Igniting Passion
When Red Hat first approached me about taking the job as president and CEO, the recruiter leading the search tried to describe the company’s culture. He waxed on about the company’s vision and its motivated workforce. Then he paused and said, “Do you remember the scene in Blues Brothers where Dan Aykroyd says, ‘We’re on a mission from God?’ Red Hat kind of feels like that. These folks really believe they’re on a mission to change the world.” I nodded my head, figuring I knew what he meant. After all, I had been helping lead Delta Air Lines through its bankruptcy, which was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. I assumed that in that process, in which the entire workforce banded together to turn the airline around, I had experienced firsthand how having a purpose and passion can become a powerful force for change.
For generations, Delta has been an institution in the South—especially in the Atlanta area where it is now based. Everyone, including me, has always had a sense of pride working for the company. Even my mom was proud of me for working at Delta. Generations of families have worked there. That’s why, when the company faced financial problems in the wake of 9/11 and spiking oil prices, we all embraced a shared purpose that we weren’t going to let the company fail on our generation’s watch. We spent a lot of time driving home to everyone in the organization that we were in this together and that the sacrifices we were making through cuts to benefits and salaries were a necessary part of reaching our shared goal. The powerful purpose helped drive a deeper commitment to what we were working on as we fought through the bankruptcy.
But it wasn’t until a rival airline swooped in with the intent to buy Delta after we had made all of those sacrifices to turn the company around that I saw something different in the eyes of my peers and coworkers. It was passion, pure and simple. Somehow the threat of being taken over by a rival lit a fire throughout the workforce. Employees, all on their own, began making and wearing T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with the slogan, “Keep Delta, My Delta.” They were standing up and saying no. After all that we had been through, we weren’t going to give up now. It was as if a match had been lit and the entire company rallied together to meet the shared threat of a takeover.
The remarkable thing was, it worked: in the face of the passion we all showed, the rival stopped pursuing the acquisition. The CEO of the other company credited Delta employees’ massive outpouring of support as one of the main reasons he walked away from the deal. He said he was worried about the potential backlash to his own airline if he completed the deal. That moment concluded what was, for many of us, a deeply emotional experience and showed me the power of passion ignited in a workforce—a key lesson I brought with me when I joined Red Hat.
Over the past few years, many authors have written about “intrinsic motivation”—things inside a person that motivate him or her, as opposed to external incentives like money or power. In their best-selling book, Conscious Capitalism, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Babson College professor Raj Sisodia write:
Business has a much broader positive impact on the world when it is based on a higher purpose that goes beyond only generating profits and creating shareholder value. Purpose is the reason a company exists. A compelling sense of higher purpose creates an extraordinary degree of engagement among all stakeholders and catalyzes creativity, innovation, and organizational commitment . . . Higher purpose and shared core values unify the enterprise and elevate it to higher degrees of motivation, performance, and ethical commitment at the same time.1
Or, as the authors of the excellent book Collective Genius so aptly put it: “Purpose is often misunderstood. It’s not what a group does but why it does what it does. It’s not a goal but a reason—the reason it exists, the need it fulfills, and the assistance it bestows. It is the answer to the question every group should ask itself: if we disappeared today, how would the world be different tomorrow?”2
That’s a message more and more companies are giving weight to. Having a purpose is not something just for tech companies or newfangled start-ups. For instance, the J.M. Smucker Company in Orrville, Ohio, which makes and markets everything from jams and jellies to coffee and peanut butter, has a stated purpose of “Bringing Families Together to Share Memorable Meals and Moments.”3 Or, consider the following diverse list of organizations and their stated purpose:
Disney—“To use our imagination to bring happiness to millions.”
Johnson & Johnson—“To alleviate pain and suffering.”
Southwest Airlines—“To give people the freedom to fly.”
Pivot Leadership—“Better Leaders = Better World.”
Charles Schwab—“A relentless ally for the individual investor.”
BMW—“To enable people to experience the joy of driving.”
Humane Society—“Celebrating animals, confronting cruelty.”
American Red Cross—“Enabling Americans to perform extraordinary acts in the face of emergencies.”4
Mackey and Sisodia also write:
People are most fulfilled and happiest when their work is aligned with their own inner passions. Personal passion, corporate purpose, and business performance all go together. For a passionate foodie, working for Wegmans or Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods Market can be truly fulfilling. For outdoors enthusiasts, Patagonia, REI, and L.L.Bean are wonderful places to work. In such settings, work becomes so much more than a job. It even goes beyond having a satisfying career. It becomes a calling—something we were born to do.5
For Mackey and Whole Foods, their purpose is nothing less than to change the kind of food and beverages each of us consumes so that we become healthier and live fuller lives as a result.
