Saying “ everyone sucks ” is not leadership

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is not the type to brag and belittle rivals. He’s been more measured since taking over from more outspoken Steve Ballmer seven years ago, forming alliances with challengers like Red Hat and Salesforce and even allowing people to use Amazon’s Alexa assistant in Windows operating systems.

On Thursday, he put his more peaceful approach into words when former Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes asked him what leadership advice he was giving within the company.

“I’m just saying, ‘Well my team is great and everyone sucks’, that’s not leadership,” Nadella said during an appearance at the Economic Summit hosted by the Institute for Research on Human Rights. economic policies of Stanford University. “In a multi-stakeholder, multi-constituent world, you need to bring people together inside and outside your company.”

In addition to standing out from Ballmer, who has criticized the efforts of rivals like Apple and Google, Nadella also differs from her peers at other big tech companies, including Larry Ellison of Oracle and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 while co-founder Bill Gates was still in charge. But Nadella is also different from Gates. In a 2013 session on Reddit, he wrote that “seriously Bing is the best product at this point,” despite Google having a dominant market share in internet search.

In contrast, Nadella’s Microsoft has become more tolerant of other forces in the business world. While open source software was seen as a competitor in the past, Microsoft purchased the open source code storage service GitHub for $ 7.5 billion in 2018, and the company incorporated the open source operating system Linux. in Windows.

When Nadella makes distinctions with her rivals, he is less pronounced about it. He told a Microsoft Ignite conference on Tuesday, for example, that “no customer wants to be dependent on a vendor who sells them technology on one side and competes with them on the other” – probably a reference to Amazon, which is in competition. with some of its cloud clients.

Here are some of the other leadership points Nadella mentioned during the virtual event:

• “Leaders have this innate ability to find themselves in uncertain and ambiguous situations and to bring clarity … leaders are not people who find themselves in a confused situation and create more confusion. They actually create clarity, and that’s sort of something that leaders absolutely have to hold themselves accountable for. “
• “Leaders create energy. You know when you meet someone who is a leader because you come out saying, ‘Wow, I want to join the parade. I want to be part of this team. “”
• “Leaders don’t say, ‘Give me the perfect tone to perform.’ I cannot say, “Let me wait until the end of the pandemic to show my leadership skills.” You have to take a problem that is too constrained in many cases and free yourself from its constraints, and more particularly free the team you are leading, so that they can continue to get things done. “

Nadella said no one would be perfect. But he wonders if he is better than yesterday.

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