DeLisa Alexander
Leadership looks different at Red Hat. People don't just receive the status of "leader" when appointed to a position or given a title.
Instead, we've observed through the years that at Red Hat leaders earn their leadership positions when they adopt a special combination of mindsets and behaviors.
A few years ago, we embarked on a journey to identify that unique mix of mindsets and behaviors. And we used what we discovered to shape how we help people become effective in leading in our open organization. We strive to develop leaders at all levels, enabling them to extend their impact and strengthen the open culture that has been so critical to our success.
We found that open leaders leverage a set of mindsets and behaviors to create an inclusive meritocracy, where everyone can thrive by contributing at their best. Open leaders create a community with shared purpose, where everyone harnesses their individual strengths and talents to unlock their full potential.
After 17 years of working in our open organization, I've learned a lot about what it means to be an open leader—often by making mistakes along the way. As our CEO Jim Whitehurst sometimes says, when you operate at the bleeding edge, sometimes you get cut. These are a few of my stories, some of the lessons I've learned reflecting on what we've learned at Red Hat about the stages of open leadership. Ultimately, our journey has helped us establish a community of leaders who use open leadership to unlock the potential of both Red Hatters and our customers.
To understand why open leadership is such a big part of our story, we have to look back to our founders, Marc Ewing and Bob Young.
Marc was a software engineer with a big tech company, and he became a true believer in the open source development model after being frustrated with the proprietary development model. Marc realized that he could work with his own small team to develop software, and they would make incremental progress and incremental innovations—or he could share his code with a broader developer community, inviting those best suited to solve problems to participate and to innovate much more quickly. He chose the second option. That's how Red Hat's first Linux distribution was born.
Bob was Red Hat's first sales and marketing leader, and he saw the potential in the open source way. We still had a long way to go to develop a sustainable business model, let alone reach profitability. At the time, Bob was also selling T-shirts, magazines, and coffee mugs to boost the bottom line. But the underlying interest in the development model, the passionate community of developers committed to keeping the code open, and the early hires Marc and Bob made from this community cemented the open source way as the way that Red Hat would develop technology.
Those early hires, and the community that sprung up around Red Hat Linux, were committed to a level of transparency that gave all participants the same amount of insight. They chose meritocracy over hierarchy to ensure the best idea wins. They viewed collaboration as essential to success. And they took a "release early, release often"
approach to development. As Red Hat continued to hire more people from the open source community, these expectations and norms became those of our Red Hatters.
At Red Hat, those principles of open source software development shape our approach to leadership. We found that the people we hired from the open source community expected leaders at Red Hat to act like community managers. Their expectations for managers were very different from what you might find in a traditional, hierarchical company. They expected meritocracy—that anyone could bring great ideas forward, and that best solutions could come from anyone, anywhere. Anyone could choose to lead.
At Red Hat, we believe open leadership is a set of behaviors, not strictly a position in an organizational chart. Driving those behaviors is an open mindset—a preference for working and acting with open values and principles in mind (see Figure 1).
{insert Figure 1} Figure 1: The Open Leadership Mindset
Of course, a person's behaviors and that person's position in the organization do reinforce one another. But in an open organization, and especially in an inclusive meritocracy, a person's role in the organization doesn't guarantee influence; it just amplifies the influence that person has worked to generate. Executive leaders do benefit from greater visibility in an organization, for sure, but in many ways that means they shoulder a larger burden to continually demonstrate (through their behaviors) their commitment to the organization and its values. Excellent leaders accrue more influence when they use their highly visible positions to elevate the organization and its mission. Poor leaders lose influence when others see them behave in ways that might seem counter to that mission. The more influence a person has accrued in an open organization, the more visible their position in that organization will become—and the more responsibility they bear for doing right by the organization as a result. We've collected and codified some of this knowledge in our Red Hat Multiplier, a tool we use to identify and assess leadership behaviors at Red Hat (see Figure 2).
{insert Figure 2} Figure 2: The Red Hat Multiplier
This open approach to leadership is key to how we grow and scale our culture. We've learned a lot of lessons along the way as we have matured. Back in those early days, we had no manual on open leadership that we could refer to (which is why I'm so happy this project exists).
As we've worked to understand the nature of open leadership, we've observed three important stages of its development:
- Leading personally
- Leading through a team, and then
- Leading exponentially by catalyzing other leader
Let me explain them.
Leadership begins with every individual. Becoming a leader is a personal choice people make when they want to contribute beyond their own self-interest. Leaders enrich an organization's culture when they become an influential voice on a particular topic, and when their actions effectively influence and engage others. Personal leadership can be an incredibly powerful force.
I began to learn how to lead in an open organization when I joined Red Hat as the second lawyer on a team of two. Within the first week, I was working on several questions our legal "department" received about how certain open source licenses should be interpreted and applied. I studied the issue and provided my learned opinion.
Then something happened that would never happen at a law firm: The developers with whom I was working (my clients) promptly informed me that they disagreed with my opinion. They suggested using a different license.