In Red Hat’s case, its purpose and calling—To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way—is built upon open source software (more on that later). But additional examples of how the dynamics of passion and purpose are changing the way work gets done come from other people and companies, as with Mackey and Whole Foods. Do you think a grocery chain could become as successful if the people who work and shop there didn’t believe in the purpose of growing and eating healthy, ethically sourced food?
The same can be said of the open source community. Participants in open source decided they wanted a hand in the technology being created—that was their purpose for investing their time in creating better software. They didn’t want to trust all of the work to the engineers sitting behind the walls of proprietary software companies.
For example, I send out personal e-mails to any Red Hatter who is celebrating a longtime anniversary—ten-year, fifteen-year, and so on—working with us. When I sent one to one of our top engineers, Mark McLoughlin, to celebrate his ten-year anniversary, he replied:
I think what’s most gratifying is that after 10 years and the tremendous growth we’ve had, I’m still here for the same reason I joined in the first place—that Red Hat is a pure-play open source company.
Thanks again!
Mark.
Making the code free and open was why top engineers like McLoughlin decided to work with us; they saw a job at Red Hat as a way to do good for the world. It’s how Red Hat is able to attract the most talented people and engage them to the best of their abilities; we have a mission they believe in. Some companies dabble in offering some open source products, but Red Hat people are absolutely passionate about the fact that the only products we sell are 100 percent open source, which is something we all believe is fundamentally good for the world.
For context, software has long been a domain in which companies have tried to “control the code” and then charge customers to use that code. But Red Hatters are products of the “maker movement”: people who embrace the decentralization of production. We see massive benefits to making the code free for everyone to use and benefit from. That helps explain why politicians and statesmen like the presidents of Brazil, Poland, and India attend Red Hat events. They see open source software like Linux as good public policy because they aren’t forced to pay companies for the intellectual property associated with the code. That’s why Linux programmers say, “Open source is not a matter of life or death; it’s much more important than that.”
But whether your business is to provide wholesome food or to write software that runs nuclear submarines, if you can create a compelling reason for people to participate, they will. The ultimate benefits of having a purpose, then, are that people work harder and turnover is lower than the industry average. As the authors of Collective Genius put it: “Purpose—not the leader, authority or power—is what creates and animates a community. It is what makes people willing to do the hard tasks of innovation together and work through the inevitable conflict and tension.”6
More and more, executives and entrepreneurs are beginning to understand the importance of having a purpose in business—you need to have a goal in mind that transcends the profit motive. That’s the only way you’ll be able to attract the best and brightest talent. Think about the success that Tony Hsieh and his company, Zappos, have had, for example, by focusing on delivering happiness to their customers.
But what’s less clear is that to truly perform at a peak level, simply defining a purpose is not enough. It’s just a first step, the table stakes for competing in the twenty-first-century economy. What sets open organizations apart, and what gives them a true competitive advantage, is that they also have embraced the idea that they need to activate the emotional passions and desires among their workers to actually reach that ultimate destination as defined by their purpose. Today’s workers want their work to mean something; they want to be part of something that makes a difference. If having a purpose gets people to do the right things, then passion motivates them to extraordinary performance—to go the extra mile—as they try to fulfill their goal.
Purpose is a baseline. But when you add passion, it’s like pouring gasoline on the fire. That’s what can take your organization to the next level of performance and achievement. As management expert Gary Hamel says, “To put it bluntly, the most important task for any manager today is to create a work environment that inspires exceptional contribution and that merits an outpouring of passion, imagination and initiative.”7
At Red Hat, we realize that people invest their valuable time by choosing to work with us (versus the myriad other alternatives they have) because they want to feel as if they are changing the world for the better. Unlike my experience at Delta during the takeover attempt, Red Hat maintains an extremely high level of passion every day. It’s not episodic or periodic: it’s consistently there, bubbling, simmering, and sometimes exploding.
At Zappos, the idea of delivering happiness to its customers begins by focusing on first building a team that believes in the company’s purpose. As Mig Pascual, a content developer for Zappos Insights, part of the Zappos Family of Companies, puts it, “Zappos hires talent whose personal values align with the company’s core values, our employees have a genuine interest in helping others. They’re inspired to be a part of something bigger than they are, and are able to fulfill their personal higher purpose at work by living out their own values every day.”8
Red Hat associates passionately live our purpose every day, so it becomes the norm. I sometimes forget how different and special it is until someone new sees it. At a conference for Red Hat’s European partners, the chief information officer (CIO) of a large industrial giant gave a keynote speech. During a dinner at the conference, the CIO leaned over to me and said, almost in amazement, “I have never seen a company of this size where the people are so passionate. Look at how much energy they have and how much they care, and this is just an internal event. You need to figure out how to bottle this!” That was not just gratifying to hear, but also eye opening because it helped frame for me how passion can be contagious and how it infects others around you so that they want to work and collaborate with you. That’s why open organization leaders should look for ways to spur passion not just in response to threats, but also in repeatable and sustainable ways that create a competitive advantage for their organizations.
