How Amazon’s Leadership Values Have Built its Culture

According to Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, one of the company’s primary goals when it comes to culture is to “operate like the world’s largest startup.” 

For Andy, this means constant innovation and quick decision-making as the company looks to develop through continuous growth. 

This startup-like approach has led to significant change. In January 2026, Amazon announced it was cutting 16,000 roles after previously making more than 14,000 employees redundant in October 2025. 

These changes, says Andy, are necessary to maintain the company’s agile and competitive culture. 

In a quarterly earnings call, Andy said of these cuts: “You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers. 

“Sometimes without realising it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions.”

To ensure the company prioritises this startup-like culture and facilitates long-term growth, Amazon has developed a talent strategy that ensures it is hiring and retaining only the highest performing candidates. 

Hiring at Amazon 

A key part of Amazon’s high-performance culture stems from its talent acquisition strategy. 

When hiring new talent, the company will bring in a ‘Bar Raiser’ – an independent interviewer not part of the hiring process. 

The role of this bar raiser is to ensure any new employee is better than 50% of those in similar roles – with the company using this to gradually improve quality over time. 

According to Amazon, bar raisers help assess a candidate’s capability for long-term success at the company and make sure they meet its 16 ‘Leadership Principles’. 

These principles – which include having good instincts, thinking long term and acting on behalf of the company – act as core values for Amazon, helping it navigate through business challenges. 

Amazon expects talent to meet these principles within the hiring process, often assessing how candidates act in accordance with these values in practical interviews. 

Data driven performance management systems

To maintain these high standards throughout its workforce, Amazon takes a thorough, data-driven approach to managing employee performance. 

Once again using its leadership principles, the company measures employees' performance against how effectively they can demonstrate these values in their day-to-day workloads. 

Using these principles alongside measures of overall performance and potential, employees are assigned an overall score (OV). 

The top 5% of employees measured in this scale can receive the grade of ‘Role Model’, which improves the likelihood of promotion, while the bottom 5% are placed in the ‘Least Effective’ category. 

Using this model and other metrics, Amazon has developed an ‘Unregretted Attrition’ rate – employees it is okay to lose. This rate is often around 5% to 6% annually, and has been designed to maintain high talent standards. 

Amazon has also asked employees to measure their own performance, with internal documents seen by Business Insider revealing the company asked employees in January 2026 to list three to five of their key achievements in 2025. 

In these documents, the company says: “Accomplishments are specific projects, goals, initiatives or process improvements that show the impact of your work.

“Consider situations where you took risks or innovated, even if it didn’t lead to the results you hoped for.”

This initiative is designed to drive accountability in employees and further justify talent decisions.