4

Choosing Meritocracy, Not Democracy

Most people understand how decisions are made in a hierarchy. You don’t have to know the specific people in the organization. All you have to see is the organization chart. In general, the higher on the chart, the more say a person has. If an issue cannot be resolved at one level of the hierarchy, it moves up until there’s just one decision maker. It’s neat and orderly. But what happens when you work in an organization that isn’t a top-down hierarchy? Who makes what decisions? How are disagreements adjudicated?

Red Hat still has organization charts, but how we make decisions doesn’t necessarily follow that structure. We have modeled ourselves less on the familiar, traditional corporate hierarchy model and more on what the ancient Athenians, the founders of democracy, called politeia, a term they used to describe their society. To be a member of the Athenian politeia, according to the authors of A Company of Citizens, meant that you thought, argued, and acted with your fellow citizens, and that you learned through the practice of civic life. Each person was actively engaged in learning and seeking a common purpose. In other words, the Athenians lived in what they called “a community of citizens,” which was built upon a meritocracy.¹ That system, when applied within a company of citizens, would be based on this recognition:

Merit means that decisions are based on the best case put forward; excellence, not position, prejudice, or privilege, is the criterion for choice. In a company of citizens, the best case for action is that which carries the day after the open, sufficient, and informed debate. Merit means that every thoughtful and knowledgeable individual, with good ideas based on real understanding, will get a hearing. The incompetent blowhard will not. The practice of merit gives lie to the idea that participatory democracy must devolve to the lowest common denominator.²

Similarly, the primary responsibility for leaders at Red Hat is to build and support our meritocracy by making sure the right people are working together on the right things. The people who are closest to the issue, rather than those responsible for the overall direction of the organization or team, tend to make the decisions. This requires collaboration and mutual respect between associates and their managers, in a complementary relationship. We try to have the right people in charge of the right decisions and hope they have the humility and organizational understanding to be open to influence and outside perspectives.

For example, at Stew Leonard’s, a chain of food stores in New York and Connecticut that is famed for its exceptional customer service, literally every employee can do whatever he or she needs to—from answering questions to rejecting faulty merchandise—to ensure customer satisfaction without having to first get approval from management.³ Similarly, at Red Hat, we strive to ensure that the people most capable of making the decisions, regardless of their title, make the vast majority of our decisions. But that raises two questions: Who is empowered to make a decision? Who decides who is empowered to make a decision?

It’s Not a Democracy

Many people assume that if an organization is not top-down, then it must be some flavor of democracy—a place where everyone gets a vote. In both hierarchies and democracies, decision making is clear and precise. It’s proscribed and can be easily codified. In most participative organizations, however, leaders and decision making don’t necessarily follow such clear rules, just as it was in ancient Athens, where literally every citizen had the same opportunities to lead or follow others. Some people have more influence than others. Some people state an opinion and quickly get others to fall in line. It’s not because they have positional authority. There is something else at work in these organizations. We’ve all seen it elsewhere, whether it’s a teenage daughter coping with the “queen bee” phenomenon or a social group in which there are one or two people who clearly run the show.

Exactly how leaders emerge and get others to follow in voluntary organizations has been the subject of much research and writing, which is far beyond the scope of this book (though I do recommend reading A Company of Citizens for more details on ancient Greek society). But it’s important to recognize that informal leaders do emerge. And in less structured, less hierarchical organizations, they are a key part of the overall management system.

At Red Hat, some of the seven thousand voices inside the company have far more sway than others. In most cases, decisions aren’t made by executive fiat, nor are they arrived at through consensus. Rather, those people who have earned their peers’ respect over time drive decisions. Associates who make a positive impact on the business and on the culture find that they gain more influence than those who do not. That’s why we call our culture a “meritocracy,” which, if you use Wikipedia’s definition, means:

A system of government or other administration (such as business administration) wherein appointments and responsibilities are objectively assigned to individuals based upon their “merits,” namely intelligence, credentials, and education.⁴

Michael Young coined the term in 1958 in his book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Strangely enough, Young used the term satirically as he described a dystopian future where a person’s place in society would be linked to his or her scores on standardized tests. But the term has evolved to take on a deeper, more positive meaning. For example, when Liz Elting, cofounder of TransPerfect (the parent company of Translations.com), was asked how her business has grown into a $350 million company with two thousand employees, she credited the culture of meritocracy they have created:

We did not know from day one how this meritocracy would develop or what the best practices would be. What we did know was that a meritocracy was the only model we felt we could truly believe in and fully support. We created a foundation of accountability that not only gave our employees the motivation to succeed, but also presented management with clear opportunities to unequivocally note an employee’s success. By holding each individual responsible for their goals and role within the company, we have been able to empower each member of TransPerfect to take ownership of their contributions and truly demonstrate their value. This core idea helped drive our very first employees; 2,000 people later, it continues to drive our business today.⁵

Within the meritocracy we have built at Red Hat, everyone has the right to speak and access the kinds of tools that will help ensure that his or her voice is heard. But to appreciate how a meritocracy works, you need to first recognize that not everyone is listened to equally. That is to say, everyone has an equal chance to be heard, but the meritocracy functions so that the collective helps empower and choose the leaders and influencers.

At most companies, everyone knows who the “A-players” or “superstars” are, even if their title doesn’t necessarily convey how much influence they have within the company. When I worked at BCG, we used the terms “thermometers” and “thermostats” to categorize people in an organization. Thermometers are people who reflect the temperature (hot, cold, or lukewarm) of the organization; the thermostats are the ones who set it. When it came time to create change in an organization, we knew we needed to get the thermostats on board to help drive those changes by setting a new temperature that would be quickly reflected by the thermometers.

The challenge for most companies, though, is that while everyone knows who the thermostats are, it’s very rare that anyone takes real advantage of his or her potential influence. The challenge and the opportunity for companies and organizations, therefore, are to find ways to not just openly recognize the thought leaders, but also to leverage the thermostats to drive innovation and decision making forward. When it’s time to make big decisions or get people on board with new initiatives, you need to find ways to get the thermostats involved in the action as early as possible. That’s how you can help ensure your best chances at success.

An example of how we leverage our thermostats at Red Hat is Máirín Duffy, a user-interface designer. Duffy started working at Red Hat as an intern and later joined full-time in 2004 after she graduated from college. While Duffy has made exceptional contributions to the core Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, she has also earned a stellar reputation throughout the company for her reasoned and intelligent contributions to memo-list conversations on everything from the creation of the mission statement to the adoption of certain controversial proprietary software programs. In a case involving the latter, DeLisa Alexander, executive vice president and chief people officer at Red Hat, approached Duffy to talk about such a proposed project. “DeLisa approached me in person—I had never met her in person before—because she knew from memo-list how vocally I was against Red Hat using proprietary software,” Duffy said. “She had caught wind of such a project and let me know about it, asked me what I thought, and supported my efforts to have it reconsidered. It eventually was and didn’t move forward then as planned. The people who take the initiative to make sure the right thing happens are the ones who end up winning the influence.”

This is an example in which a senior leader in the company went directly to someone working close to the frontlines to gather feedback on a fairly major corporatewide decision simply because Alexander, the executive, knew that Duffy, the designer, could help make or break the success of the final decision, based on her level of influence throughout the company. That’s how a meritocracy functions.

The Open Source Way: Leadership Is Earned

The first questions in building a meritocratic system are: How do you decide whose ideas get more time and attention? How do you assign merit in a modern corporation? Why would the opinion of someone like Máirín Duffy merit the attention of a high-level executive? Or, how does a fifty-year-old company like W. L. Gore continue to be successful despite the fact that it has a uniquely egalitarian culture in which there are very few traditional job titles and even fewer people considered to be bosses in any traditional sense?”⁶ The answer is surprisingly simple. To become a leader in a meritocracy, you need to attract followers first, not the other way around, as is typical in most conventional organization structures. Your peers actually have to select you as their leader based on how effective they think you are, not just because you have a more impressive title or résumé.

