Good leaders can’t be afraid to get their hands dirty, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Before he founded the computer chip giant, which is now worth more than $3.1 trillion, Huang was a teenage busboy who worked at Denny’s. Years later, he would come up with the idea for Nvidia with the co-founders in a booth at the same Denny’s, where he used to clean tables, wash dishes and even clean toilets.
Despite boasting a net worth estimated by Forbes to be close to $108 billion, Huang says these humble beginnings are still creating the type of business leaders they are today.
“For me, there’s no job that’s beneath me because, remember, I used to be a dishwasher (and) I cleaned toilets,” Huang said in a March interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“I mean, I clean a lot of toilets,” he said, telling a room full of students: “I’ve cleaned more toilets than you put together — and some of them you can’t even see.”
Of course, there is a big difference between being a teenage restaurant employee and running a multitrillion dollar company. However, Huang said he still tries to approach his current job with the same willingness to do anything he believes can help employees improve the company, regardless of whether the task can be delegated to someone else.
“If you send me something and you want input and I can be of service to you – and, in the review of this, share with you how I reason through it – I have made a contribution to you,” Huang said.
Huang is a popular boss, with some employees calling him “demanding” and a “perfectionist.” He asked employees across the company to send him a weekly email with the five most important things they were working on, and then Huang sometimes even walked over to the employee’s desk to ask how the project was going and weigh in with suggestions, according to a profile in the New Yorker.
Whenever possible, long-time CEOs like to show their employees the reasons behind the suggestions or solutions they offer. Doing so helps the company in the long run, and Huang also finds it rewarding and an opportunity to learn new things himself, he told an audience at Stanford.
“I show people how to reason through things all the time: about strategy, how to forecast something, how to break problems down,” he said. “You empower people everywhere.”
He tries to get the most complicated work done during the day, so if someone needs something from him another day, he can “always say, ‘I have plenty of time.’ And I am,” Huang said in his commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology last month.
And, while many CEOs try to limit the number of people who report directly to a few employees to free up management’s schedule, Huang prefers to have “50 direct reports,” he told CNBC in November. The structure improves Nvidia’s performance by allowing information and strategy to flow more directly between Huang and other Nvidia leaders, according to Huang.
“The more direct reports the CEO has, the less layers in the company. It allows us to store fluid information,” he said.
It’s all about putting employees in the best position to succeed and contribute to Nvidia’s overall success, Huang said at Stanford. It’s the job of a good CEO to “lead others to greatness, inspire others, empower others, support others,” he said. “This is the reason why the management team exists: to serve all the other people who work in the company.”
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