I was simply shocked that they would debate my advice. I was the lawyer, after all. In a law firm, if I were working as the senior lawyer on a project, others would have deferred to me even if I were wrong. After practicing law in an outside firm and moving up the law firm ladder, my hourly billing rate meant that people listened to me. I thought things would be the same at Red Hat, with my credentials speaking for themselves. Once inside Red Hat, however, I soon discovered that's not how open leadership works.
After I listened to the developers' reasoning, I realized they were right. They, in fact, knew the open source licenses better than I did.
That's when I began to understand that I had to lead by being transparent about my findings and analysis. I couldn't simply opine on a topic. Open leaders don't rely on compliance, but on influence. Open leaders are defined by those who choose to follow.
As a leader in an open organization, I needed to be prepared to defend my logic. I needed to know the ins and outs, the pros and cons, the ideal and the realistic aspects of every issue I debated. Over time, I developed my ability to lay out a common fact base, to describe mitigating factors, and to make the business case for decisions even if they weren't ideal. When I engaged my peers transparently and early in the process, we often identified even more risks or mitigating factors.
We were forging new territory in copyright law, and we were able to approach problems in a new, more productive way. By adopting this approach, we felt confident that we made the best decisions for Red Hat.
Working collaboratively and inclusively—such that job titles and business cards were less important—I was able to provide much more value to the company.
In short, I learned what personal leadership was all about.
When an individual needs to lead a team of people, directly or indirectly, that leader must learn how to tap into, combine, and align the individual strengths of every member of a group to bring about a shared vision. While this certainly happens with managers and their direct reports, and with project and program managers, members of organized groups and communities can also exercise team leadership by aligning the strengths and interests of their stakeholders and collaborators.
Before I was selected to lead our human resources team, I was the primary legal partner to my predecessor. I had provided legal advice to her team and been a customer of their programs. By working with her on some critical projects, I had developed deep expertise in executive and equity compensation (very important capabilities for the HR VP), but I had limited exposure to other critical talent capabilities. So when I stepped in to manage the People team, I needed to learn a great deal more about all of the other areas including employee relations, talent acquisition, benefits administration, training and development, performance and development, and talent management. This was a daunting challenge. The people who populated my small team were all subject matter experts deeply knowledgeable in their areas, and often they were the only person at Red Hat responsible for it.
Importantly, I did have a deep knowledge of and experience in Red Hat's culture and grounding in our open leadership concepts. My perspective coming into this management position was that there were many opportunities to provide even more value to Red Hat if we grew into being business partners in addition to HR policy protectors.
HR policy protectors are often in the position of trying to prevent their internal clients from doing the wrong thing. This is clearly an important function, and HR organizations tend to approach policy adherence from a command and control position. This is what the team was hired and chartered to do at the time. But if we could shift our mindsets and move to being business partners with our internal customers, we could provide more value and help solve business problems.
At the time, our sales general managers said that our biggest business risk was an inability to grow by attracting the best new talent. I wanted our team to be in the room to ask probing questions and to collaborate by providing data and insights, so that our partners could make better talent decisions. This required a total shift in mindset and growing our capabilities, but it was what our People team needed to do to provide more value, and more importantly, to put us in a better position to grow and scale our open organization.
I will be blunt. Stepping into this new role was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I was taking on a new position where I was managing people who were once my peers. They had the specialized HR knowledge that I needed to learn, and I was asking them to make a major strategic shift. Just as in my previous role, I had to make the case for why we needed to move in a new direction. And I had to up my game, doing deep dives on our core functions so that I could be fully conversant in the areas where our team worked. I had to navigate moments to push for change when I thought there was a more effective way to provide business value, and moments to let their knowledge and expertise carry the day.
Sometimes we had to "let the sparks fly." I made mistakes, but I worked hard to set context for our work by articulating a clear vision of better business partnership that would allow Red Hat to accelerate while maintaining solid policy practices.
Gradually, the team began to support the vision of helping Red Hat achieve our business objectives. Our subject matter experts began to leverage their expertise and grow their capabilities as business partners, and I stepped out of the way, empowering them to determine how to accomplish the specific tasks needed to reach our goals.
If I could time travel and talk to myself on my first day as the People team's leader, I would tell myself not to expect buy-in from everyone immediately. While people have their own perspectives and experiences, you can do many things to accelerate the support for your vision. Open leaders need to have the mindset that their role is about inspiring people by understanding their values and goals, how they connect their work to your organization's purpose, and your organization's higher-level goals. Successful open team leaders extend trust and bring their people's expertise to the table, get their perspectives, make adjustments, and then let the experts decide how to best contribute to a shared vision.
Exponential leadership occurs when an individual's impact gets multiplied. Exponential leaders compound and integrate the strengths of teams (groups of people) to create new organizational capabilities. They create new leaders and catalyze vibrant ecosystems of teams that channel their passion and energy toward a shared organizational purpose to deliver rapid results. Their leadership contributions have a powerful effect, with the potential to profoundly influence an organization's culture.
