Letting the Sparks Fly
Early on in my Red Hat career, I was working from home one day after a doctor’s appointment. I had a phone meeting with Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies. Cormier and I discussed a variety of issues, as we always do, and then eventually wrapped up our talk. My wife, who was at home during the call, came over and asked, “Oh my gosh, what’s wrong? It sounds like you just had a huge fight!” This caught me by surprise. I said, “No, we didn’t. We were just debating something and trying to find a solution.”
What I realized then was that many of our discussions at Red Hat involve heated and passionate debate, something that rarely happened in my earlier jobs. Certainly, most interactions are not as heated as my discussion with Cormier was that day—he and I have developed our own norms over the years—but Red Hat associates’ passion for the business and comfort with speaking our minds make the average interaction much more frank than I’ve seen at conventional organizations. In my experience, if someone disagreed with something you said in a meeting, he would rarely confront you about it, and certainly not in Red Hat’s open and unvarnished way, especially to dare questioning someone higher up on the corporate hierarchy.
Luckily, I started my career in what I would characterize as an intellectual meritocracy. At BCG, a professional services firm with many bright, motivated people where the product was our thoughts and ideas, we had many spirited, free-flowing debates. While the partners were clearly in charge, there was a deep cultural ethos of seeking truth and give-and-take. Case teams at BCG were encouraged to have healthy debates, which often lasted late into the night. I loved it. But I also knew that when I left to join the corporate world, I would have to leave this behind. That type of debate is rare across levels in a conventional organization.
When I got to Red Hat, though, I quickly learned that you can’t get the best creativity, initiative, or effort from the members of an open organization by saying, “Go do this.” The best ideas happen when teams hash things out. Engineers at Red Hat have publicly challenged my decisions. That would never have happened at Delta. These challenges are typically quite respectful and well thought out, and rarely cross the line. But public, open disagreement is part of how Red Hat works; I’m convinced that we get better answers as a result. I love working, debating, and sometimes arguing with people to solve hard, complex issues. I love to argue—not maliciously—but in a healthy way in which both sides are heard. I love to stir up a good debate and sometimes think of myself as Red Hat’s head debater. When you start a conversation, you’re more likely to find better solutions. I didn’t bring this component of our culture to Red Hat; it was already there, but I do feel right at home with it. As the legendary management guru Peter Drucker so aptly put it, “The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis.”1
At Red Hat, even our values—freedom, courage, commitment, and accountability—intentionally create a degree of tension (see figure 5-1). These four values, which the company chose in 2002, well before I joined the team in 2008, still resonate with everything we do today. This is true in large part because they weren’t handed down from executives after returning from a weekend retreat. Red Hatters themselves chose them and have since embedded them into the fabric of the corporate culture. And those values require thought. Most companies’ values are decidedly noncontroversial. Our values, on the other hand, address our aspirations—what we believe in. And we accept that those things can, at times, be in conflict. They therefore require constant balance.
Our values, usually represented as balls on a scale to show that balance, also illustrate how the debates in a highly collaborative culture can, in fact, be quite productive, despite “letting the sparks fly.” Think about how freedom, for example, can directly oppose accountability or commitment. People might ask, if freedom is a value, what’s to stop someone from declaring he has the freedom to not show up for work? But freedom is balanced out by another value—accountability. People do have a great deal of freedom at Red Hat, but when we are at our best, this freedom is kept in check by accountability—to each other, to our partners and customers, and to our shareholders.
As an organization, we’re like a ship that rights itself when we lean too heavily in the direction of any one of the four values. People who naturally gravitate toward freedom or courage don’t find it easy to work with those who lean more heavily toward accountability or commitment. That inherent tension and conflict between our values is part of why they’re so compelling to our associates. Red Hatters continually experience this push and pull within the company. The willingness to address tension is built deep into our corporate DNA.
At Red Hat, solving problems head-on is a big part of the culture. We’re in the business of working with communities, customers, and partners to solve complex IT challenges (think of the cloud and big data). While we don’t necessarily argue for argument’s sake, we can be really passionate about getting things right. Many see a highly collaborative culture as a supportive, positive environment where people encourage each other with positive reinforcement. Actually, Red Hat is anything but that. It is very supportive and collaborative, but in a very different way. We debate, we argue, and we complain. In many ways, it can seem harsh. But iron sharpens iron, and we’ve come to embrace the notion of letting the sparks fly.