Rethinking the Role of Emotion in the Workplace
We often use the word “emotional” as if it’s a bad word, especially in the workplace. You could argue that much of what we’re taught about conventional management theory and practice is all about making the business world as dispassionate as possible. When people cry at their desks or explode in laughter in a meeting, they’re often immediately written off as being “unprofessional.” Why? Because emotions aren’t clear-cut, they make things seem messy. Think back to the birth of social sciences like microeconomics, when economists used supply-and-demand curves to map out how people and markets operate. In science, we often make simplifying assumptions. In management science, the simplifying assumption is that people are rational, value-maximizing, unemotional cogs.
Think back to the Economics 101 class you might have taken in school. Your professor might have explained how certain simplifying assumptions are made to make the math work—assumptions that people are rational and that everyone has access to the same information. But toward the end of the semester, after you thought you understood what was going on, your professor confessed that the markets aren’t really ever in equilibrium, there is no perfect information, and people are clearly not always rational. How else could bubbles and busts occur?
Conventional management theory makes similar (but inconsistent) simplifying assumptions because they are both social sciences that developed at a similar time in history. Management theorists had to make certain simplifying assumptions in which they stripped any kind of emotion or irrationality from the equation in order to make their models work. They needed people to act like cogs in a wheel, simply as inputs to a system that would create outputs. But, as we know, people don’t easily fit such models, mostly because we don’t act in the rational ways economists or management theorists think we should. A whole field of study, behavioral economics, has emerged to tackle this issue in the field of economics. We need the same in business.
Inspiration, enthusiasm, motivation, excitement—those are emotions, too. Aren’t they generally considered to be positive things? Don’t you want your workers to be inspired and engaged in what they’re doing? The question becomes, then, do you really want employees to check their emotions at the door? The short answer is no. As a leader, you should be working very intentionally to spark as much emotion and passion as you can among your team rather than worrying about running the kinds of conventional management studies that try to measure how hard or fast people are working. While that form of management style may have worked well when workers tackled rote tasks like turning screwdrivers and working on assembly lines, it’s completely irrelevant to modern workers. Today, we can use robots to complete mundane tasks. What sets the best companies apart from their competition is their ability to attract the kinds of innovative, intelligent, and, yes, emotional workers, who want to do far more than just show up and punch a clock. What open organization leaders need to do, then, is to challenge their people to take initiative, find ways to innovate, and gain an edge on the competition by getting them to all work together in pursuing a common goal.
Tapping into passion is especially important in building the kinds of participative communities that drive open organizations. The open source communities like Linux in which we at Red Hat work rarely emerge when there is no passion for the community’s purpose. For Red Hat, that sense of purpose is driven by our passion to change the world by wholeheartedly embracing the principles of open source development.
The Leader’s Role: Leading a Passionate Organization
The challenge for leaders is that—unlike financial planning, capital budgeting, or organization structure—there really is no formal management theory created to build, leverage, and measure passion among workers and other members of the participative community. Maybe the closest measurement is the level of engagement or even morale among workers, which companies typically gauge through employee surveys. While you can learn quite a lot from these measures—and we do use them at Red Hat—they can’t easily capture exactly what I’m talking about. Unfortunately, it essentially falls into that ambiguous category of “You’ll know it when you see it.”
When I first got to Red Hat, it took me some time to adjust to and even make sense of the level of passion. I vividly recall, for example, conducting my first company meeting where I stood up in front of a group of Red Hat associates to answer their questions. But rather than pepper me with questions about the company’s marketing strategy or the potential of the stock price, they asked things like, “What kind of operating system do you run your computers at home on?” “Have you ever used Linux or Fedora before?” “Do you have your RHCE?” (RHCE is a Red Hat Certified Engineer.) What these folks were trying to assess was not whether I had a handle on Red Hat’s business model. They wanted to see how committed I was to the cause. Their hard-driving questions were designed to see if I was as passionate about it as they were, because they wanted to know if I would fit into the culture they had all built together.
After my first day of interviews at Red Hat, my wife knew something was different about me. She told me it was the first time my face actually lit up when I talked about my experience. I came to realize that I was excited about the potential of going to work for a disruptive company, one that was creating positive change in the world. That was something that, while I didn’t know the nitty-gritty details about the technology yet, I could truly get passionate about.
