3

Building Engagement

Leaders at large, conventional organizations often ask me how it feels to lead an engaged, participative organization. That’s a critical issue, especially because Gallup research shows that only 13 percent of employees worldwide are actively engaged at work, and more than twice that number are so disengaged they are likely to spread negativity to others.¹ Many executives see companies like Google, which gives away food and other perks, and think that building an engaged workforce is about lavishing things on your employees. Certainly perks like great sushi may get people to stick around the office longer, but they aren’t in themselves tools that engage.

True engagement comes from, well, engaging. It’s about leaders making themselves available for constant dialogue with employees. When I bring up this point in conversations with peers in the executive ranks, I often get blank stares and questions like, “That sounds like a massive time sink. It can’t be worth it, right?” Or, “We’ve invested heavily in internal communications capabilities to discuss what’s happening at the company.” Or even, “Employees are welcome and encouraged to listen to our earnings call.” I, too, used to struggle with how best to describe what we do at Red Hat as fundamentally different from simply proactively pushing out information to employees.

But I have come to appreciate that, as technology has automated rote tasks and as business strategies rely more on employees’ initiative and innovative abilities, there is greater need for them to deeply understand and support the direction of the company. It’s not just the changing nature of business strategies that are driving the need for engagement. It’s the next generation of our workforce as well. Millennial workers have far greater expectations than their parents for being heard in the workplace. If you want to recruit the best and brightest talent and then keep them engaged in their jobs, you’ll need to become far more accountable to them in terms of explaining why you made certain decisions, and own the results as well.

In their book, Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People, Stanford professors Charles O’Reilly III and Jeffrey Pfeffer conclude that if companies create a culture in which employees take psychological ownership, even average employees can perform at high levels.² If employees feel that they are listened to and appreciated—that is, when they are engaged—great things can result.

Consider the Rochester, New York–based grocery chain, Wegmans Food Markets, which is renowned for its workplace culture, exceptional product range, and superlative customer service. As one employee noted during the company’s application to a “best places to work” list, “I contribute something really meaningful. This company takes pride in empowering its people to a point where they do not feel like they are just ‘doing a job,’ they are actually playing a pivotal role in the company.”³

I described the importance of purpose and passion in chapter 2; there is a tendency for managers to confuse these concepts with engagement. But purpose and passion are about creating meaning and excitement in one’s work, while engagement is more about channeling that energy toward the specific areas that drive a company’s success. It’s about attention to the whats and hows of the company’s strategies and tactics. It’s about proactively being involved, curious, and questioning what the company is doing and each individual’s role in making it successful. Put another way, if you want to build engagement, you need to stop thinking in a conventional organizational manner.

Purpose and passion go a long way to creating the motivation for being engaged, but neither creates engagement per se. There are obviously people who are very excited about the overarching mission or purpose of a company but fail to understand its strategy for achieving that purpose. Most people at Red Hat are passionate about open source, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically engaged with the company and buy into the ways we are working to achieve our purpose. The leadership team and I must ensure that happens.

Many executives with whom I speak also confuse engagement with happiness or employee morale. Engagement isn’t about being happy. Happy people may or may not be engaged in the business. According to Sue Moynihan, a director on the People team at Red Hat, companies tend to confuse “job satisfaction” levels among their associates with engagement. So rather than ask associates about how they feel about their compensation or benefits package—which are more closely tied to satisfaction—Moynihan’s team measures associate engagement levels by tracking how many people react affirmatively to statements such as:

1. The people I work with are passionate about Red Hat’s mission.
2. Associates at Red Hat take accountability for their work.
3. I believe Red Hat has a culture that allows me to learn and grow.

We also use a tool, Net Promoter Score (NPS), which has gained prominence throughout the business world as a way companies can ask customers if they would recommend their products or services to friends and family. At Red Hat, we’ve turned NPS into an internal tool and ask associates how willing they are to recommend working at Red Hat to their acquaintances, with the idea that only engaged associates would pass along an enthusiastic endorsement.⁴

None of the questions we ask attempt to measure morale or how happy people are. They measure knowledge of the business, how that applies to individual jobs, and perceptions of whether the rest of the organization is equally engaged. “If you’re engaged, you’re happier with your job, more interested in creating quality work, more productive, and more likely to recommend Red Hat as a great place to work,” Moynihan told me.

At Delta, someone asked me, “What are you going to do about our morale?” My answer was, “Nothing.” Morale is an output of many things. If employees believe in and are passionate about their purpose, have the tools they need to do their work well, and are engaged in what they are trying to accomplish, then they’ll most likely have high morale. But the answer to low morale is to focus on purpose, tools, and engagement, not directly on trying to make people happy in and of itself. That’s treating the symptoms, not the cause. People need to believe that the company and its leaders care about them. We see this theme in our survey results—Red Hat cares about its people, their workspace, their health, their needs. We are a community in that sense, and that’s a big part of building morale.