Beyond Brainstorming
When people envision what good collaboration looks like, most picture classic brainstorming techniques in which positive reinforcement is used to encourage participation. Brainstorming was originally conceived by famed ad man Alex Osborn, founder of the advertising agency BBDO; the idea behind it was to use positive reinforcement and feedback to stimulate people’s creativity—“there is no such thing as a bad idea”—a technique that has been widely employed since Osborn laid out the ground rules in his 1948 book, Your Creative Power.
Osborn’s technique has been challenged in recent years. For instance, in a 2003 study, Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, found that emphasizing the “debate condition,” in which people are encouraged to challenge and debate each other’s ideas, actually generates substantially more new ideas than Osborn’s approach. As recounted in a New Yorker article titled, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” Nemeth said:
While the instruction “Do not criticize” is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition … There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.2
Similarly, in his book, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, psychologist Richard Wiseman reached the conclusion that simply gathering a group of people together does not ensure that they’ll reach creative conclusions. He writes: “When strong-willed people lead group discussion, they can pressure others into conforming, can encourage self-censorship, and can create an illusion of unanimity. Two heads are not necessarily better than one. More than fifty years of research suggest that irrational thinking occurs when people try to reach decisions in groups, and this can lead to a polarization of opinions and a highly biased assessment of a situation.”3
One term we often hear is groupthink, coined by William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man, in a 1952 issue of Fortune. The idea is that when a group of people work together, they tend to want to reach some kind of harmony and to minimize conflict, which so often leads to terrible and even tragic results. James Surowiecki tackles this subject in his now famous book, The Wisdom of Crowds, in which he discusses the research done by the Yale University psychologist Irving Janis to understand how groupthink was responsible for the poor decision making leading up to events like the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Surowiecki writes: “Homogeneous groups become more cohesive more easily than diverse groups, and as they become more cohesive they become more dependent on the group, more isolated from outside opinions, and therefore more convinced that the group’s judgment on important issues must be right. These kinds of groups, Janis suggested, share an illusion of invulnerability, a willingness to rationalize away counterarguments to the group’s position, and a conviction that dissent is not useful.”4 In other words, there’s almost a constant bias for us to go along with the will of the crowd—to please others and fit in, regardless of whether we truly agree with the consensus.
That’s where the power of what the authors of Collective Genius call “creative abrasion,” which they define as something that involves some level of conflict—a disagreement, contention, or argument—that works best when it’s practiced within a community that has a shared purpose, shared values, and rules of engagement that help keep the conflict productive rather than destructive.5 The film studio Pixar is a big believer in the power of such creative abrasion, and its executives credit open debates within the ranks of their creative people for pushing the boundaries of what was possible for animated movies such as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Cars, and Up. “There is no doubt that our decision-making is better if we are able to draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group,” said Ed Catmull, one of Pixar’s cofounders, who strongly believes in the value of “candor”—meaning forthrightness or frankness—when working through opportunities and challenges. Pixar has even created an organizational group called the “Brain Trust” whose function is to get candid feedback on whatever movies the studio happens to be working on. “A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms,” Catmull said. “Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.”6
Similarly, John Seely Brown, the former head of Xerox PARC, once said, “Breakthroughs often appear in the white space between crafts. These crafts start to collide, and in that collision radically new things start to happen.”7 Bill Coughran, a former senior vice president of engineering, infrastructure group at Google, was quoted as saying: “Managing tensions in the organization is an ongoing issue … You don’t want an organization that just salutes and does what you say. You want an organization that argues with you. And so you want to nurture the bottoms up, but you’ve got to be careful that you don’t degenerate into chaos.”8
An interesting characteristic of open source software communities is that, as a whole, they tend to embrace the approach championed by Nemeth and others who see the value in stirring the pot and dissenting from the crowd. Online forums and chat rooms are often filled with spirited and sometimes caustic back-and-forth debates about everything from how best to fix a software bug to what new features to consider in a subsequent release. Usually, there is a first phase of discussions in which new ideas are posited and collected, but there is always a subsequent round of critical analysis. While anyone may have the ability to wade into these debates, in doing so, they should be prepared to defend their position with every ounce of their ability. Unpopular ideas will be, at best, shot down and, at worst, ridiculed.
