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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Lisa Burrell.

The subject of today's podcast is how Google grooms its managers.

Harvard Business School Professor David Garvin

recently interviewed Eric Klaberg, a Google Software

Engineering Manager. They discussed how Klaberg, a winner of Google's Great Manager Award,

and others at the company have embraced eight key management

behaviors. Those behaviors are the centerpiece of Project Oxygen, a research initiative that's

bloomed into a comprehensive feedback and training

program for Google's managers. What follows is an excerpt of their conversation.

Eric, thank you for joining us this morning.

Thanks for having me.

So to begin, we'd love to go back pre-project oxygen.

And how would you describe your management style before you receive the feedback and training that Google provides through Project Oxygen?

Well, prior to Project Oxygen, actually prior to Google, I was a serial entrepreneur who worked on a number of small companies.

So in those kind of environments it was actually sort of hard to do a lot of

career developments since we didn't really have a lot of opportunities to give to our people.

...