Demanding perfection: The leadership style of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
Nvidia employees at the company’s Santa Clara HQ revealed what it is like working under CEO Jensen Huang, describing their boss as a “perfectionist” and “not easy to work for”.
Bill Whitaker, a correspondent for CBS News show 60 Minutes, interviewed members of Nvidia’s staff to learn more about their chief. Some talked about how demanding it was to work for Huang.
When Whitaker spoke to Huang about it, the Nvidia boss agreed with his workers’ statements, claiming that they described him “perfectly”.
“It should be like that,” Huang told Whitaker. “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Huang’s distinct leadership style
Huang, along with fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, founded Nvidia in 1993. Since then, he has led the chipmaker into becoming one of the biggest companies in the world. Nvidia is currently worth more than US$2 trillion, joining Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet with the honour.
However, Huang has garnered quite a reputation for his unique leadership style. In an interview with CNBC, he said that he established 50 direct reports to prevent unnecessary layers of management from developing at his company. By comparison, most other CEOs would only have 10 direct reports to stop such things from happening.
Huang also has high expectations of his senior executives as he wants every one of them to operate on their own and with as little hand-holding as possible.
Doing what it takes to succeed
While some people might not agree with Huang’s leadership style, others like Trinity Business School Associate Professor Wladislaw Rivkin understands how important it is for business leaders to be relentless if they want their companies to succeed.
“He is to some degree cutthroat,” said Rivkin, an expert in organisational behaviour who spoke to CNBC.
“He is the leader of a trillion-dollar-valued company and has gone through a very rough selection process because there are many tech companies which are at the trillion or billion-dollar mark.”
Rivkin pointed out that Nvidia has survived even when most other companies would have already folded. He believes this is because of the company’s ability to stay resilient.
Meanwhile, Imperial College Business School Professor Sankalp Chaturvedi said Huang’s 30 years of Nvidia leadership is “quite rare”.
Chaturvedi highlighted how many of the company’s employees are choosing to stay with the chipmaker even though they have other options available. He said Huang might be doing something right if his workers are sticking around.
Improving Huang’s leadership style
If there is one thing that Huang can improve on, Rivkin believes, it is his ability to connect with his workers.
“I think taking care of people’s well-being, recognising people as people, and not just as workers, can be something that could be looked into,” he said.
However, he warned the Nvidia boss that being a leader who is people-focused and meets their workers’ needs can be “very demanding”.
“Being task-oriented requires much less energy because you set the task, you set the deadline, you set the milestone, you check it out, then that’s pretty much it. You don’t care who is essentially doing the work,” Rivkin said.