A powerful awakening for me, I realized how motivating it is when a company truly has a positive mission and a purpose behind it. If you watch football on Sundays as I do, you’ll notice commercials in which big-name companies talk about all the good they are doing in the world—regardless of what their business models might actually involve. As a result, the message falls flat; it feels false. As the old adage says, you can’t put lipstick on a pig. That’s especially true in our social media era, where it’s just about impossible to fake authenticity. But when your organization really does have the kind of purpose that fuels a true sense of passion among your workers, it’s electrifying—and that’s something people even outside your company’s walls can’t help but notice.
As Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, said: “Authenticity is not a characteristic; it is who you are. It means knowing who you are and what your purpose is. Your True North is what you believe at the deepest level, what truly defines you—your beliefs, your values, your passions, and the principles you live by.”9 That the company consistently makes the various “best companies to work at” lists is no surprise: it earns positive reviews from its employees for everything from its “small business atmosphere” to its exceptional work-life balance and delivers exception financial performance as well.10
Similar to Delta, our company has had moments when Red Hatters’ passion exploded in the wake of threats from competitors and rivals. One great example predates me. Red Hat was blindsided by a longtime strategic partner that repositioned itself as a formidable competitor. At that competitor’s annual industry event in San Francisco, where Red Hat had a booth and a sizable presence, the industry giant announced that it would begin offering a new Linux distribution, which was essentially the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, stripped of trademarks and rebranded as its own “unbreakable” Linux product and sold at half the price.
That kind of news wasn’t welcome on Wall Street, where Red Hat’s stock took an immediate hit. Rumors even began to fly that its rival was about to acquire Red Hat as a way to take control of Linux as a whole. Overall, the situation looked grim. As Leigh Day, now vice president of corporate marketing and a longtime Red Hatter, remembers: “The whole company was just stunned, and there was a palpable sense of fear. Everyone was posting on memo-list [one of the internal e-mail lists], lots of speculation about what this meant for us as a company, and the question that kept coming up was, how was Red Hat going to respond?”
That’s when a Red Hat engineer, Rik van Riel, jokingly posted that the company should trademark the term “Unfakeable Linux.” In the conference rooms where the marketing and public relations folks were huddled, debating various responses, it was as if a light bulb went on. “It was so typically Red Hat,” Day told me. “In came this great idea, the perfect response, from this passionate young engineer up in Westford, [Massachusetts], and we just ran with it.”
Knowing that so many Red Hatters were on site at the event booth in San Francisco, a group from across different departments worked late into the night from the Raleigh headquarters to pull together a coordinated response. The next morning, visitors to our company’s website saw “Unfakeable Linux” prominently featured on the home page. There were FAQs for the media and customers. At the competitor’s event, Red Hatters proudly manned their booth, wearing red “Unfakeable Linux” T-shirts, ready to answer questions from customers and partners. Back in Raleigh, the design team had called T-shirt shops all over California until they found one open late that agreed to print and deliver the T-shirts to the events manager in a nearby parking lot that morning.
“It is one of my favorite Red Hat memories, because we had all felt so crushed by the announcement,” Day told me. “We then pulled together, galvanized by this attack on our company and the open source way, and responded in an incredibly cheeky, coordinated, bold way that our competitor never could. Everyone, from our engineers to our designers to our sales people, were so proud to be Red Hatters at that moment.”
What’s remarkable is that this wasn’t an isolated moment in Red Hat history. Every day, the passion of the people who work at Red Hat bubbles up to the surface. Take, for example, Jon Masters, a technology architect, who once gave a keynote speech at the industrywide Red Hat Summit while riding a bike that was powering the computer server he was using to give his presentation. “Working at Red Hat is one of the most rewarding and challenging jobs I have ever had or seen any of my friends have,” Masters has said. “The unstructured environment is daunting at first, but over time it becomes exhilarating to have that kind of dynamic environment. The thing that really excites me is that there are always new challenges and opportunities.” The passion is contagious. It’s impossible to be around people like Masters and not be infected by the passion that pervades this place.
Make It Personal
Describing the value of a passionate organization is one thing; trying to build and maintain one is another set of lessons entirely. That’s why a key part of my job is to help stoke that level of passion through my own actions. That means that when a new version of Fedora—a free community distribution of Linux—comes out, I try to be one of the first to download it and comment on its new features on our message boards. Sometimes my job means embracing the fun-loving and irreverent side of the business—like dressing up for our companywide Halloween party. A leader of a twenty-first-century organization is, in part, a “cheerleader-in-chief.” Passion is an emotion, and it’s tough to convey emotion in an e-mail or a company newsletter. Passion is, almost by its very nature, personal.