For newcomers to Gore’s culture, especially those accustomed to a more conventional corporate environment, joining the company can be a somewhat daunting experience:

“When I arrived at Gore, I didn’t know who did what. I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy.” She also didn’t know how to work without someone telling her what to do, and kept asking “Who’s my boss?” “Stop using the B-word,” she was told. She also saw that people didn’t fit into pre-defined job slots; they had team commitments that often combined roles traditionally done by different departments. It took a long time to get to know people and what they did, and to earn the credibility and trust required to be given responsibilities. But she did, and eventually went on to become what she calls a “category champion.” Her experience is the norm. Another associate with 20 years of experience on multiple teams, observed: “You join a team and you’re an idiot . . . It takes 18 months to build credibility. Early on, it’s really frustrating. In hindsight, it makes sense.”⁷

Red Hat’s culture and management system, which relies heavily on open source principles, is similar. A common saying in open source is, “The code talks.” In other words, the folks who earn the most influence in any open source engineering project tend to be those individuals who contribute the best code or new ideas, or even have a gift for spotting bugs. There really is an objective beauty to this principle because titles, experience, and politics begin to matter far less than insight and sound reasoning. That’s how the best ideas get acted on rather than the most popular ones, which is a subtle but extremely important difference.

Red Hat has built upon this concept as well. Sure, our engineers earn influence with each other based on their contributions to the code. But the same principle applies to all associates in the organization, regardless of what department they work in or what their day-to-day job entails. Everyone has the ability to earn influence and to get his or her ideas heard. It simply relates to how effective you are at presenting and getting people behind your ideas, throughout the organization.

Red Hatters like Máirín Duffy build their reputations and influence through sustained contribution. That means doing a great job, but also helping others and contributing to the multitude of internal discussion threads that are ongoing at any one time. Some associates post a lot of their opinions, while others are more judicious in the number of discussions they weigh in on. But the path to building influence really is about quality over quantity. Frequent posters may find that they lose influence if their peers begin to treat their contributions as mere noise. It’s like living in a small town where, no matter how much you try to hide, everyone knows quite a bit about you based on how you live your life.

Successful open source software projects—and, by extension, open organizations—are those in which the most influence over the direction of the project lies with the people who contribute the most meaningful work. In other words, projects and organizations work best in the context of a meritocracy. How, then, does this principle manifest itself at Red Hat? Who decides who leads and who follows? To answer these questions, we’ve taken a page from the open source manual and allowed a meritocracy to grow.

Building a Culture of Thought Leaders

While most company hierarchies dictate who gets heard, the most influential voices at Red Hat aren’t necessarily tied to someone’s title or even his or her longevity within the company. Instead, the most respected individuals tend to be those who have a track record of being consistent and selfless. You can’t assume that your job title gives you credibility, any more than it does in a real community. People might watch you a little more closely because of it, but they’re looking for their own clues and assessing your importance by their own criteria.

At Red Hat, you also can’t gain influence or followers by gaming the system, as we often see in conventionally run organizations. We’re all familiar with the folks who get labeled brownnoses or similar as they climb the ranks of political and bureaucratic hierarchies. They are the political animals in the organization. They make friends and allies mostly to help advance their own careers. Yet, while everyone knows who they are, they still seem to get their way, because conventional bosses respond to that kind of sycophantic behavior.

It’s much harder to manipulate an open organization community like Red Hat’s. There are too many people who will flag you for being insincere, and your reputation will suffer. Those people who are the most committed to the mission and purpose of the organization, on the other hand, and who work hard to fulfill its goals are those whose voices become the most predominant. So when I run into Thomas Cameron from time to time, I listen to him because I respect the brand and reputation he has built within the company, not because he’s trying to butter me up. At Red Hat, we revere our influencers wherever they work. That’s the essence of a meritocracy.

A meritocracy also means that you don’t need people reporting to you to create change and get yourself heard—a notion that many organizations struggle with. Rebecca Fernandez, a senior employment branding specialist at Red Hat, explained it in her article “Building a positive meritocracy: It’s harder than it sounds”:

Most people have experienced the Peter Principle in action: In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In other words, people are promoted so long as they excel. When they are promoted to a position where they lack competence, they stay there, unable to gain further promotion and unlikely to be demoted. This happens because upward mobility generally involves a move into management. The brilliant engineer becomes the bumbling manager . . . To create a positive meritocracy, we must re-envision management as a career track parallel to others (e.g., engineering or marketing), with overlap for some dual-skilled candidates.⁸

At Red Hat, we address the dangers of the Peter Principle by offering ways for an individual to grow his or her scope and influence without having to change jobs. The people who are listened to have earned the respect of their peers, regardless of their position or role in the company. Because of that, associates can grow their role tremendously without being promoted up the hierarchy, by simply continuing to build their own credibility and leadership brand. Jan Wildeboer, a Red Hat veteran whose official title includes the word “evangelist,” is an example of a nondeveloper who is a key influencer. Wildeboer, who is fond of wearing a red fedora (given to every new hire) just about everywhere he goes, has substantial influence not just within Red Hat, but also within the greater software community. His passion and energy for open source earned him his title, which is a great gig if you can get it.

