Hitting "Refresh" on What It Means to Lead

Reading Satya Nadella’s recent book Hit Refresh requires any executive to pause and consider what it means to lead in the present day. Gone are the days of all decisions being handed down from the corner office, at least for anyone who wants to run a successful company. Today’s mobile and flexible workforce demands more of all of its participants than ever before when it comes to working collaboratively, especially because the space in which everyone is showing up is more and more likely to be virtual rather than physical. Accounting for the changing needs of his company, Microsoft, and its workforce, Nadella suggests in his book suggests that the C in CEO now needs to stand for “culture,” and I partly agree. I’d expand his definition, though, to “Culture of Collaboration.”

Fostering a culture of collaboration is every executive’s job, and showing up ready to participate in that culture of collaboration daily is every employee’s. In a Fast Company article excerpting his book, Nadella highlights leading a corporate shift to a “growth mindset” in three key ways, pared down to curiosity, diversity, and unity. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a “growth mindset,” it is worthwhile to check out the work of Stanford psychology professor Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., who undertook decades of research on success to bring us the ideas of both “growth” and “fixed” mindsets. To summarize the Mindset website, the key difference between the two mindsets is that people with a “fixed” mindset believe that their abilities are fixed and can’t be changed, whereas those with a “growth” mindset believe that brains and talent are just the beginning of developing themselves via hard work and dedication. Like Nadella, who wouldn’t want to lead a corporate transition away from stagnancy and “the way we’ve always done it” to a growth path in which hard work and commitment yields bigger results? Good hiring practices attract employees who have growth mindsets already. For those who aren’t coming in new, though, leading a cultural shift to that growth mindset, as Nadella seeks to do, is necessary in order to transition to a new way of doing business. Circling back to the three ways he seeks to bring about a growth mindset -- through curiosity, diversity, and unity -- I see value in all of these things, and I’d expand and add to his definitions as follows:

Curiosity, and a related willingness to embrace change, is a must in the tech space. Making change happen is the crux of what we do! High tech moves at a fast pace, and conducting business “the way we always have” isn’t going to keep, let alone gain, marketshare. In the article about his book, Nadella frames that curiosity in terms of meeting customer needs. That is important, of course. However, I’d rewind it a step from that, even. As my company’s EVP of Innovation, it’s my job always to be peeking around the next corner, curious about the path ahead, and to lead a team that is constantly probing that unexplored turf with me. Yes, we must account for our customers, but that approach is a bit reactive and still old-school to me. To really break the mold, we can deliver something unexpected and new that the customer didn’t know they needed until we’ve already shown them that they can’t live without it. The cloud falls in this territory. Company by company, “server rooms” are falling to make way for software and data stored in the ‘invisible” cloud space. True curiosity in the tech space involves seeing needs ahead of our customers and delivering them such that we’re driving change.

With regard to diversity, the importance of it cannot be understated. Beginning with combating unconscious bias in hiring, all companies, not just tech ones, need to focus on creating a culture of inclusion. In the tech space, equality of opportunity for women to enter the space, let alone attain leadership positions, must be a constant priority for companies. Tech still needs to “woman up.” Success still feels like a boys’ club sometimes, but there is plenty that companies and employees can do about that. The value of any company is only as great at the value of its employees, and their feeling valued by their company is more than half of that battle.

When it comes to unity, it is here that I find the greatest value in the growth mindset and the greatest need for new technology. Teamwork is everything. While building your team well from the get-go is important, so is ongoing cohesion, and that is more of a challenge today when a workforce is likely to be distributed, mobile, and flexible. It’s my belief that any company who does not operate this way is already behind on the “curiosity” front. If we really embrace a growth mindset, it’s not only incumbent upon our employees to be willing to change; it’s necessary for companies to change the way we allow our employees to do our business, too. And that means that some of them may want to work outside of 9-5, or move two states away for less expensive housing and better schools for their kids, or take an extended family trip halfway around the globe while being able to keep up with their work. It is the ultimate in expressing our value of unity when we make space for our employees’ lives rather than force them into the box of a building and face-to-face. With collaboration tools like my company’s software Glip and collaborative video meetings, unity is facilitated. In our experience, performance is enhanced by allowing such flexibility. No one loses the thread of our ongoing work because our messaging, file-sharing, task-tracking, and related functions keep us all on the same page.

This brings me back to the C in CEO, or in any C-level position: I suggest that if it stands for a Culture of Collaboration, we’ve achieved something beyond Culture, and beyond a company with a “growth mindset.” With a Culture of Collaboration encouraged and embraced from the top down, we’ve staked a claim on our progress stemming from the inclusion of a distributed, diverse workforce that is curious enough about how to do business differently to push the frontiers of our possibilities. I can see the effectiveness of this high-level collaborative culture in my own workplace and couldn’t be more grateful for the doors it opens for us to grow in new ways in the cloud and beyond. I applaud what Nadella is doing at Microsoft, and I hope to see him push further into the turf on which I now stand, where a growth mindset is evident in the products we offer for a new business paradigm that is less brick-and-mortar and more meeting our employees and customers where they are. It’s an exciting time to be in charge of Innovation, the space in which growth manifests.