W. L. Gore & Associates, which has brought us breakthrough products like Gore-Tex, also credits breaking down the traditional corporate walls for helping the company continue to grow (it now has more than nine thousand associates in more than thirty countries and annual sales of more than $3 billion), more than fifty years after its founding. One of the company’s associates once said, “The things we accomplish in business are very personal for a lot of us. It’s not just that I’ve accomplished a business goal with a team, and then I can just go home and shut my brain off and go about life as usual. A lot of the other folks we work with become our friends and our family in a lot of ways, and when something good happens, we’re going to celebrate the fact that we accomplished something. Sometimes, it’s not just the destination; it’s the journey.”11
While all of this might seem somewhat silly to seasoned executives, it’s all about breaking down barriers and showing everyone that we want them to let down their guard and let their passion rip. If purpose is about innate desire, then passion is adrenaline—the rocket fuel that propels people to walk through walls to make the place successful.
While I had tinkered with Linux before taking the job at Red Hat, I didn’t have the deep appreciation for the power of open source that the people there already had, some of whom had laid the groundwork for the company’s growth at the very beginning when it was essentially a bunch of developers working together. But what I could demonstrate was that I cared about what we could accomplish through open source, and that’s something every Red Hatter takes to heart.
Most companies have a stated corporate purpose or mission statement. Unfortunately, these are rarely used words that do little to drive purpose or passion within the company. This is often because leaders do not feel that driving a connection to the corporate mission is part of their daily job. In open organizations, the connection is critical and can create substantially better performance in any company. A key job of every leader is to continuously create the context required for passion to emerge by connecting associates’ job functions to the organization’s broader mission. The good news is that it doesn’t require a companywide mandate to get started. Any leader, in any company and in any function, has the opportunity to drive that connection. Connecting to the mission and showing personal passion can take any organization to a new level of performance.
Hire Passionate People
The level of passion in your organization is obviously correlated with how deeply your people connect with its purpose. As Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, stated in a TED Talk he gave in 2009, there has to be a reason, a purpose, for today’s workers to commit and give their best effort for an organization. He continued:
Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever is left. If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.12
For example, at Red Hat, we have at least three associates who are so passionate about the company’s role in changing the world through open source technology that they have gotten tattoos of Shadowman, the elusive icon wearing the red fedora in our company logo. (Here’s a bit of trivia: the red hat is an homage to our cofounder, Marc Ewing, who was known as “the guy in the red hat” during his time at Carnegie Mellon University, where he often wore his grandfather’s red lacrosse cap. It’s also a nod to several historical revolutionaries who wore red hats during uprisings.) How many companies can say the same? That’s a level of permanence and sense of mission that no economist could ever have predicted with a chart. One owner of a tattoo, Thomas Cameron, a chief architect based in Austin, Texas, told me, “Regardless of what happens to Red Hat, whether it gets bought or even if I leave someday, it doesn’t change my history. Yes, I have ink and it’s because I am proud and humbled to be part of all this. I have come to realize how life-changing and beneficial to society this software we work on is. The mind-set and technology behind it is a way of life. There is a spiritual aspect to it. I hope and believe that the work and collaboration I have done has had an impact. I consider myself the luckiest guy because I get paid to make the world a better place.”
Another powerful example is Adam Miller, who also has a Shadowman tattoo, which he got to mark his ten-year anniversary as part of the greater Red Hat open source community. Only Miller didn’t work for Red Hat at the time! He actually worked for a big computer company with a household name. As you might imagine, his coworkers had a hard time understanding why he would do something as radical as getting a tattoo of another company’s logo. “Red Hat, Linux, and open source in general really changed the course of my life in so many ways. It’s something I’ve been passionate about for a long time,” says Miller, who wisely got his wife’s approval before he made his final decision.
While it would be wonderful if everyone in your organization and every new hire brought that same level of motivation and passion with them into work every day, that’s not always possible. So how does an organization like Red Hat find people who believe in the same mission as it does?
First off, we have observed that the conventional interview process does a mediocre job of identifying if someone is truly a fit with our culture. While we can ask lots of questions to determine someone’s skills and experience, it can be difficult to assess if they are truly passionate about the organization and our mission or just excited about the prospect of landing a job, any job. Culture fit is a hard thing to tease out in an interview. When it’s core to your company, you must find ways to ensure that you’re hiring the right people. When W. L. Gore makes its hiring decisions, for example, it looks for candidates who are driven, but not just by their desire to climb the corporate ladder. To help assess that kind of cultural fit, Gore relies on teams of its associates during its hiring process.13
Red Hat also finds passionate people by relying on Red Hatters themselves. The Red Hat Ambassadors program—an associate referral initiative—was started because we recognized that good people know other good people in terms of both their skills and their potential fit for an organization’s culture. As the tagline for the program says, “No one can spot a potential Red Hatter better than a current Red Hatter.” While Red Hat always had an informal referral program, it wasn’t until we formalized the process by creating the Ambassadors program two years ago that we began to see internal referrals skyrocket from about 29 percent of all new hires to more than half.