If a key goal of the open organization is to build the capability for members to make their own decisions, act quickly, take initiative, and creatively solve problems, then engagement is critical. I’ve heard many times—and correctly, I believe—that a leader’s primary job is to create context for his or her organization. As Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks, once said: “The person who sweeps the floor should choose the broom … We need to get rid of rules—real and imagined—and encourage independent thinking.”⁵ That is a powerful statement for an organization with more than twenty-three thousand locations worldwide, where thousands of its employees deal one-on-one with its customers. Having that kind of trust in an employee is a powerful statement that will, in most cases, bring out the best in that employee.

The department store Nordstrom is renowned for its exceptional customer service. When new hires join, they are given a one-page employee manual that states: “Welcome to Nordstrom. We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them. Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules. Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.”⁶

That statement applies to leaders at every level of an open organization. It is dramatically easier and more effective when the people you are leading are proactively seeking that context. Similarly, initiatives aimed at offering greater transparency, information, and so on to all associates can be powerful, but if people aren’t fundamentally engaged—if they don’t care—then they really won’t believe it anyway.

The Power of Engagement

My ah-ha moment about the importance of building engagement by communicating both the good news and the bad with your employees—and my conviction that this can be replicated at virtually any company—came when I was still working at Delta. Specifically, it was the day Delta filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. I was the chief operating officer at the time and responsible for developing and driving the turnaround plan. I had spent an exhausting several months either locked up with a small group of advisers working on the plan or in a New York conference room pitching our plan to raise financing from lenders.

The day the company filed for bankruptcy was horrible for every member of the Delta family. For me, it was also a crazy day of press interviews, calls, and meetings. At some point, I was asked if I would be willing to stop by the break room at the airport that night to meet with the night-shift line mechanics. Our turnaround plan included significant changes to maintenance in addition to pay and benefit cuts, so all of those employees would be negatively affected. I was running from one thing to another and, without much thought, I said, “Sure.” I didn’t realize at the time that the suggestion to go meet with those mechanics would become the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

By the time I arrived at the break room, I was exhausted. This wasn’t a preplanned, prescripted event. As I walked in, I realized I had no idea what I was going to say, but there were a couple hundred people staring at me and waiting for me to speak. I decided that the best thing to do was to tell them the truth. I said that I was sorry and that the turnaround would require real sacrifices, but I also let them know that they were part of our holistic plan to revive the airline. I then launched into the same forty-five-minute speech about our plan that I had been giving to the bankers in New York for the prior few weeks. At the end, I apologized again, letting them know that management had failed them, but we had a plan to fix the problems. There was a lot of detail about arcane network and fleet concepts, but I thought it was important for everyone to understand how his or her sacrifices fit into the whole plan.

When I finished, I think everyone was a little stunned; at first, they just looked at me. Then they started asking questions—lots of them. Most impressively, the questions weren’t about the pay cuts and benefits changes. Instead, people asked insightful and detailed questions about the plan itself. They were truly interested in how it would work and what they could do to make the plan successful.

I finally made it home and got some sleep, but word quickly spread about my trip to the break room. Suddenly, I had requests from areas across the company that wanted to hear the same speech. Those requests led to a more formal program that we called the “Velvet Rope Tour,” where I joined other Delta leaders and spent time with groups of several hundred employees at a time, candidly sharing our plan and answering questions. Employees were pleased that the company respected them enough to share a high level of detail about our vision for Delta’s future and how we came to the decisions we’d made. In turn, we saw a substantial jump in engagement, despite the fact that our employees’ jobs were at risk.

Skipping ahead a few years, I was walking through the international terminal in Atlanta when two Delta mechanics approached me. They mentioned the speech I had given and thanked me again for laying out the plan, notably the details I shared about our intent to expand Delta’s international presence. They had both taken that plan to heart and transferred to the international concourse, knowing they would be a big part of the company’s turnaround. That was incredibly gratifying for me, and I had tears in my eyes as I thanked those two gentlemen and went on my way.

In the end, I garnered many great lessons from those experiences, such as:

• Bad or tough news is much better accepted when delivered in person. Be open and honest. Don’t sugar-coat bad news.
• People thirst for context; they want to know the whats and whys of their company’s direction, and they want to be part of making it successful.
• Being accessible, answering questions, admitting mistakes, and saying you’re sorry builds your credibility and authority to lead.

All employees want a sense that their work is making a difference. They want to know how what they do is important to the whole. My Delta experience demonstrates that people are willing to make substantial personal sacrifices if they believe they are part of a broader plan for success. Leaders often underestimate the importance of creating that context and overestimate how much people know about the strategic direction of their organizations.

