Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended a media roundtable held in Singapore on December 6, 2023.
Sue Edgar | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang knows he is a tough boss and has no regrets.
In a recent interview with “60 Minutes,” employees at the company’s Santa Clara headquarters told reporter Bill Whitaker that the entrepreneur was “demanding,” a “perfectionist” and “not easy to work for.” ”.
Huang, who co-founded the chipmaker in 1993 and now has a market value of more than $2 trillion, said that described him “perfectly.”
“That’s how it should be. If you want to do something extraordinary, it shouldn’t be easy,” he told Whittaker.
This isn’t the first time Huang’s leadership style has been in the spotlight. He previously told CNBC that he had “50 direct reports” to prevent unnecessary management growth at the company — most CEOs have about 10 direct reports.
He said he expected senior executives to operate with great independence, requiring little guidance or pampering.
Huang’s strategy may be a bit controversial in the age of empathetic leaders, but experts say to run one of the world’s largest companies, you have to persevere.
“He’s cruel in a way,” Wladislaw Rivkin, associate professor of organizational behavior at Trinity Business School, told CNBC Make It. “He’s the leader of a multi-trillion-dollar company and went through a very rough selection process because there are so many tech companies with valuations in the trillions or billions of dollars.”
Rifkin noted that many small companies have gone bankrupt, but Nvidia “survived.” He added that you have to be “resilient” to operate at this level.
In addition, Sankalp Chaturvedi, professor of organizational behavior and leadership at Imperial College Business School, said Huang’s tenure in Silicon Valley has lasted more than three decades, which is “pretty rare.”
Chaturvedi said employees at well-known companies like Nvidia often have other options, but “they choose to stay as long as possible,” which suggests Huang is doing something right.
Jen-Hsun Huang runs Nvidia like a “machine”
Behavioral experts told CNBC that Huang’s immigrant background played a role in shaping his leadership style.
The billionaire was born in Taiwan in 1963 and was sent to the United States by his parents when he was nine, even though he spoke no English.
According to The New Yorker, he spent time in a boarding school where he was bullied mercilessly. As a teenager, he worked part-time as a dishwasher at Denny’s and even cleaned toilets.
Rifkin said Huang now exhibits a “task-oriented” leadership style that focuses on getting work done, setting ambitious goals and monitoring performance.
He added that it was reminiscent of immigrant backgrounds and work ethics, with the common belief that “to be successful you need to work hard”.
Task-oriented leaders can be “effective” because they tend to challenge their employees, Rifkin said.
“Both in leadership and in motivation research, we have a lot of evidence that challenges motivate people and lead to optimal performance,” Rifkin said.
Chaturvedi explained that “struggle” from an early age also showed that he preferred a high degree of control over all aspects of his company.
“He understood his organization as a machine, thinking about planning, thinking about economics,” Chaturvedi said.
While this approach has been effective for decades, Huang may have overlooked other important leadership traits.
Empathic leadership is ‘demanding’
Most importantly, they believe Huang’s leadership style can be improved.
“I think taking care of people’s well-being and recognizing people as human beings, not just workers, are issues worth looking at,” Rifkin said.
But he said being a people-first leader and meeting the needs of workers was “very demanding”. This requires remembering people’s names and maintaining relationships with many people, Chaturvedi added.
“Being task-oriented requires less energy because you set the task, you set the deadline, you set the milestone, you check it off, and then that’s it. You don’t care who does it essentially This work,” Rifkin said.
Huang had 50 direct reports to manage, and one thing he was severely lacking was time.
“We all have 24 hours in a day, and the more direct reports you have, the harder it is to coordinate,” Chaturvedi said.
“I can definitely tell you that it must be difficult for him to manage so many direct reports,” Chaturvedi added. “He’s trying to control every bit of the action instead of coordinating his strengths, and that’s the problem.”
Rifkin said a lot of people want to work for Nvidia, so Huang’s ruthless leadership style has worked so far because there’s always a revolving door of talent at the company.
“If your company has a hard time hiring talented employees (and this applies to most companies in the market), then I think it’s hard to lead with such a ruthless leadership style as someone who has options and sees things from the employee’s perspective. The perspective is just to look for other opportunities,” Rifkin said.