Once again, the details of the plan did not come down from on high; a cross-functional advisory board assembled to lead the program’s implementation. That helps explain why we went beyond the typical corporate approach of simply handing out cash rewards. What we have in place now is a structured program, similar to a tiered airline program in which you can achieve a different status based on how much you fly. In our case, we wanted to create an aspirational incentive plan that would reward associates for how many referrals they made that led to new hires. We asked associates what kind of rewards they wanted.
At the first level, a Red Hatter becomes a “Super Ambassador,” earning a T-shirt and sticker for his or her first successful referral. It takes three successful referrals to reach the second level, where associates earn an extra 25 percent cash referral bonus, a sticker, and a coveted hoodie emblazoned with the words, “Mega Ambassador.” Refer five people, and they attain “Ultimate Ambassador” status, which includes a onetime, 100 percent bonus match (effectively doubling the referral bonus), and the choice of either a cape or a jacket conveying that they are a Red Hat Ultimate Ambassador. In an annual drawing among Ultimate Ambassadors, they can earn prizes like a new bicycle; perhaps just as importantly, they are invited to join the program’s advisory board. As a whole, the program has been a tremendous success in terms of both getting talent inside the company and feeding the collaborative energy we continue to stoke.
We haven’t been able to completely eliminate interviewing people. But when I assess a candidate, I have changed the kinds of questions I ask. If you stick to only asking traditional questions during an interview—“Tell me about a situation where you failed?” or “Tell me about a situation where you were particularly collaborative?”—most people have scripted answers.
Instead, I focus more on asking about candidates’ views on where their previous company is going and what they see as its future. How is the company positioned? I want to know if they have enough innate curiosity and analytical and conceptual skills to be able to frame strategically where they stand. A lot is about discovering if they are curious enough to care and want to know. I don’t want somebody working for me who doesn’t care. To me, curiosity also signals that the person isn’t in it just for him- or herself.
By asking more macro-level questions, I can see where a candidate perceives the company as a whole moving, beyond just his or her individual role in that shift. If you’re really trying to understand the whole business and clearly have opinions about it, that says you’re not spending 100 percent of your time just making sure you nail your own job. It means you’ve clearly built relationships and talk to other people within the company. When someone brings that kind of perspective to an interview, that’s a telltale sign that he or she has the potential to be a great team player.
Like connecting with a company’s mission, this does not require a top-down corporate mandate. Almost all leaders have an opportunity to shape who is on their team—either by hiring or deciding who can transfer in or out. Recognizing that passion is a key criterion for a high-performing team and screening for that in your personnel decisions can bring tremendous value to your own team.
Recognize and Reinforce Passion
Another key aspect of building a passionate organization is finding ways to reinforce the kinds of behaviors you want to seed throughout the entire culture. One way that happens at Red Hat is through active internal message lists and e-mails, where the community goes out of its way to celebrate people doing great things.
An example of Red Hatters’ passion comes from an e-mail by a principal software engineer, Stephen Gallagher, posted for the entire company in the midst of a busy—and stressful—time:
I just want to call out something I’ve seen today that makes me proud to be a Red Hatter. As most of the people reading this know, today has been a major crunch day in engineering. We’re racing to land our final changes to prepare for the RHEL 7.0 beta and there have been many issues. Brew is overworked and taking hours to process builds; Bugzilla is slow, we’re discovering new and fun bugs in errata tool . . .
And yet, as I watch this happening, I notice something interesting. While there’s plenty of opportunity to be complaining about the situation, that’s not really occurring. Development and Release Engineering are talking, helping each other out and looking for solutions to move forward. I see no accusations, no infighting and no snark.
This right here is exactly what Red Hat’s culture of contribution and meritocracy is meant to inspire, and I just want to say “Thank You” to everyone that is living this ideal. You continue to make Red Hat one of the greatest companies to work for.
In turn, Paul Frields, the manager of Fedora Engineering, replied:
I couldn’t agree more with this. When push comes to shove, Red Hat culture says we should go out of our way to help co-workers. That’s precisely what I see going on, and I’m overjoyed by that. “When the times get tough, the tough get going” is a well-used cliché, but it’s really appropriate today. Red Hatters rock!
Associates’ willingness to share their passions so openly completely changes what it means to be their leader. I don’t have to instruct everyone to “play nice” to make sure we meet our deadlines, because everyone already knows we are working together to accomplish something that is fundamentally good. During my first few months at Red Hat, I thought it was strange that I was being copied on many “thank you!” or “great job!” notes that the management team sent. This rarely happened at Delta or at BCG. But this behavior is embedded deep into Red Hat’s DNA, where everyone tends to err on the side of over-thanking people and going out of his or her way to acknowledge the good work others are doing. When you have passion inside your organization as Red Hat does, a leader and manager’s role becomes more about creating context and reinforcing what purpose and end goal the organization is working toward.