Engagement Is the Foundation

Of course, many companies and leaders understand the value of having an engaged workforce. What’s different in an open organization is that it’s not a “nice to have” overlay. It’s actually a key component of the management system, especially as it applies to getting work done effectively. To put that another way, if you have an engaged workforce, it actually changes where and how you make decisions regarding what needs to get done. When you consider that thousands, if not millions, of decisions can be made within an organization every day, your ability to make faster and better decisions can have a massive impact on the competitiveness of your organization.

One major function of any management system is to effectively identify and react to changes in the marketplace. To me, the best articulation of this process comes from John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel and military strategist, who created the OODA loop. He originally conceived of OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) to describe the process a fighter pilot must go through to win a dogfight (see figure 3-1).

The idea is that we are constantly processing information that we observe—whether the location of enemy combatants or the actions of our competitors—before choosing to act on those observations. Therefore, the faster you can close the loop between new observations and take action, the more effective those actions will be. Consider the example of a fighter pilot flying a routine scouting mission. Out of the blue, he runs into enemy forces intent on shooting him down. That pilot might be required to report his situation to his commanding officers before he’s allowed to fight back, which obviously puts his life in danger. If he’s given more leeway to act on his own observations, he should be able to more effectively deal with the situation, based on those observations.

In conventional organizations, the OODA loop functions within a hierarchy that is similar to a pilot waiting for orders. Standardized management reports and communications working their way up the hierarchy through the chain of command are the “observe and orient” functions. Decisions are then made somewhere in that chain, and directions are subsequently passed back down for action. One risk of this system is that useful information is filtered or lost, and therefore important signals are missed. Another is the amount of time it can take for information to flow up, decisions to be made, and directives for action sent back. As the pace of business accelerates, those flaws are exacerbated.

But an open organization management system can be much more effective because, for the most part, it empowers the people making the observations to act on that information rather than pushing it up the ladder and waiting for orders. This obviously assumes that people observing the situation have enough context and knowledge to know what observations require changes. For the most part, pilots have the leeway they need to decide on their own actions, but they have been well trained for this.

An obvious question is, how do employees know when the barrage of information coming at them represents an opportunity or a threat? Empowering your workers to act unilaterally to changes they observe requires that they have the knowledge and context of the strategy so that they act appropriately. Engagement, therefore, is a critical element to the distributed management system we have at Red Hat.

Even so, isn’t there a risk that workers will make poor decisions? Yes, but that’s mitigated by the adoption of the open source principle of “release early; release often”—or “fail fast”—that entails tightening that feedback loop (I’ll cover this in more detail in chapter 7). Here at Red Hat, people managers play a critical role in this process. They must determine the appropriate amount of latitude that each individual is capable of handling, plus develop, coach, and stretch their capabilities along the way. To make this work, everyone in the organization must have a sense of the strategy, why it will be successful, and how his or her individual actions can contribute toward those goals. But that’s the definition of engagement, which is why having engaged employees is so important to the operation of an open organization.

Engagement also greatly improves another key management function—control. Not only are engaged organizations quicker to act, but they also require far fewer top-down controls. In many ways, the more engaged an organization is, the more self-policing it will be. If you no longer rely on conventional top-down management hierarchies to solve problems, you need to encourage and empower the members of your organization to solve their own issues. Consider how open source communities operate when there is no leader or group of leaders officially in charge. Rather, there are people who are charged with making decisions based on the input they receive from the group. When someone goes astray, the community itself resolves the issue. That’s not to say that people can’t be trusted. It’s just that the more you are accountable to your peers, the more aware you’ll be of the impact of your decisions and actions. That means employees and contributors are expected to work out issues among themselves, rather than bumping them up through the hierarchy for resolution, as in so many conventional corporate cultures. An open organization is focused on driving innovation and keeping ahead of market trends, not devoting scarce people power to missteps better left for peers to solve. Too many organizations tend to get sucked down into creating policies and procedures aimed at quelling misbehavior, which is truly a waste of a talented person’s time and energy.

For example, if someone uses memo-list, our companywide e-mail list that reaches every Red Hatter, or any of our other internal communication tools in ways that contradict the values of the Red Hat community, he or she will pay a price. Managers at Red Hat coach their direct reports to work out their own issues, rather than immediately jumping in to act as mediator. “If you’re a jerk and misbehave, you get frozen out and rendered ineffective and miserable, so there’s a much higher penalty than a manager could ever induce for not being cooperative,” said Máirín Duffy, a user-interface designer based in the Westford, Massachusetts office.