For example, even Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux operating system, voices his disagreement with proposed changes to the code on message boards. In one case, he and David Howells, one of Red Hat’s lead developers, got into a heated discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List about the merit of a change in the code Red Hat was asking for, which would help our clients with security. In response to a request from Howells, Torvalds wrote back:
Quite frankly, this is [bleeping] moronic. The whole thing seems to be designed around stupid interfaces, for completely moronic reasons. Why should we do this? I already dislike our existing X.509 parser. And this makes the idiotic complicated interfaces, and now it goes up to 11. Linus9
Technical details aside, Torvalds went on to say a few more choice things in a subsequent note that I won’t get into here. That conversation got so loud that even the Wall Street Journal covered it. “An argument between software engineers working for open source distributor Red Hat Inc. and Linux founder Linus Torvalds embodies the tension between pragmatists and idealists that exists in almost every business, and underlies many decisions made not only in building software, but involving just about any product that’s brought to market,” wrote Michael Hickins in an article with the headline: “Linux Throw-Down Sheds Light on ‘Moronic’ Software Processes.”10
Hickins frames the argument by showing how, in most proprietary software companies, there is no public debate about what new features or changes the company might be working on. When the product is ready, the company simply ships it out to customers and moves on. With Linux, however, there is an almost constant debate about what changes might be needed and—most importantly—why they’re needed. That, of course, makes the whole process a lot messier and more time consuming. As Hickins writes: “Keeping those arguments behind closed doors allows vendors of proprietary software to ship products more quickly than purists might like, even if it means having to patch or upgrade the software later. Hashing out arguments out in the open helps ensure software purists have their say and, in many cases, their way.”11
My point is that this is the culture that Red Hat has grown out of. At the beginning, the company was really just a bunch of developers and hackers who embraced the whole idea of working in the spirit of open source. That meant engaging in heated debates about, well, just about everything. But as the company has grown, it has become much more than just a group of coders. People work in everything from marketing and human resources to finance. Yet, as we’ve grown up, we’ve kept that spirit of collaboration and debate alive so that it affects just about every decision we make as a company.
I am certainly not advocating that the Linux community’s brash style is generally appropriate. It has taken the model to an extreme. In fact, Red Hat actively works to ensure that open source communities welcome diverse people and thoughts. We need to navigate a tightrope between providing honest and unvarnished feedback without crossing the line to be offensive. Most people are naturally nice. We would much rather compliment than criticize. Others even avoid conflict. But a key theme throughout this book is that leaders must often foster and encourage debate. If you don’t debate things and solicit feedback, that’s a problem. If you like top-down order and structure in discussions, the kind of chaotic culture we have built at Red Hat won’t appeal to you.
It takes time to get used to our open, frank style of debate. But for some of our developers—in particular, those who have spent years in their open source communities—we’ve actually had to work to find a compromise. We’ve learned to embrace the phrase, “You aren’t your code,” which is used in the open source world to emphasize that just because someone is criticizing what you’ve done, it doesn’t mean they are criticizing you personally. We have worked hard so people don’t let their feelings get hurt when someone disagrees with their idea; those are two separate things. They need to be able to remove themselves from their work to look at it objectively. But it’s a work in progress. We want to make sure that we keep our edge without alienating others who join our mission.
Adopting a New Mind-Set
During Delta’s bankruptcy restructuring, I worked with a number of people whose full-time jobs are to help distressed companies. These bankers and lawyers specialize in bankruptcies and out of court debt restructurings. I learned that they often use the expression “terminally nice” to describe clients. They often see companies with cultures that avoid conflict, so they never have frank, unpleasant conversations that are needed. These companies end up in real trouble because the cultures never initiate the difficult conversations that drive superior performance.
Everyone knows the expression “the elephant in the room” (or some variant of it). In other words, everyone knows what the real issue is, but no one wants to raise and discuss it, because it’s personally painful and full of conflict. One of the biggest threats any executive faces is the notion that he or she is only hearing the good stuff about the business. People generally want to please, so it can be a challenge to encourage them to deliver the bad along with the good. Open organizations adopt an open mind-set so they can encourage everyone to speak up and share insights. While most companies fortunately don’t reach the point of being “terminally nice,” many never reach their full potential because they don’t address the hard issues. In most conventional organizations, the biggest clue that there is disagreement among the team is that nobody says anything at all. That’s why encouraging dissenting opinions is so critical to success in making the culture in an open organization come together.
