a market capitalization of $240.2 billion.
“A culture of high standards”
The Netflix co-founder is not the only business leader to embrace critical feedback from his employees, a strategy reminiscent of former Google and Apple executive Kim Scott’s “radical candor” philosophy .
Hastings cited Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as an example, highlighting Bezos’ tendency to read reviews from “dissatisfied” Amazon customers to help build “a culture of high standards” within the company. Bezos also advised listening to your critics and carefully deciding whether they are right before changing if necessary.
“You listen, you ask, ‘Are they right?’ Or, even if they’re not quite right, is there something that is right that you can learn from (and) then you should change,” Bezos said at a conference in 2018.
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