Similarly, Red Hat management trusts its community of associates to create ground rules when they’re necessary. Sometimes, self-enforcement manifests itself in unexpected ways. An infamous story lovingly remembered as the “Bagel Touching Incident” involved an associate who took a bagel from a plate in the kitchen of the Raleigh office, then apparently decided to eat only half of it before returning the rest to the plate. When other associates noticed what had happened, they took to the Raleigh office e-mail list, which we call rdu-list, to decry the anonymous person’s behavior. Someone also taped up a sign in the kitchen that said, “No bagel touching.”

A similar incident occurred when one associate parked his or her car in a space reserved for a motorcycle. Within hours, pictures of the offending car found their way onto the rdu-list, along with associate-rendered ASCII-art diagrams and suggestions for painting better lines in the Raleigh parking garage.

Clearly, self-enforcement is not all about high-minded debate and grim punishment; it often involves humor and lightheartedness. But peer-to-peer management isn’t just about enforcement; it’s also a critical form of celebration and support. That means that every associate relies on his or her peers for the praise and acknowledgment that most companies give only their managers the power to bestow. “One of the things I appreciate the most about Red Hat is that we don’t just call each other on our B.S.,” Thomas Cameron, a chief architect, told me. “I am constantly impressed how often people point out when things go right. And it’s not fake cheerleader stuff either. People will tell you, ‘Thanks for kicking ass,’ and really mean it.”

Leveraging 360-Degree Accountability

In the conventional industrial model of labor management, managers managed and laborers worked. There was very little expectation that management would be accountable to labor. It would rarely have crossed a manager’s mind to explain the rationale for decisions or directives. The mind-set was that workers would be equally efficient regardless of how much they understood about the company. In fact, they might be less efficient if they thought too much, slowing production lines and asking why. They were largely considered to be replaceable cogs rather than valuable intellectual assets.

Everybody knows what accountability is. In conventional organizations, accountabilities are clear, and they only go in one direction: up. Each person is accountable to his boss. That person is accountable to her boss. And so on. That’s why accountability is neatly distributed and clearly rolls up. It’s simple and scientific, and anyone who has ever had a boss knows what it is. But being accountable doesn’t mean you have to ask for permission before you make every decision. It’s not about saying, “May I?” all the time. Rather, it’s about being accountable for a set of outputs after the fact.

So the simplest way I can describe the role of a leader in building, fostering, and enhancing an engaged workforce is to say, “You are accountable to everybody.” That truly sets the appropriate bar for a leader’s actions to driving deep engagement. For Chris Van Gorder of Scripps Health in San Diego, which employs more than thirteen thousand people in twenty-nine locations, managers are held accountable for quality, safety, and financial metrics, but also for people metrics: “I always teach at the new manager orientation that your biggest job in life is to take care of people. That is your job. If you take care of people, they will take care of you. But I also talk about responsibility and accountability. I am pretty harsh on accountability. My definition of accountability is, you can miss your targets once. You won’t be here to miss them twice. Pretty simple.”⁷

I and all of Red Hat’s managers are accountable to everyone in the organization for:

• Knowing our strategy.
• Listening.
• Engaging.

To put that another way, my job is to explain not just what we’re doing as an organization, but also why we’re doing it. It’s to inform and give context for our collective actions. My job is also to take questions and feedback and engage associates in a conversation about the decisions we’re making as a team.

But the truth, it seems, is that most leaders and managers find it difficult to make themselves accountable at work for a couple of reasons. First off, it takes a lot of time to listen. You have to believe that it’s part of your job description to invest your time that way. As soon as you think that’s unproductive time, then it becomes brutally painful.

Early in my career, a senior partner in BCG’s change management practice told me that, if you really want people to understand something, you have to tell them five times. I think she might have been conservative. Engaging with people takes a ton of time. You can’t staff it out; you can’t delegate it. You can use electronic tools to help facilitate communication, but you can’t automate it either. It requires personal commitment. In the scope of the myriad other things that today’s fragmented executives have on their plates, it’s an easy one to let go. There’s no immediate payback. The fruits of an engaged workforce come over time. You truly have to believe in the value, or you won’t do it.

You won’t hear employees if you’ve delegated the task of listening. I make the effort to personally answer every e-mail I receive from Red Hat associates, though I warn folks that it could take me a couple of days to respond. As a leader, your role isn’t to tell people what to do but to tell people how they are important and how they fit in.

Unfortunately, few conventionally run organizations think about how they can use the tools they have in place, including e-mail, to create the kinds of two-way conversations needed to build accountability. At Delta, for example, I was the only executive who voluntarily gave out my e-mail address to every employee (and I did the same thing when I joined Red Hat). I made it clear that anyone could e-mail me anytime and that I would get back to him or her, if not immediately, in a reasonable amount of time. The result? It was as if I had unleashed the floodgates of pent-up demand.

