I was lucky to work for John Chambers at Cisco, and his moral compass was clear: if you cheat on your spouse, you are out.
Period.
You can’t be trusted with Cisco’s reputation or culture.
I’m confident John would have fired Jensen long before he resigned.
Make no mistake about it: Jensen broke the trust of his family and his team at Nvidia.
Every Nvidia customer will be asking this question: Can I trust the company’s roadmap?
Every sales and partner account executive at Nvidia is calling customers today to reassure them they can.
And you can bet some customers are going to push for more discounts.
It’s a complete waste of time, of money, and of trust built over 33 years.
Humans being humans, I don’t know if you can ever create the conditions where stupid stuff doesn’t happen.
But I do think managers can improve the odds of it not happening by following three basic rules.
It doesn’t matter whether you manage 50,000 people or five.
1. Be clear about your moral compass. In the end, a team operates on trust. As team manager, it’s your job to lay out the principles of behavior you expect from the team. I don’t think you can delegate these principles to “corporate.” You need to know yours. Honesty was the center of my moral compass: I don’t ever remember lying to a teammate in my entire career. What’s the center of yours?
2. Everyone is replaceable, so build a great bench. It’s an organizational risk to have 50 direct reports and no succession plan. Across my career, I learned that everyone is replaceable—even a visionary CEO. I never wanted any one person to think they were bigger than the team. As an old coaching maxim goes: “When the name on the back of the jersey becomes more important than the name on the front of the jersey, then we have a problem.” A succession plan is really a statement about your team-building skills. Ask yourself: if you were out for two weeks starting tomorrow, who would run your team? If you don’t have a few standouts on your bench, you need to build one.
3. It has to be safe to say something. Here’s the thing that really bugs me about this: people saw him in public doing things that he should not have been doing. As team manager, the “see something, say something” rule matters to making sure people know the team has no secrets. But your team won’t say something unless they know it’s safe. That’s your job. I never liked the phrase “retribution culture,” but I know it exists. It just can’t exist on your team.
As a manager, you want to be remembered for what you accomplished and how you treated people.
This is a self-awareness exercise as a person first, and a manager second. If you were on the board at Nvidia, what would you have been thinking? What would have been your first instincts?
More importantly, as a manager, have you shared your instincts with your team?
Today’s a good day to do that.
What kind of manager are you?
Where do you rank on the Six Drivers of Consistency? Take the Self-assessment.
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I’ve managed about 5,000 people in my career, and I was consistently ranked in the top quartile of all managers at Cisco, one of the world’s best places to work. I’ve walked in your shoes as a manager.
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