Having boundless passion for the mission is common in start-ups. You might even argue that it’s a prerequisite to getting a business off the ground. But one of the challenges any organization has is how to keep the level of passion high even as it continues to grow and add new people in different locations. There are more than seven thousand Red Hatters, for example, spread among more than eighty offices and working remotely worldwide. To help stoke the flames of passion in every location, we have an internal employment branding team that celebrates the people and activities that drive company culture forward and then takes that culture external to attract like-minded candidates to our growing company.
A key project for the team is a quarterly video, “The Show,” which captures the essence of some of the most interesting things, people, and happenings inside Red Hat worldwide. For example, “The Show” might highlight one Red Hatter who makes his own Iron Man Halloween costume using open source designs he pulled from the internet. Or, it might feature a profile of someone like Michael Tiemann, vice president of open source affairs, who, besides being one of the preeminent thinkers in the open source community, is also a music aficionado who built his own recording studio, Manifold Recording, using open source designs and software. We might also have a segment about the different ways groups of Red Hatters have given back to the community. “The Show” also highlights different Red Hat offices worldwide as a way to celebrate our international and cultural diversity.
Video is a much more powerful way to make these connections than just a corporate newsletter sent to everyone. It’s a better medium for capturing the visceral nature of passion. And passion tends to rise when people are together. So, we work hard to make sure “The Show” is not just a link on the intranet that nobody clicks on. We promote it by holding a viewing party in every Red Hat office, where Red Hatters can meet people from other teams, connect with old friends, and laugh together at the video, while also enjoying food and perhaps an adult beverage or two. “The Show” even highlights some of the more creative parties that different Red Hat offices throw to watch the video.
In addition, we now set aside an entire week each year to celebrate our people, culture, and brand—“We Are Red Hat Week.” While possibly sounding arrogant, it’s really a purpose-driven exercise to reinforce what the company stands for and what we believe in—all of which got its start on Halloween in 1994 when Marc Ewing first released Red Hat Linux. We’ve continued that tradition by making Halloween more than just about costumes and candy; we now celebrate the culture of Red Hat. I dress up at the annual Halloween party during “We Are Red Hat Week” and perform a skit with other senior executives. It’s like a team-building event or even like Homecoming Week at your alma mater; it’s a chance to bond over shared experiences and to build anticipation for creating even more reasons to celebrate in the future.
The practice is fairly common at organizations that foster the passion of their workforces. Zappos, for example, holds a companywide meeting every quarter that is “like a high school play mixed with presentations about company updates. At this meeting, employees have an opportunity to showcase their talents on stage, whether playing an instrument, dancing, or singing. It may be perceived as all fun and games, but this production also has a huge team-building component that requires employees from all departments to collaborate and organize.”14
By bringing associates together once a year to celebrate our identity as a company, we increase engagement, loyalty, and a healthy sense of pride, which will contribute to increased corporate revenue and growth for Red Hat as a whole. To accomplish that, we use an open source methodology and collaborative approach to build the content and the activities of the week, which range from games and volunteer events to the sharing of important company topics, such as corporate strategy, definitions of a brand, and product and technology insights. It’s far more than just “spirit week” or a coffee mug for associates one day of the year. It’s harnessing the essence of the company—our people, culture, and brand—and spending a whole week exploring it, connecting with each other, and becoming more in tune with who we are and what we stand for.
Each year, we focus on a theme based on where the company is. In 2013, for instance, the theme was unification among our more than eighty offices. In 2014, the focus was on moving forward together. Whatever the next twenty years throws at us, we can proceed with confidence, knowing that the best way to move forward is to move together.
Red Hat even leans on its community when deciding which charitable or nonprofit organizations to support. Donating money becomes another way to engage associates in the efforts they are most passionate about and meld their personal passions to what we do within the workplace. “We do it a little differently here, and the way the program came about and has grown is a pretty good illustration of our culture and values,” said Melanie Chernoff, government and community affairs manager at Red Hat, who joined the company nearly eight years ago as an intern. Chernoff now chairs the corporate citizenship committee, which oversees Red Hat’s worldwide charitable donations, associate matching-gift program, volunteer activities, and local community relations efforts.