I decided to share my e-mail address because, as I was walking through a maintenance hangar one day, one of the mechanics stopped me and complained that he had been using the company suggestion box, but clearly nobody was listening. Knowing that was probably the truth, I told the mechanic he could just e-mail me directly instead. But after doing this for one employee, I realized that I would probably get a lot of valuable feedback if I opened it up to everyone. It’s next to impossible for a frontline employee to send a direct e-mail to top executives at any big, conventional organization. Which begs the question, why? In my opinion, feedback is a gift. I want and need to hear from folks throughout the company.

I once received an e-mail from a member of the airline maintenance department. The question required a somewhat delicate answer, so I tried to answer as best I could. I then received a response asking if I would be willing to discuss the issue further at a barbecue lunch the department was hosting the following week. As soon as I got that, I was intrigued. So I just picked up the phone and called up my new pen pal to tell him I would be excited to attend. After I explained who I was, there was a moment or two of silence on the other end of the line. “A few of my colleagues bet me that it wasn’t really you answering your e-mail,” he told me. That’s exactly why it does matter that you, as a leader, open yourself up to everyone you work with.

While that’s not always easy to do, there are systems you can put in place to help. Starbucks, for instance, has a program called “Mission Review,” which encourages anyone in the organization to voice concerns about whether the company has strayed from its mission statement or guiding principles. The program has been a great success in that it generates thousands of comments from within the organization. Someone with knowledge of the issue or a member of the mission review team follows up on each comment.⁸

At Red Hat, I’ve needed to take my own level of responsiveness to a new level. Now, in addition to answering e-mails and occasionally responding to an important tweet, I hold informal town hall meetings in our offices worldwide to answer associates’ questions. Yes, you can risk being overwhelmed at times, maybe even criticized or taken aback by questions about problems you thought had been solved. In my mind, that’s how progress occurs.

Most leaders are wary of receiving lots of complaints. A number of Red Hat execs, especially when wanting to make a significant change, will groan because they know that they will have to confront the inevitable complaints, questions, and so on that come with working through changes. As one senior leader has said to me, “Everyone at Red Hat believes that it’s their God-given right to complain about anything and everything.” And frankly, they’re right. It’s part of what engagement is all about. It’s painful and time consuming to hear a barrage of complaints, but the ultimate result makes it worthwhile. I’m fond of using the “it’s like eating your broccoli” analogy. Going through the process isn’t necessarily the most pleasurable experience, but it’s actually good for you, and you’ll feel better in the end. At Red Hat, we’ve all seen the results of the power of engagement. We all know it works and makes the effort worthwhile.

But it can be frustrating. Often, as a leader, you get excited to engage your people in the things you want them to focus on. You set up town halls, chat sessions, and so on, only to find out that your people want to discuss other things—things that you may not think are important or you simply don’t want to spend time on. It’s easy to feel as if those are a waste of time relative to the key issues you’re trying to resolve. However, if these are the issues on people’s minds, you need to address them proactively before they’ll engage on the issues you want them to. It’s a give-and-take, and ultimately you end up with better engagement.

The final barrier—and for many leaders, the most significant—is that it’s never fun to admit your own mistakes. A painful experience for many of us, we’d rather avoid it. A study of a thousand leaders and employees conducted by Forum Corporation, a global consulting firm, found that only 19 percent of the employees it surveyed said their bosses were willing to apologize if they made a mistake.⁹

Why? The results showed that these conventional-style bosses were afraid of appearing incompetent or weak. Amazingly, 7 percent said they simply “didn’t have to” apologize for making a mistake. I guess that makes sense if you fully buy into the conventional hierarchical organization as the only way to maintain order and get things done.

A good example of how I learned to be accountable to my team at Red Hat came in the wake of our acquisition of Qumranet. The decision was a bold step forward for the company into a white-hot sector called “virtualization,” a technical term for describing how you can get a computer to run multiple operating systems at the same time. Buying the company gave us a leadership position in a key strategic area that underlies cloud computing. But while much of its technology was open source, key components had been written in another proprietary language and were anything but open. Our internal tech estimated that it would take about six months to a year to rewrite those pieces of code.

That left me in a dilemma. We had just spent more than $100 million to buy a company in a sector that was moving fast, and we would have to wait almost a year before deploying it. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to go to market with what we had, with the idea that we would work in parallel to rewrite the code.

The end result was a giant dud. Not only did our associates hate using the product, they couldn’t support it well because they weren’t familiar with the code. Worse, our customers—who choose us because we are open source—didn’t like it either. It quickly became obvious that I had made a mistake and that we would need to pull back the product and rewrite the code before we released it again. All in all, that mistake added up to about a year-and-a-half delay instead of a six-month one. But I owned it. I admitted to the company and board of directors that I was wrong and then hatched a plan to launch the product in a way that was true to Red Hat.