Red Hat works to enable careers of achievement as well as careers of advancement. In conventional organizations, though, it’s all about advancement—how far you can climb the corporate ladder in order to gain the kind of power and influence you crave. But what often happens is that some of the best people may not want to advance in that way. If you are a top software developer, for example, the only way you can get promotions, raises, and increase your influence in a conventional organization is to get promoted into a management role, even if you happen to hate the idea of managing other people and regardless of whether you are even good at it.

That notion is turned on its head in open organizations like Red Hat by promoting the idea that people can excel and achieve what they are best at and still build influence, without necessarily having to do a job that they may not like as much or be as good at doing. The people with the most influence in our organization are not necessarily those who hold fancy titles or have people working for them.

For example, Wildeboer’s role—along with others like him, such as Michael Tiemann, vice president of open source affairs—is really to serve as an educator about what open source software is, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux specifically, and how it can help transform everything we know about software. These aren’t necessarily the roles these folks were hired for; more often, this kind of job is earned. The core open source programmers and developers worldwide would never accept some charlatan or slick salesperson advocating for their cause. Wildeboer and Tiemann earned their reputations and influence and, hence, have pivotal roles in steering the future of open source. In this way, they also add immense value to Red Hat, helping build the company’s reputation in the open source community.

In the conventional organization, recognition and rewards are just another top-down process that managers initiate. But at Red Hat, we have long appreciated the power of peer recognition to fuel meritocracy. For many years, the Red Hat Reward Zone program has enabled associates to recognize and reward peers who go beyond what’s expected. Each quarter, regardless of rank or seniority, every Red Hatter—myself included—is granted an equal number of points to use for rewarding fellow associates, who can redeem the points for gift cards and other merchandise. Sometimes we use Reward Zone awards to recognize peers for extraordinary efforts, such as working late at night to help someone else find a solution for a customer. Associates also reward peers for living our values and doing things the Red Hat way, such as inviting other teams to contribute their ideas and feedback on a project. One of the most popular reasons for giving and receiving a Red Hat Reward is collaboration—a powerful reminder of how essential that ingredient is to company culture.

Another example of how we work hard to recognize those Red Hatters who best exemplify company values and culture is the Chairman’s Award. Started several years ago by former chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik as a way to drive a culture of peer recognition, the Chairman’s Award is the highest honor you can earn at Red Hat. It’s also very difficult to win, since you need to be nominated by at least two of your peers (not your manager). Only about seventeen people earn the honor each year. When someone wins, we celebrate by treating him or her like an all-star at our annual Red Hat Summit and by creating a video in which that person’s peers talk about all the reasons he or she deserves the award. When you add all that up, it’s easy to recognize why it’s a powerful force that works from the bottom up and reinforces everything the open organization is built on—connection, trust, transparency, collaboration, and meritocracy.

The Leader’s Role: Empower Your Rock Stars to Follow Their Passions

Freeing up the thought leaders and rock stars can jumpstart innovation, something every company and business is trying to bottle. Companies try many things to drive innovation. One example is Google’s approach. Ever since Google became more of a household name starting around 2004, business leaders and thinkers have been digging to find out the company’s secret sauce in an effort to replicate its spectacular success. One of its best-known, though now defunct, programs was one in which all Google employees were encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time on just about anything they wanted to. The idea, of course, is that by empowering employees to pursue projects and ideas they are passionate about beyond the day-to-day duties of their real job, breakthrough innovation will follow. The company can even tout how, before it ended the program, successful side projects like Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut all emerged from these 20 percent efforts—an impressive list, to be sure.⁹ I applaud Google for taking such a far-reaching approach. Given Google’s phenomenal track record of innovation, it’s no surprise that companies of all shapes and sizes have tried to duplicate this model in attempts to drive innovation throughout their organizations.