The team at W. L. Gore apparently agrees with this as well. The company’s CEO, Terri Kelly, has said that a big part of her job is getting out and talking to her associates in person, sometimes as many as a hundred to two hundred at a time. As part of those town hall–style talks, Kelly encourages her team to tell her how to truly stoke two-way communications throughout the organization. As one associate says, it’s an important part of their culture: “I can sit in a room with Terri Kelly and really battle out a difference of opinion and feel no fear of repercussion as a result of that kind of behavior. In fact, it’s the expected behavior. We have the opportunity to connect whenever we need to connect to take on whatever might be the issue or the opportunity of the day.”12
At Red Hat meetings, people might actually go out of their way to argue a point. Our meetings have more words spoken per minute than in any other company out there, not because people are trying to be difficult, but because they are so passionate. They like to push the discussion further than it might go to take another side of the argument.
For example, soon after I joined Red Hat, we made a very important (and strategic) technology decision in our virtualization business when we purchased Qumranet—a story I told in chapter 3. In the same spirit of trying to build engagement from the beginning, a number of our top technical people participated in an evaluation process to help us make the best possible choice when we made that acquisition.
But even after we made our decision, one of the engineers called me out in front of the group—which included his boss, his boss’s boss, and more—letting me know that he thought we were making the wrong choice. He also went to great lengths to explain why. While I thanked him for his input—he did make many valid arguments—I continued to believe we were on the right path. Meanwhile, as he was talking, I kept looking at his boss and his boss’s boss to see how they were reacting to this engineer speaking up as he was. This kind of thing never happened at Delta. If it had, people would have been turning purple with rage. An unwritten workplace rule was you didn’t call out your boss—let alone your boss’s boss—in front of their boss. The whole scene only added to my sense that this company was chaotic.
But that engineer’s words never left me. It also soon became clear that he was right—the decision we made just wasn’t the best one for Red Hat. So we made a major about-face when it came to the technology. It was costly and time consuming, but it was the better decision. I share this story not to be cavalier about the significant financial investments we made. Rather, I’d like to stress that I couldn’t let my ego—or the fact that we had been wrong—get in the way of making the best possible decisions for the company. Building an open organization with a participatory culture like Red Hat’s is all about encouraging debate and celebrating the best ideas, regardless of who or where they come from. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s the right thing if you want to build a more engaged, collaborative, and innovative workforce.
What can seem harsh at times is that no matter what you bring up, you can expect someone to challenge you. The beauty of this approach is that you will always have multiple views from different people to use as you form your own opinions. If, by contrast, the goal is for everyone in a meeting to be nice to each other and every idea is treated as a good one, you can end up with results nobody is pleased with. A famous quote from Sir Alec Issigonis frames it: “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” In other words, when you try to please everyone, you often wind up incorporating elements that nobody wants or needs. When you weave healthy debate and honesty into a conversation, though, your results can be fundamentally different.
For instance, when I go on sales calls with reps from Red Hat and ask them, “How are things?” I rarely get a response like, “Everything is fine.” What I hear instead is a litany of issues about what the reps think we could be doing better or what problems they are facing and what they think they need to do in order to overcome them. They unload on me. That’s the kind of interaction that is the opposite of being terminally nice, and it means I’m hearing what’s really going on in the business. While it would certainly be easier to hear “everything is great,” I know ultimately we perform better as a company because we don’t take the easy way out.
Google relies on something called “Google Ideas,” a web-based forum where employees regularly submit ideas on everything from product improvements to making the company a better place to work. The rest of the Google team can then weigh in with opinions on those ideas using a zero- to five-point scale. Google’s management team pays close attention to the activity on the ideas site to see which ones are trending and should perhaps be escalated to other communication levels in the company, say, by including it in a companywide e-mail discussion. What makes this kind of forum so valuable is that every employee at Google has a way to collect feedback—both objective and admittedly subjective—from peers with the ultimate goal of having the best ideas bubble up to the top.13
At Red Hat, as I mentioned earlier, we rely heavily on forums like memo-list to facilitate conversations on everything from opinions on new technology to discussing the latest scuttlebutt on our competitors. To make our system of letting the sparks fly work, though, as a leader in the organization, I can’t moderate such discussions by deleting or reprimanding or setting rules. That would squash the conversation. I encourage people to constructively criticize, because most people won’t. Now and then, there’s a post that says something obnoxious, but those get quickly shouted down. The real problem is getting people who are genuinely nice to say something that might be harsh. I have to ask people, “What did you mean by that?” Sometimes people on a mailing list might say an idea is stupid, even pointing out everything that’s wrong with one of my ideas. But that’s OK. It’s how you get to the best ideas, and it frees your organization from the dangers of terminal niceness.