This example shows how essential it is to remain accountable to those affected by your decisions. Of course, there was quite a bit of anger and frustration among Red Hatters who wondered why the company was falling behind in the virtualization market. I realized that our associates deserved to hear the story of why we made the decision as much as the board did. When you don’t explain your decision, people will often assume the worst: that you’re detached, are dumb, or don’t care. But when I explained the rationale—that my management team and I had, in fact, put a lot of thought into it—people finally understood. Red Hat associates appreciated that I owned my mistake; I earned their trust by explaining my decision—which also makes you a stronger leader. If you want to have engaged employees, in other words, you need to explain your decisions.

The key point for any leader is that you can build an enormous sense of trust and loyalty among employees when you actually take responsibility for your mistakes. For example, the Forum Corporation study also noted: “There can be no doubt that trust in leadership has a massive impact on workplace culture and business results. Employees that trust their leadership team are more loyal and efficient in their jobs. In fact, a solid foundation of trust can lead to increased productivity, profitability, and lower turnover.”¹⁰

Being accountable to your employees is so much more than simply apologizing for your mistakes; it’s about sharing the rationale for why you made any significant decision if the members of your organization weren’t directly involved in making it (how to arrive at decisions is something I dig deeper into in chapter 6). As a leader, your responsibility is to create the context, framing, and explanation for why you chose a particular path. That means you’ll be explaining yourself a lot, which can be really hard. Many CEOs complain about all the different “bosses” they have—from board members to analysts on Wall Street. You potentially have thousands of bosses in the guise of your associates and community members. Being accountable to all those folks is time consuming and emotionally draining. But when you do it, the payoff is enormous.

Generally, there has been an increase in the acceptance and importance of the notion of “corporate responsibility,” where companies have become accountable to more than just their shareholders and the bottom line. For instance, companies have become more involved with the communities they work in—either literally, as in a town, city, or the environment, or virtually, as in the case of the Linux community. To do this, leaders have had to adjust their mind-set about who and what they are accountable for.

To do this well, and at the scale we have at Red Hat, you’ll need to work hard on how you communicate.

The Leader’s Role: Scaling Up Engagement

Some CEOs believe in the power of proximity, where they want all their employees working in the corporate headquarters as a way to facilitate conversations (and likely to keep an eye on employees as well). At Red Hat, we think differently about how we connect thousands of associates, many of whom live all over the world. There are obstacles to connecting so many people virtually. More importantly, though, we have developed communications channels in a way that allows us to scale so we aren’t hampered by the fact that our associates aren’t with us physically. As Richard W. M. Jones, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, put it, “I don’t think it makes that much difference, now that we’re a company of more than seven thousand people, whether you’re remote or in an office. The chances of me working physically near to people that I collaborate with is not high.” In other words, just because a person sits next to someone doesn’t solve the issue of how we can enable that same associate to communicate with an individual on the other side of the world.

In setting up employee communication systems, many companies make the mistake of thinking this problem can be solved simply by throwing technology at it. Executives who still think conventionally might tell human resources or IT to go out and buy collaboration tools. But, unless the company has the structure in place to let employees honestly talk to each other and their bosses, the tools won’t help. So managers should first listen and then find the right communication tools. The grocery chain Wegmans, for example, has come up with a relatively low-tech solution it calls “Meeting in a Box,” a template of talking points, videos, FAQs, and feedback-gathering tools that managers can use to facilitate conversations about everything from health benefits to the financial state of the company.

Low-tech “huddling” is also a common practice at any of the growing number of companies in the SRC Holdings family, an organization with more than twelve hundred employees and $400 million in sales, which originally spun out of a failed International Harvester plant in 1982. Much of what SRC does is connected to remanufacturing, or rebuilding everything from engine parts to electronics used in farm combines. It’s the kind of work that requires you to get your hands dirty. But you can walk into any SRC factory on a given day and see hundreds of associates gathered around an easel or a whiteboard showing their daily or weekly huddles. The company’s associates actively participate in understanding the health of the business by writing financial results on the whiteboards. That practice is part of SRC’s famed open-book management system that uses transparency and financial literacy—along with low-tech tools like whiteboards—to deeply engage associates. “The meetings are, in fact, just one link in a chain of communication that is constantly moving information up and down the organization,” writes Jack Stack, SRC’s CEO, adding that when people are given information, they begin to see the big picture as it relates to meeting their targets, earning a bonus, increasing the value of the company’s stock, and protecting their jobs. “One way or another, they are moving in the right direction and in the same direction,” Stack said. “We are all working together to make those fractional improvements that determine whether or not we succeed as a business.”¹¹