At Red Hat, however, we have taken a less structured approach. We don’t have any official policy for how much time each of our associates should spend “innovating.” Rather, when deciding how to allocate resources for trying new things, we promote the idea that different people have earned different degrees of latitude to spend their time innovating. Many people frankly get little or none, while others, at the extreme, may get 100 percent of their time free to innovate. The most typical way is when someone works on a side project (maybe on Red Hat’s time because they’ve been able to show their managers the value, or maybe on their own time until its value is evident), but later grows it into a full-time gig.

We encourage this kind of approach for a specific reason: we want the people who have proven to be great innovators to spend all of their time innovating, not just 20 percent of it. For example, consider how one top developer, Gavin King, essentially went off on his own, without any direction from above, to develop a new programming language called Ceylon. King, who joined Red Hat when his former employer, JBoss, was acquired in 2006, had grown frustrated with the limitations of Java, a programming language released by Sun Microsystems in 1995 that made it possible for internet software programs to run on just about any kind of computer operating system. While Java remains extremely popular and useful, King saw a need to update its capabilities, especially in developing new user interfaces. That’s exactly what he and a community of other developers he recruited to help him accomplished. Ceylon is just one example of the innovative and game-changing products that have come from the R&D efforts of our top programmers. While we don’t know how commercially successful Ceylon will be down the road, the key point is, as we like to put it, we don’t sedate our rock stars.

Similarly, the associates at W. L. Gore also have the freedom to pursue projects that match up with their skills and passion. As the authors of The Great Workplace put it, “Gore associates have the freedom and the responsibility to increase their contributions while building their expertise. While formal classes and performance discussions are held, associates are free to innovate in their career paths at Gore as much as they innovate in product development.”¹⁰ According to Gary Hamel, at Gore, “the focus is on giving product champions time to experiment and learn, and taking small risks rather than betting the ranch too early. It’s a way to organize for innovation, rather than plan for innovation, with a long-term view.”¹¹

At Red Hat, we encourage associates to work on what interests them and then watch what happens when they put their energy and talent into their work, whatever their role. “In any job, there are those projects that look like some small, boring things to check the box on,” says Rebecca Fernandez. “But at Red Hat, there are so many opportunities for you to rethink those kinds of projects and say, ‘No, this is bigger than what you’re suggesting, there’s an opportunity here to do something more valuable,’ and maybe take that project in an entirely different and better direction.” That kind of meritocratic freedom to run with your ideas is where some of our best work happens, and is some of the most gratifying.

Rather than impose a strategic or operational direction from above, Red Hat allows star associates to determine the best route forward. That helps explain why the adage, “Ask for forgiveness, not permission,” is often repeated, whether it applies to an unofficial skunk works project or not.

The flip side of this approach would be a more democratic culture, where everyone is entitled to the same rights and opportunities. While this might sound good on paper, the results simply don’t add up. Given the competitive nature of our market, for instance, we as a company simply cannot afford to have one-fifth of our associates’ time spent on efforts that might not have any positive return on that massive investment. Sure, we’d be successful now and again, assuming we had done our job in hiring talented and motivated individuals. But we’ve found that it’s far more fruitful to let folks like Gavin King do what they do best with their time—to run with many ideas even as they do their regular work—and that’s something they earn by delivering great results.

There are many great examples beyond the work Red Hat does on software. One is the contact strategy and customer reference team, which works with our customers to provide everything from case studies and speakers at a user conference, to references, quotes, and testimonials for the media and sales prospects (among other contributions). The contact strategy and customer reference team evolved from an idea hatched by Red Hatter Kathryn Poole.

A few years ago, Poole, who was working on the Red Hat public relations team, found that she was fielding more and more requests from the sales team or the media to talk to customers. This was creating confusion for customers, who sometimes had multiple requests from different Red Hat associates to deal with, and creating internal conflict among Red Hatters, who wanted to protect those relationships.

Poole saw an opportunity to simplify those dynamics. She suggested to her manager at the time, Leigh Day, that she could create a new position for herself where she would serve both the company and the customers by becoming a liaison. “I thought it would be great to have a program that created a more formalized approach to how we dealt with our customers and made sure we honored them for their contributions,” Poole told me. “We wanted to make them IT heroes.”