For example, Vineet Nayar, the CEO who helped lead a dramatic turnaround at HCL Technologies, an information technology consulting company based in India, started an internal blog he calls “My Problems,” in which he posts the strategic problems he’s working on to collect feedback and ideas from anyone in the company willing to share thoughts. As the authors of Conscious Capitalism write, this forum gives Nayar “access to a huge amount of fresh thinking about such questions, and it also encourages more people to think more broadly and strategically about the business.”14
The key is to strive to find the balance between shutting down debate when posts become caustic, while also continuing to push people to give you the kind of frank feedback you’re looking for. This is where we rely heavily on our culture of 360-degree accountability and peer-to-peer management. The worst thing we could do as an organization is make it seem as if the CEO and management team are somehow trying to shut people up, even if they might be out of line. The job for the crowd is to help self-police our e-mail lists. At the same time, we have to encourage people to participate, but we can’t then say every idea is great. That’s what can be difficult for some people to adapt to.
Growing a Thick Skin
The feedback from sharing new ideas at Red Hat can sometimes feel blunt and brutally honest, regardless of who originated the idea. “People are passionate about the company and what we do,” Máirín Duffy, a user-interface designer, told me. “When people interpret something as going against the company’s core values, they feel threatened, and that is when the sparks really fly.” That means that memo-list can be a somewhat dangerous place if Red Hatters don’t take the time to think before they write. To work in such an environment, therefore, people need a pretty thick skin. Given that the back-and-forth can be challenging, many newcomers to the company are left to wonder, “You call this collaboration?” This approach to generating and sharing new ideas may be difficult—it certainly requires lots of effort—but it works. And that’s why we make letting the sparks fly such a clear component of our corporate culture, while also recognizing that it takes some time to adjust to.
For example, Kim Jokisch, director of Red Hat’s employment branding team, left a job at The Body Shop to join Red Hat back in 2002. The Body Shop, founded by Anita Roddick, was one of the pioneering companies in creating natural cosmetic products. It was, as Jokisch puts it, a “good news kind of business,” and the people who worked there felt as if they were making a difference in the world. But it was still a conventional organization. When Jokisch got to Red Hat, she felt the difference in culture immediately. While there was a similar passion for making the world a better place, there was also an edge she wasn’t used to, something that was driven home when she began rolling out new programs such as a performance management system and a more formalized approach to interviewing candidates.
“We were starting to hire a lot more people, and we needed to formalize our processes,” Jokisch told me. “We wanted to institute behavioral-based systems, rather than something that was more ad hoc. So, I researched the best programs we could put in place, got certified, and then traveled around the globe, training our managers and people on how to use them.”
That’s just about when the sparks began to fly. “I was really surprised by the amount of pushback I got, where people all over the company said things like, ‘This will take too much time,’ or ‘What do you mean I can’t ask that?’” said Jokisch, who had been doing such training for about ten years before she got to Red Hat. “I began thinking, ‘What have I done? I left this great job where there was always positive feedback on everything you did. Now I am being challenged every step of the way. It often felt like I had to justify everything I did.”
To her credit, Jokisch recognized that feedback of any kind should be considered a gift, even if it’s painful at first. She realized that she needed to engage people in the process and collaborate to find the best solution, rather than going off on her own and forcing a particular solution.
The open communication channels at Red Hat can sometimes seem like, according to one Red Hatter, “a pool full of piranhas.” But the sharing of feelings and opinions is ultimately a positive thing because it reinforces that anyone can have a say, which leads to increased engagement. “What I quickly realized was that even harsh feedback makes you smarter and better at your job because it helps you think of things from different angles,” Jokisch told me. “To be successful, then, you really have to check your ego at the door and recognize that there are a lot of other smart people working here and that by getting their feedback and point of view, you’re going to be better at what you do.”
While developing a thick skin is a prerequisite for success at Red Hat, everyone also needs to recognize, respect, and have flexibility in understanding and engaging with the different cultures within the company. As things have changed over time, not all areas of the company are the same. The engineers, for example, who work more closely with open source communities, tend to be much harsher in sharing their feedback than are other teams. We’ve discussed internally how best to handle those kinds of differences and concluded that we don’t want to have a single overriding culture. It can be OK to have differences in cultural areas as long as everyone believes we are all working for better outcomes throughout the organization. People have different personalities and priorities; they think and speak out in different ways. These differences can make letting the sparks fly even more challenging. But you don’t want to strip away differences in trying to get to consensus, because that can lead to groupthink, poor decisions, and stalled innovation. People must be encouraged to speak up, in their own distinct ways, and rewarded when they do.