Similarly, at Red Hat, despite being a cutting-edge technology company, we primarily rely on good old-fashioned, low-tech e-mail lists to help facilitate our conversations. We understand that participation is based on building that culture of accountability, not a set of tools. To help keep conversations on point, people can use separate channels. Over time, new associates naturally figure out what type of content belongs where. Here are a few examples of communication vehicles at Red Hat:

• Announce-list—An e-mail list for broadcasting information that probably won’t need or require conversation. If a post generates more than one response, it will typically move onto memo-list.
• Memo-list—An e-mail list where we post informal things that will likely have a companywide impact and where we expect significant debate to occur. It’s not atypical to have dozens or hundreds of messages on particularly important topics.
• A topic-specific list, such as Cloud-Strategy-List—Where associates most interested in cloud computing can discuss and debate topics in this area.
• Blogs—When someone has something really substantial and thoughtful to share, they blog about it. They know not everyone will read it, but it allows for much deeper exploration of narrower subjects.
• Wikis—When someone wants a more structured dialogue and more thoughtful feedback, the final weapon of choice is to use a wiki.

Conversations in these different channels can sometimes seem chaotic or even out of control. That’s okay. As a leader, you need to learn to not police the chatter too much. If you do, you risk dampening its power. I learned this through experience. At one point, memo-list had become almost too polluted with nonbusiness-related items that many thought had simply gone too far. Some were sending out funny pictures of cats, and consequently people were starting to tune out the important items we wanted to share around the company. My initial instinct was to implement a set of rules to fix the problem. Fortunately, before my conventional organization top-down instincts kicked in, I got some advice from other veteran Red Hatters who suggested that I reach out to the most active memo-list users and posters and ask them to come up with the solution. And they did: they developed a set of guidelines and self-monitored the list, coaching people who were posting material that did not fit the role of the memo-list. They created another list for humorous material, because they recognized that associates, especially remote Red Hatters, wanted an outlet for sharing nonwork-related things with like-minded people. That was a key lesson for me in terms of learning how to foster participation without setting the rigid ground rules that tend to push associates away from contributing.

As a global company, Red Hat also had to turn to other solutions that help all of us stay connected as a whole and as parts of smaller working teams. Since even scheduling a room for an in-person meeting or arranging a global conference call can be complicated in an organization like ours, one of the internal teams put together a series of “connection tips” that highlight methods and approaches people use to connect and collaborate, combined with some perspective from the folks who actually put the tools to use:

1. IRC (or instant messaging). By far the most popular of all the tools, IRC is seen as a quick, casual, easy way to connect when you need to solve a problem or just stay in touch. “Instant Messaging (IM) is my lifeline. Sometimes just a quick answer is all that is needed and you don’t want the e-mail to get buried. So having the ability for the fast connection is the best. I love that our team is all on IM and we use it constantly,” commented Joan Richards, senior principal program marketing manager. According to Jennifer Scalf, technical account manager, “IRC lets me communicate with Red Hatters across the globe quickly. There are very few barriers; you can be anywhere chatting with someone else who is anywhere. Most of the time, whether it is in a channel or one-on-one with a person, the speed and effectiveness of using IRC to solve technical issues is amazing.”
2. E-mail. Although some felt it wasn’t always used effectively, e-mail has its place in collaboration efforts. “We use this as a fallback for when we can’t get a hold of someone. It’s really the slowest and least responsive of the technologies we use. But it’s persisted across days/weeks/etc.,” said Jason Connor, senior software engineer. Stephen J. Smoogen, Fedora team, added, “Always default to e-mail. It is a recorded media, it can be kept as a local copy, and it can hold a lot of data which might not be easily communicated in IRC or other things.”
3. Elluminate. The web-conferencing program is a great tool for sharing presentations and keeping a recorded copy. “I love to use phone and Elluminate (and recording for replays). I’ll share desktop/browser and slide deck to discuss topic of training session and allow real-time Q&A and demo of new feature/function in product releases,” commented Cliff Perry, manager of software engineering.
4. Etherpad/social intranet. These tools, which include one called Mojo, provide a lot of interaction and online collaboration on documents and notes. According to Peter Larsen, solution architect, “I use Mojo [our social intranet platform] to allow collaboration in regards to official documentation, presentations, etc., that I share with my peers (or they with me). We’ll communicate on e-mail/IM/IRC and share links to information on Mojo that we then work on.”
5. Video conferencing. Although sometimes the hardest to use, video conferencing helps generate a feeling of being there when face-to-face isn’t possible. “We have once-a-week meetings on video chat. It helps to see people’s faces and facial expressions . . . even though the same information could be communicated on IRC or e-mail. It takes a bit longer, but it is worth it,” said Michael Foley, quality engineering supervisor.