Fast forward 17 years after I joined Red Hat. We'd been experiencing exponential growth in our business, and we'd hired many, many new Red Hatters. Those were great achievements, but by now our founders had been gone for a long time. We often assumed that all Red Hatters could state Red Hat's purpose and would use that purpose as a north star for making decisions, but I'd started seeing some indications that was not the case. Some Red Hatters saw their purpose as contributing to open source communities; others saw it as driving business results, or delivering value for stockholders.
At that point, I was lucky to have the chance to meet Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why. After learning more about his work, it was interesting to realize that while we have a mission, vision, and values, we did not have a purpose statement. I felt that we needed an aligned way of articulating our purpose to reduce inconsistencies and risks to our culture for the future.
Simon and the consultants we engaged suggested working with our senior management team and executives to develop our why, then doing change management for our associates. But we were not trying to change anything. What we needed was an open organization approach, a companywide conversation where we engaged all associates as collaborators.
We began by inviting all Red Hatters—more than 10,000 people—to share their personal why stories by describing a moment when they felt especially proud to work at Red Hat. More than one out of every five did! These were some of the most incredible, inspiring stories I've ever read. Some Red Hatters even posted their stories to our company-wide mailing list and intranet, for all to read.
We were overwhelmed with so many stories; in fact, we simply didn't know how we were going to pull the data out of the stories. We had some ideas and were transparent with the entire organization about the fact that we were going to take the time to build some technology to help, but stressed that people should anticipate this would take us a while. We ultimately created an analytics tool for identifying key narrative themes using open source natural language processing technology. Pairing this tool with human intelligence allowed us to identify key themes, shared beliefs, and cultural concepts.
As we moved through the project, again and again we enlisted Red Hatters to push us along. When we shared a few gaps in our data collection and surveys, a number of our people helped us reach associates who were underrepresented. And when we asked for input on our rollout plans, in addition to sharing creative ideas, many Red Hatters took up the baton and blogged, tweeted, or spoke about our why statement of their own accord.
To make the "Rediscovering Red Hat's Why" project happen, I had to practice my best exponential leadership skills and get out of the way.
We brought together a community of incredibly brilliant Red Hatters, and my role was to resource and transparently provide context for their work. Some of these associates were people you would expect to find in a room leading up such an ambitious project. Others were stretched by the experience and emerged as new leaders who have gone on to excel in our organization.
For me, this project reinforced the notion that when you give Red Hatters the ability to create something brilliant they will wildly exceed your expectations. To help them succeed, you have to create the right environment to multiply their individual strengths and talents.
The process may sometimes be messy, or chaotic, but you have to have faith in the power of participation. Our project team thought through the details, developed intricate project plans to engage all Red Hatters, conducted data gathering, and analyzed the results. I influenced their work more as a collaborator, not as a hierarchical senior manager.
In a brainstorming session with Red Hatters from many different levels and departments, Chief Technology Officer Chris Wright suggested the phrase we ultimately adopted as our Why statement. When he made his suggestion, heads began to nod, we knew intuitively he had articulated the central theme that many Red Hatters had expressed as our purpose: "Open Unlocks the World's Potential."
At Red Hat, we strive to be open by default in our collaboration with associates, communities, customers, partners, and other stakeholders. We believe that open unlocks the world's potential.
Bringing this to life requires open leadership at all levels. Open leaders are especially adept at applying open principles to their work, inspiring, guiding, and assisting others. In fact, they prefer this manner of working and leading to any other. They are transparent about both their goals and constraints, sharing data and resources as widely and thoroughly as possible. They create inclusive environments by drawing diverse and disparate groups of stakeholders into productive conversations and establishing the conditions for pointed yet respectful dialogue. Rather than simply issue commands, they take great care to provide teammates with both sufficient context for the challenges they face and the latitude to make innovative decisions. And they constantly seek the best ways to align their teams' actions and behaviors with an organization's mission and goals.
Looking back, I can see how my own leadership journey has impacted how I view the concept of open leadership. Open mindsets and behaviors help open leaders succeed during the phases of their leadership journey.
Individuals exercising personal leadership must engage transparently and rely on influence to lead others. Team leaders have to set the context for others, connecting their work to the organization's goals and creating an environment that aligns strengths and embraces inclusive meritocracy. Exponential leaders catalyze not just one team, but many teams in an open, collaborative environment, and they work to ensure new leaders emerge to address the challenges an organization will confront in the future.
Now, we are seeing the need to articulate the manager's unique role in an open organization. Our next frontier to explore is the concept of open management. We think we know open management when we see it at Red Hat. Open managers are leaders given resources and accountability to create value through and with other people. They know that the best way to do this is to help people lead in order to unlock potential. Now, we need to deepen our understanding of the role of open managers, measure their impact, and put systems in place to help open managers and the people they manage thrive. We will look at what great management looks like elsewhere and what it looks like at Red Hat. Managers create context and connection, and they are important guardians of our unique culture. We know that the mindsets and behaviors that set our open managers apart are going to be incredibly important at this stage of our growth.
With the values and leadership principles firmly rooted in the world of open source, we have a strong foundation to build upon.