In the true spirit of the open organization, Day told Poole to go for it. She has since grown the program to include three other full-time associates and become an integral component of how Red Hat interacts with customers worldwide. “One of the cool things about working for Red Hat is that we give people enough leeway to go out and find your own role,” says Poole. “You get to design your own destiny. Nobody is going to create your career path for you, which makes some people uncomfortable. But if you can prove that you’re providing value, then people want to help you achieve success with it rather than seeing it as some kind of a land grab.”

Examples like this aren’t “nice to haves” at Red Hat. We rely on this type of self-direction as a key component of the management system. We use individual initiative and freedom to replace many of the typical management processes that would have identified this need, built the business case, justified it in the planning and budget processes, and ultimately implemented it. Yes, we do sometimes create business cases and we certainly have a budgeting process, but those are less onerous than is typical at companies of similar size and are designed to complement, not replace, the natural innovation coming from associates.

This example also illustrates the important role that leaders play in this system. Managers help foster an environment where associates feel comfortable asking to build something new. They create the space for people to operate. Those are the traits that leaders must exhibit to successfully lead open organizations.

Organizing for Success

You might infer that managers are less important in a meritocracy than in a hierarchical organization because they make fewer direct decisions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our managers play a vital role in building, supporting, and moderating the meritocracy. Finding that balance between supporting it and, at the same time, leaving things alone is critical. To support the growth of a meritocracy, for example, you’ll need tools like memo-list that give a voice to all employees, so they can begin to build influence among their peers. As a leader or manager, you’ll also need to keep your ears open to not simply the loudest voices, but the ones that carry the most sway.

What you don’t want to do, however, is try to squash the organic nature of how the meritocracy might self-organize. All too often, companies, especially fast-growth or larger organizations, buy into the idea that they have to systematize and sanitize their organizational culture to help gain control. But, by doing so, they also begin to make excuses and create shortcuts for their underachievers—an idea that runs counter to everything a meritocracy stands for.

As the president and CEO of a fast-growing, publicly traded company, I understand the difficulty of this pull to control things. I’ve realized though that I have had to establish my own reputation as well, which has pushed me to be a better listener and leader. I know that I don’t have all the answers for where the company or its technology needs to head into the future. But I also know that I will do my best to empower the most innovative associates to help me map that road ahead. Again, it’s not always a neat, pretty, or efficient process, but it works.

While we’ve taken the notion of a meritocracy to an extreme at Red Hat, it’s not rocket science. Any leader at any company can improve his or her organization’s performance by simply engaging the thermostats. Most people know who the thought leaders are. Ask around your own organization, and just about anyone can tell you who the thermostats are. The key for you as a leader and an organization, however, is to think about how to best use these people, regardless of their role in the company, to help drive innovation forward. Sometimes that can mean creating a physical atmosphere to promote that kind of mind-set.

For example, the financial services firm Edward Jones, which has more than eleven thousand locations and some 7 million clients, ditched its system of formal job descriptions in favor of what it calls “responsibility statements” that the company’s associates write themselves. The associates define their own jobs. While I think some readers might be saying that’s akin to turning the zoo over to the animals, it’s actually an effective strategy in which the associates define their goals and how to measure the results they will attain to reach those goals. It’s not about describing daily activities as much as giving the associates control over their own career paths. “We don’t tell associates exactly what they have to do, when they have to do it, or how they have to do it,” said Jim Weddle, the firm’s managing partner. “With responsibility-based management, decisions are made by the people who are the experts because they are the ones doing the work. It makes us more nimble, more able to make good decisions quickly. We take more satisfaction for our work because we’ve assumed responsibility for it.”¹²

Similarly, I recently spoke with a senior executive at a large insurance company. In order to foster innovation, he had selected teams to innovate on specific areas of the business. One team member he chose was a security guard at one of the company’s facilities. While he might seem an odd choice, that security guard is one of the company’s largest patent holders. Thermostats are everywhere in your organization: ignore them at your peril.

The Path to Earning Respect as a Leader

How would you be perceived in your own organization’s meritocracy? Ask yourself if you command respect because people have to respect you or, rather, because you’ve truly earned respect. Many people aspire to titles because that forces others to respect them. But, to me, this is the lowest form of respect, especially if the person you’re receiving respect from is more junior than you or works at a lower rung in the bureaucracy. Respect has to be earned. It’s not about a title.

