I Tried to Apply the Netflix Culture to My Team. Here’s What Worked (and What Disastrously Didn’t).

I remember the first time I read the Netflix Culture Deck. It was like a lightning bolt. As a manager struggling with the slow pace of corporate bureaucracy, the ideas felt revolutionary. No vacation policy? No travel expense approvals? A culture built on “Freedom and Responsibility”? It sounded like a leadership utopia.

I was inspired. I decided I was going to be a “Netflix-style” leader. I told my team, “I trust you completely. I am not going to micromanage. Just be amazing.” I encouraged them to be radically candid with each other. I was ready to unleash a new era of high performance.

What followed was a slow-motion disaster. The “freedom” I gave was interpreted by some as a lack of direction. The “radical candor” without a deep foundation of trust quickly devolved into hurt feelings and cautious silence. My attempt to import a world-class culture into my small team had failed, and it was a humbling but powerful lesson. The Netflix culture is not a piece of software you can just install. It is a complex, delicate ecosystem that depends on a set of preconditions that most of us do not have. But in my failure, I learned what we can realistically take away from their revolutionary ideas.

Lesson 1: The ‘Freedom and Responsibility’ Pact

• The Netflix Idea: The core philosophy is that if you hire responsible, adult professionals, you do not need to bog them down with rules. You can give them immense freedom (to take vacations when they want, to spend money as they see fit) because you trust them to act in the company’s best interest.
• The Reality Check: This is the most seductive idea, and the most dangerous if misapplied. The unspoken second half of the sentence is “…if you only hire hyper-disciplined, world-class talent.” This freedom is not a universal perk; it is a direct consequence of an incredibly high bar for performance. Granting this level of freedom to a team of mixed performers can lead to confusion, inequity, and a lack of clear guardrails.

Also read: Why Giving Autonomy To Employees Matters

Lesson 2: The Pursuit of ‘Stunning Colleagues’ (and the Keeper Test)

• The Netflix Idea: Netflix believes that the best workplace perk is a team of “stunning colleagues.” They maintain a very high “talent density” by constantly asking managers to apply the “Keeper Test”: “If this person told you they were leaving for a similar job at a peer company, would you fight hard to keep them?” If the answer is no, then they should be given a generous severance package to make room for someone who is a better fit.
• The Reality Check: This is the most controversial part of the culture. While it ensures a team of A-players, it can be brutal on psychological safety. If employees feel they are constantly one mistake away from being let go, it can stifle risk-taking, vulnerability, and the very creativity the culture is meant to foster. For most companies, a relentless focus on upskilling and coaching your existing team is a far more sustainable and humane approach than a constant “up or out” model.

Lesson 3: The Mandate for ‘Radical Candor’

• The Netflix Idea: To ensure high performance, feedback must be constant, candid, and come from all directions. The goal is to “challenge directly” while also “caring personally.” Honesty, even when it is difficult, is seen as an act of commitment to a colleague’s growth and the team’s success.
• The Reality Check: I made this mistake. I encouraged my team to “challenge directly” before I had done the hard work of building a foundation of deep trust and psychological safety. Without that foundation, “radical candor” is not received as a gift; it is received as “obnoxious aggression.” It just feels like being a jerk. True candor can only flourish when people are 100% certain that the person giving the feedback is in their corner.

Also read: Ditch the Sugar-Coating, Honesty Can Boost Your Career

Lesson 4: ‘Lead with Context, Not Control’

• The Netflix Idea: This is the most powerful and universally applicable lesson. A leader’s job is not to micromanage tasks or approve every decision. It is to provide the team with as much business context as possible—the strategy, the challenges, the market—so that they can make great decisions on their own. Instead of telling them how to do it, you trust them to figure it out once they understand why it needs to be done.
• The Reality Check: This is incredibly difficult for many leaders to do. It requires you to give up control. It demands that you be disciplined enough to frame the problem and then get out of the way, trusting your team to find a solution that might be different from the one you would have chosen. It is a profound test of a leader’s confidence in their team.

The Real Lesson from Netflix

My attempt to copy-and-paste the Netflix culture was a failure. But my attempt to learn from it was a success. The true lesson from the Netflix Culture Deck is not the specific policies about vacation or expenses. The real lesson is about the power of intentionality.

Netflix’s leaders thought deeply about the kind of company they wanted to be, made a series of courageous and difficult choices to support that vision, and were relentlessly transparent about it. They did not stumble into a high-performance culture; they designed it.

You should not try to be Netflix. But you should be like Netflix in one critical way: be brave enough to have an honest conversation with your team about what you want your culture to be. Define your own values. Agree on your own rules of engagement. Be as intentional and rigorous in designing your culture as you are in designing your product. That is a lesson that can work for anyone.

If you are ready to have the crucial conversations needed to build a stronger, more intentional culture on your team, explore how FocusU’s leadership and team development programs can help you on your journey.