“It’s not just debate though—it’s action, too,” Duffy told me. “Talk without action isn’t regarded very highly. For example, if you complain about a piece of software we make not doing something you think it should, you’re going to be regarded as noise unless you step up and actually write some code to prototype the idea. Or, if you complain that the company uses some piece of software that isn’t good, you better back up your complaint with some suggestions for better things, or you will be regarded as just adding noise.”
The Leader’s Role: Knocking Down Barriers to Collaboration
Technology companies are known for casual dress. You can walk the streets of Palo Alto past the cafés and restaurants for hours and never see a tie. But many of the same technology companies that employ these folks have rigid hierarchies that would match anything a military academy can muster. Steve Jobs dressed casually, but there was no question who was in charge at Apple. At Red Hat, we embrace informality in myriad ways, not because we like to be comfortable in what we wear or that we wouldn’t like couches in the executive suite, but because we’ve learned that to truly encourage dialogue and debate across the company, we have to break down any semblance of an “us and them” culture.
In conventional hierarchical organizations, the trappings of power can actually play a constructive role. They are visual cues for people’s positions in the organization. Since decision rights correlate to level, having visible ways to show differences in position can be helpful. When I worked at Delta, wearing a suit and tie was a measure of rank in the corporate hierarchy. As soon as you were promoted to vice president, you received a sticker for your car that corresponded with your own personal parking space with your name on it. Every day when I drove in, the guards at the gate would salute me and call me “sir.”
That helps explain why it took me a few months working at Red Hat before I noticed that I looked different from everyone, that the button-down shirt and pressed khakis I wore somehow set me apart, just as a suit and tie did at Delta. I was creating an invisible hierarchy without realizing it. The very next day, I came in wearing jeans and a casual shirt. It finally dawned on me that formality and visual cues could become barriers to collaboration. What I learned was that the people at Red Hat express themselves through their personalities, not their clothes or their rank. There are plenty of fancy cars in the Red Hat parking lot, but no one has an assigned space. Our associates recognize that promotions are more about validation of their value and hard work, not parking spaces and corner offices.
Something as simple as a T-shirt can break down barriers at Red Hat. Early on in my experience at Red Hat, my wife and kids were still living in Atlanta, so I was commuting back and forth on the weekends until we settled in Raleigh. FUDCon, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major open source software event, was being held on Saturday at the end of my first week. Kim Jokisch suggested that I stay the weekend so I could attend, since it would be a chance for me to connect with Red Hatters who had assembled for the event from all over. While I was clearly looking forward to seeing my family, I thought it was a great idea. I asked if I could get a Fedora T-shirt to wear to the event. The last thing I wanted was to show up looking like the typical corporate executive on a casual Friday. I didn’t really have a grand motive for wearing the T-shirt. I just wanted to blend in. It took people a while to realize that this guy walking around in the Fedora T-shirt was the new CEO of Red Hat. I was surprised that people actually noticed. I heard about it several times in the weeks and months that followed and was later told that wearing the T-shirt bought me some added geek cred. The little symbolic things can truly make a real difference.
How we dress seems like a little thing, and many companies have adopted “business casual” policies. But to truly break down the barriers and get ideas freely flowing, things like how you dress need to reflect and reinforce your culture, not be at odds with it. The lesson, therefore, is about not just going through the motions but truly working to break down barriers. In other words, it’s not really about the clothes.
Similarly, when I look back at my interview at Red Hat, which I talked about in chapter 1, when I wondered why I was the only one with cash in my wallet, I now realize that it never occurred to Matthew Szulik or Michael Cunningham to treat me any other way or to evaluate me based on my clothes. I wasn’t special or privileged just because of my background or the job I was interviewing for (I would later learn that Szulik ran more than a few other recruits through a similar gauntlet). It was simply part of the company’s culture in which meritocracy, not hierarchy, reigns supreme. If you like the accoutrements of power, Red Hat is most certainly not for you.
