Reed Hastings, Netflix Co-Founder (ever heard of him?), recently co-wrote a book about Netflix’s culture called No Rules Rules with Erin Meyer. It’s a really interesting read about how they build and maintain a high performance team that, for many, will introduce a starkly different management approach than most other standards in startup land. Its pages include relevant stories of the wins and challenges the company has faced along the way.

As tempting as it is to write a book report and share those ideas, who’s got the time? Amazon has pretty good summaries these days anyway. Instead let’s discuss a couple Netflix ideas for post pandemic team strategy after we cover off on the content highlights. The Netflix approach goes a little something like this:

• Accumulate the most talented people and create a critical mass of “talent density”
• Give the employees as much information as possible from all levels of the company to do their jobs with a major bias toward radically full transparency or “candor”
• Remove as many rules and constraints as possible so as to avoid stifling innovation
• Pay the best people at top of the market rates and give the rest generous severance packages
• Win

Netflix’s performance over the last decade provides ample evidence that this strategy is allowing them to do just that. Win. And win big. Their cultural approach is a direct reaction to Reed’s experience at his first startup where things didn’t go quite as well due to process constraints and overall what he judged as the inability to innovate in the later company stages.

Now, as many teams enter a new phase of their journey in the post pandemic world, “New Rules Rules” provides some ideas for how to maintain team performance and hit the ground running in a post pandemic return to “office”:

• Pay: it isn’t easy to pay top of market in the most competitive startup hubs like Silicon Valley. But what about Salt Lake City? Miami? Phoenix? There are so many cities with strong universities and talent pools where your team could pay most competitively and corner talent density. Think about expanding the geographic footprint of your teams location
• Transparency: how does information filter down from the executive levels to your management group? Could you share more? How high is the trust level across your team? Might additional context allow your team to perform at a higher level?
• Process Constraints: every company has dumb rules that people either just step over or roll their eyes at. Speak up! Eradicate the dumb rules you don’t want to see on your team. You can do it! Innovation requires brave people to break down dumb rules like hotel $$ limits or a dozen sign offs that don’t make any sense…and drive the best performers to other companies
• Team Incentives: Netflix pays their employees generous salaries and eschews variable compensation. Their outlook is that variable milestones either incentivize the wrong goals or contribute to lower performance. How do incentives work on your team? Are they adding to performance or do they just create unnecessary stress? Don’t necessarily do away with variable comp…but think about how it’s achieved on your team

We look to Netflix because they’re the best in the new world of media. We don’t need to copy them and the Netflix model isn’t necessarily the model. Still, Reed’s hard fought lessons learned from Pure Software translate into a great story of a 2nd act of high performance at Netflix which has obviously turned out phenomenally well. That’s their path. What trail will your team blaze?