The good news about using simple technologies is that you don’t have to wait for a corporate mandate or major program to implement a collaboration suite. Any group, department, or function can leverage existing tools to engage. Creating a departmental mailing list is generally easy to do. It’s not the technology that drives engagement. It’s the commitment of the leader to truly engage.

Scaling Engagement

Red Hat also works to scale engagement beyond its walls and beyond the software sector itself. To that end, we launched a site, opensource.com, in 2010 (we had owned the URL for many years) because we knew there were many inspiring stories about how the principles of open source—collaboration, transparency, meritocracy, and so on—were being leveraged beyond the software industry. Our hope was to create a place where anyone could learn about and share stories of the growing open source movement.

We call opensource.com a “Red Hat community service” because we provide the hosting and editing for the site. But the content—articles about how the open source way has woven into areas such as government, education, health, law, and life—comes from our extended community, which includes Red Hatters. Over the years, the most popular articles have covered a range of technical topics, such as a discussion about the top open source project management tools. But the site has also tackled everything from how open source helps libraries to how it might provide a solution to the problem of bee colony collapse.

Since launching the site, we have shared thousands of diverse open source stories and have gathered an impressive following. We’ve published thousands of articles and generated millions of page views. On social media, we have tens of thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook fans. We’re also growing our Google+ community and LinkedIn professionals group.

Jason Hibbets, who spearheads the effort for Red Hat, has worked to build a diverse and growing community that already numbers hundreds of authors, some Red Hatters but many who are not. Additionally, the most engaged community members have taken on the role of community moderators and are leading the continued evolution of the site. These volunteer moderators don’t work for Red Hat, but have a personal interest in the open source way. They contribute their time to write articles, engage with commenters, and spread the word about content on social media. “Opensource.com is a great example of the open principles of catalyzing a community and building a platform that engages other people,” says Jeff Mackanic, Red Hat’s senior director of global awareness, who was instrumental in launching the site.

While this community has helped plant the seeds of open source awareness, there is much left to do. The door is open for the open source way to bring success to nontechnology companies, schools, universities, governments—to the world. I eagerly await the day when the open source way becomes the expectation rather than the exception. Opensource.com is a place where we can shine a light on the progress along the way, thanks to our active participative community.

Go All the Way . . . or Don’t Start

When collecting feedback from employees and customers, many companies still rely on an age-old standard: the suggestion box. Usually it’s some kind of locked box stationed somewhere in the break room or similar area where management encourages people to tell it how the business could do better. The idea, of course, is that management collects the ideas and complaints regularly and then addresses the most pressing issues or even the best ideas.

But we know what really happens with the suggestion box. Nothing. I recall watching a television program on one of the food channels that features restaurant turnarounds. I’m sure you know the format: a famous restaurateur parachutes in to save a struggling business. In this particular episode, the struggling business owner pointed to a suggestion box as proof that he was listening to his employees and customers. Not only had the restaurant owner not bothered to check the contents of the box in some time, he had actually lost the key to it. The consultant used a sledgehammer to open the box as the camera zoomed in and dozens of ignored suggestions floated to the floor.

The worst possible thing is if employees contribute their best ideas and nothing happens. Listening is simply not enough. Or the HR department runs the effort without any other senior leadership involvement. That tells your people not to bother. Soliciting feedback and ignoring it is worse than not soliciting it at all. But it takes time to do things the right way—a lot of time.

Accountability plays a huge role in building a collaborative and innovative workplace. While you might go through the motions of putting out a suggestion box so your employees and customers can speak up and connect with you, it won’t mean a thing unless you’re serious about it. Ignoring your suggestion box will only push your employees further away, creating the kind of cynicism that becomes difficult to reverse. Employees simply won’t trust that you’re really listening.

While much of the feedback might not have any intrinsic value in isolation, the overall benefits are huge. Not only do you get a few good ideas, but, more importantly, you also get deep engagement from your employees. They will feel as if they are part of a living, breathing system, not mere cogs in the wheel.

Jim’s Leadership Tips

1.Enter every interaction with people in your organization believing that each person is equally accountable for his or her contributions and performance to everyone else, regardless of reporting relationship.

2.If your boss is not providing the appropriate context, ask for it. Most bosses are happy to share. They just haven’t yet figured out that it’s part of what they should be doing.

3.Understand the tools and vehicles your company has for internal communications. Use them or advocate to get better ones.

FOR PEOPLE MANAGERS

1.Use every interaction as an opportunity to share context and knowledge.

2.Equip your team with the skills and knowledge to be successful.

FOR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS

1.Don’t wait for your manager to provide context. Be proactive. Understand your company’s strategy, and do what you can do to make it successful.

2.Engage with your peers. Learn from them and let them learn from you.