When people respect you only because of your authority, they will give you the minimum effort. Some incredibly brilliant people have earned respect because they are so smart, but most people aren’t incredibly brilliant. So how do you go about it? There are three ways:

1. Show passion for the purpose of your organization and constantly drive interest in it. People are drawn to and generally want to follow passionate people. At Red Hat, that means being passionate about open source.
2. Demonstrate confidence. Many people in positions of authority don’t show confidence well, especially with their team. It’s one thing to convey confidence to your own boss, but it’s just as important to share that same confidence with those who report to you.
3. Engage your people. Trust has to be earned, and it’s not enough to call a meeting and tell people what to do and then retreat behind your own closed door. You also need to be open about your weaknesses and ask the team to help you address them. Nobody expects perfection, so don’t hold your cards too close; get your team to work with you.

As a leader, it’s so easy to surround yourself with people who think exactly the same way that you do, or at least who tell you what you want to hear. Those people are everywhere, and they’re often the first to speak up. But if you really want to learn, seek out those people who present a divergent viewpoint and who will tell you what you need to hear, even when it’s not easy.

Certainly, joining Red Hat posed a challenge for me. While I had a degree in computer science, I had no background in enterprise IT. In a very open, interactive culture like Red Hat’s, there was no way for me to fake it. However, I found that being very open about the things I did not know actually had the opposite effect than I would have thought. It helped me build credibility. My team learned that I wouldn’t feign knowledge where I did not have it and therefore was more likely to give me the benefit of the doubt when I did talk confidently. No one expects leaders to know everything all the time, but we do expect our leaders to be truthful and forthright.

Still a Work in Progress

At Red Hat, one of the greatest insults or blows to your ego comes when you put something on one of the internal discussion threads and receive nothing back—neither positive nor negative. “That’s the worst outcome, truly,” Kim Jokisch, director of Red Hat’s employment branding and communications team, told me. “That means they’re likely ignoring it, which means you’ve failed in some way.”

Even so, the goal is not simply to generate posts and responses. That’s not what builds your credibility. Rather, it’s all about your true purpose. “People smell out intention around here,” says Emily Stancil Martinez, a member of Red Hat’s corporate communications team. “If your intention is just to stick your nose into every little thing so you can be front and center, people see it and will take note. But if you are thoughtful when you weigh in, in order to make a real contribution for the greater good, that’s what truly builds your credibility and raises your profile.”

But having the patience to build up that level of credibility can be frustrating to someone who joins the team. A new hire—especially someone who hasn’t already built a reputation in the open source community—simply won’t have the same level of influence as, say, Máirín Duffy or Thomas Cameron. It doesn’t always seem fair, and some good ideas are likely never heard as a result. An enthusiastic new hire may join the company with the thought that his ideas will be heard equally, only to fall into a rut when he feels as if his good ideas are ignored. That can quickly lead to a disengaged employee who either leaves the company or, worse, becomes a cultural naysayer. Part of the solution is to set expectations so people know that earning a reputation takes time and hard work. It’s as if you want to sell something on a site like eBay: without any history or reputation score, you can find it far harder to locate buyers interested in what you’re selling. That takes time, patience, and a commitment to working at building your reputation, which isn’t something everyone enjoys doing. The upside of this kind of culture far outweighs any downside. The system is a work in progress, but is still a system that is light years ahead of the conventional organization approach.

Jim’s Leadership Tips

1.Don’t use phrases like “the boss wants it this way” or rely on hierarchical name dropping. While that may get things done in the short term, it can curtail discussion that’s core to building a meritocracy.

2.Publicly recognize a great effort or contribution. It can be a simple thank-you e-mail in which you copy the whole team.

3.Consider whether your influence comes from your position in the hierarchy (or access to privileged information), or whether it truly comes from respect that you have earned. If it is the former, start working on the latter.

4.Proactively ask for feedback and ideas on a specific topic. You must respond to them all, but implement only the good ones. And don’t just take the best ideas and move on; take every opportunity to reinforce the spirit of meritocracy by giving credit where it’s due.

5.Reward a high-performing member of your team with an interesting assignment, even if it is not in his or her usual area.