At Amazon, performance ratings had two equal components: what you accomplished (results) and how you did it (leadership). They were weighted 50/50. This ensured that people were measured both on their performance and their leadership.
The first part of the rating was straightforward. It looked at your goals and whether or not you reached them. The second part was based on how you approached those goals—specifically, whether your behavior reflected Amazon’s leadership principles.
Leadership principles are descriptions of how someone manages, thinks, and operates. If I’m customer-obsessed, that means I prioritize the customer, and my behavior shows it. If I think big, that means I look beyond incremental improvements. If I disagree and commit, I raise concerns but align once a decision is made. These are concrete behaviors. They show up in how people lead and how they work.
This meant you couldn’t be successful just by crushing your goals without embodying Amazon’s leadership principles. And you also couldn’t be a great cultural ambassador who didn’t deliver results. To advance, you had to excel in both. Promotion required repeatedly being rated as a “role model” leader, meaning you excelled across multiple LPs.
This part of the rating was subjective, but not left to a single manager’s judgment. Every review cycle included calibration sessions, which were truth-seeking meetings where managers brought written examples of how their team members did or didn’t embody the LPs. Then we debated them openly.
What’s notable here isn’t just the mechanics of the review. It’s that Amazon made the leadership principles central to how performance was evaluated. Half of your rating was based on whether you embodied the company’s core values. That made the culture tangible. It attached real stakes to it.
Most companies say culture matters, but they don’t have any mechanism to enforce it. At Amazon, your ability to reinforce and reflect the culture was 50% of how you were evaluated. That’s how performance and culture became one and the same.
This is also one of the reasons the LPs have real staying power. They weren’t just a poster on the wall. They were embedded into core mechanisms like performance reviews and hiring. That’s what makes them stick. If there are no stakes, “values” and “culture” are just empty words. But if you make them central to how people are rewarded and promoted, then people get serious about them. They work hard to get good at them.
You couldn’t succeed at Amazon if you weren’t good at these behaviors. So people got better at them. And as a result, the culture reinforced itself.
To learn more about Amazon from the inside, read our book: https://lnkd.in/gzJ4qb45