Chernoff says that when she joined Red Hat after working for several years in the nonprofit sector, there was one committee in the headquarters office charged with charitable donations but no real strategy to determine which organizations would receive financial support. After she asked to join a meeting of that committee, her persistent questions and suggestions encouraged the other committee members to name her their new chair. “At Red Hat, if you have good background knowledge and have enthusiasm for something,” says Chernoff about our meritocracy, “eventually someone will say, ‘Congrats! This is now yours.’ This is definitely a culture that allows you to follow your own personal passion.”
In her new role, Chernoff headed up efforts to transform how Red Hat would give back, including sponsoring an anonymous survey issued to every associate about what kinds of organizations they supported personally and which they thought Red Hat should support. What Chernoff found was that Red Hat’s associates made clear distinctions between the two. Where individuals might be passionate about the environment or art, for example, they felt the company should support organizations in four key areas: basic needs, health, education, and technology.
With those priorities identified, Chernoff again turned to the Red Hat community to best determine which organizations in those categories would receive the Red Hat’s support. While there is admittedly executive involvement in the process in setting budgets, there is a strong commitment to let the associates run it from there.
“We are unusual in that we don’t have a vice president of corporate citizenship or a foundation like many companies our size do,” Chernoff says. “It is really about engaging our people, which is why we rely on associates around the world who volunteer their time to serve on committees.” Red Hat establishes committees in the different geographic areas in which we operate. We give each a pot of money to distribute every year to best engage their associates in that area. The overarching corporate citizenship committee provides advice and support to the local committees as needed, as well as implementing matching-gift and volunteer programs that also rely on the power of the community, not just an executive team, to decide where to apply our efforts.
Once you give power to the community to make decisions, its members begin to apply that responsibility in interesting and powerful ways. For example, in 2008, when the economic recession hit and the holidays approached, it was impossible to turn on the TV or read a news story that didn’t mention massive layoffs and the number of people who would soon be unemployed. While we were fortunate at Red Hat not to have to do anything that drastic, the notion of holding a large holiday party struck a sour note with many US associates whose family, friends, and neighbors were out of work.
That groundswell of support led to a change. Rather than throw a large gala event in Raleigh as we had done in the past, we instead held a modest party in our office. We donated the difference in what we would have spent on the party to a national charity chosen by associates. The US associates nominated thirty different organizations, and the North America committee vetted the nominations, selected five finalists, and put them up for a vote. That first year, the associates voted for America’s Second Harvest, a national network of food banks; the program has continued in similar fashion with organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project, charity: water, Meals On Wheels, and Communities In Schools receiving our support during the holidays. The annual holiday donation is now one of the most popular company traditions with our associates.
Keep the Fires in Check
A leader’s role can also involve keeping a passionate organization constructively focused when things begin to run amok, which they undoubtedly will. For some leaders, that could be considered a significant downside of introducing and stoking the emotions of the workforce. We have had disruptive battles flare up inside the organization when the “freedom fighters” face off against the “capitalists” over key decisions related to the kinds of technology we use at an enterprise level all the way down to the desktop. For Red Hat, these valuable debates impact our culture, but they are also times when our emotions can get the best of us. Sometimes, emotions make us lose sight of the facts in a situation—we tune out the merits of something we don’t agree with. But, the upside outweighs any potential downside. We have worked hard to find ways to keep our emotions from overwhelming us. We have learned the value of hitting the pause button and having a difficult conversation about why we did what we did (something I’ll cover in more detail in chapter 5). The point is that as an organization, we have had to learn how to best balance our passions so that they don’t become destructive.
If you look through the right lens, every organization has the potential for world-changing impact. The role of a leader is to foster passion around that impact and to keep that passion alive by reinforcing it every day. In Red Hat’s case that means advocating for the power of open source or championing its role in bringing positive change to the world. Our organization continues to pursue that purpose by making investments in open source beyond those required for our business, such as supporting free and open fonts anyone can use without the encumbrance of copyrights that would force payment for them. Red Hat’s legal team tirelessly works to defend software freedom in the courts. We also support other organizations like the Software Freedom Law Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Creative Commons to show that we truly believe in the power of open source principles.
If your workers believe that what they are doing in their daily roles means far more than simply padding the company’s bottom line, that they truly have an impact on the world in some way, what they can accomplish will be amazing.
Jim’s Leadership Tips
1.Passion is contagious. Begin to personally display emotion, and others will follow.
2.Most companies have a stated purpose or mission. If yours doesn’t, advocate to develop one. If it does, make sure you integrate it into your dialogue with others. It needs to be part of everyday discourse.
3.Add passionate words to your vocabulary at work, like “love,” “hate,” “excited,” or “upset.” It should be easy—you already use them at home. Others will start to use them if you do.
4.Add questions to tease out passion when you interview. Ask “what are you passionate about?” or “what inspires you?”
5.Create vehicles for people to show their unvarnished selves. Company outings or team-building events need to allow for some silliness.