Breaking down hierarchies also includes removing all the forms of special treatments today’s executives seem so entitled to, including titles. People at Red Hat care less about the outward signs of achievement and ladder climbing than in most conventional organizations. They keep their eyes on what they believe is truly important.
On my first full day on the job, I was directed to a cubicle that was just like everyone else’s. Now, at the time of this writing, things have changed. Red Hat has moved its headquarters to a building in downtown Raleigh, where I have an office with a door. It’s similar to the offices dozens of other people have—maybe I have a better view than some—but it’s still far more mundane than the standard, conventional executive suites of the past.
This meritocratic mind-set pervades the entire company, which now has sales, development, and support offices worldwide. Part of Red Hat lore, for instance, is a picture that shows Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s former executive vice president and chief technology officer (CTO), with a bathroom plunger in his hand. As the story goes, Stevens—who had been with Red Hat for years and worked at the engineering office in Westford, Massachusetts—was famous for his hands-on attitude in tackling everything from cleaning the office toilets to lugging huge computer servers to trade shows across the country.
Of course, as CTO, Stevens could have ordered any number of people to tackle those tasks. And certainly, as CTO of a company with some seven thousand associates, he wouldn’t technically have to. But Stevens understood what the Red Hat culture is really built on: merit, not titles. Just as any entrepreneur can’t be too proud to tackle a job that needs to be done, so too do executives like Stevens and me have to be willing to roll up our sleeves and join the fight on the frontlines rather than sitting back to direct the battle from our posh corner offices.
Marco Bill-Peter, vice president of customer experience and engagement who heads up the global support organization, says that what enables people to thrive in Red Hat’s culture is an informal personality. “The fact that we wear jeans isn’t what makes us different from other companies out there,” says Bill-Peter, who worked at tech giant Hewlett-Packard for thirteen years before joining Red Hat six years ago. “It’s really about a willingness to put aside your ego while embracing openness and transparency. Titles don’t mean a thing. That’s why, for example, I don’t print my title on any of my internal e-mails. Even when I introduce myself to other people in the company, I don’t talk about how I’m a vice president. I usually just say, ‘I’m the support dude.’”
Remember that someone wearing jeans and flip-flops can convey that she is still the boss. Just look at a company like Apple, where Steve Jobs was notorious for his casual dress, dating back to the company’s earliest days. But, by most accounts, that didn’t really make him more approachable; he was still at the center of Apple’s “Cult of the CEO” kind of culture where every important decision went through him. In other words, the simple act of wearing jeans is not how you build engagement and break down hierarchies. It’s the attitude adjustments that need to go along with it.
Why Healthy Debates Matter
The lack of frank dialogue is the single biggest controllable weakness that most companies impose upon themselves. Being nice and letting things slide add up over time to an organization that knows its core problems but is unable to act. While conflict avoidance isn’t a direct outcome of a conventional organizational structure, hierarchies clearly tend to soften bad news when it’s going up the chain. All but the brashest have difficulty asking questions in a rigid hierarchy. Finding ways to foster frank, productive feedback and debate can improve the performance of any organization. For a meritocracy, it’s critical. As Ed Catmull of Pixar puts it:
It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute. There are many reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them. Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions. If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.15
Not every organization is prepared to change its culture in a way that allows sparks to fly. As I’ve described, it’s still a work in progress at Red Hat. Some people worry that my senior team is not functioning properly because of our open debates. I see it as the opposite. We have the open and frank debates we need. We continue to foster this attitude throughout the company, while also trying to find a balance between delivering good feedback and creating arguments just for the sake of having an argument. Some people say that they’ve waited to tackle new initiatives precisely because they weren’t mentally ready to deal with the feedback and challenges they would inevitably endure, no matter how valuable that information might be. We’re still learning.
Jim’s Leadership Tips
1.Proactively invite feedback and then thank those who give it to you. Feedback is a gift. As a leader or manager, if you react defensively, you are unlikely to get that gift again.
2.Start a debate. If your organization isn’t used to open, frank debate, start with easy topics. Make sure no one takes it personally.
3.If forums don’t exist for healthy debate, create them. If you’re a people manager, debating with your team is easy. If you’re an individual contributor, find ways to initiate dialogue with others in the company.
4.Recognize the myriad barriers to frank dialogue. For example, never start a contentious conversation on opposite sides of a desk, and recognize that offices are home turf. Pick neutral places.
5.Does your organization avoid the “elephant in the room” conversations? If so, think about what role you can play to initiate those discussions.