According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a good leader can’t be afraid to work hard.
Long before he co-founded the computer chip giant now worth more than $3.1 trillion, Huang was a teenage waiter working at Denny’s. Years later, he would idea for Nvidia with his co-founders in a booth at Denny’s, where he bussed tables, washed dishes, and even scrubbed toilets.
Despite boasting a net worth that Forbes estimates at nearly 108 billion dollarsHuang says those humble beginnings still shaped the kind of business leader he has become today.
“For me, no task is menial because, remember, I used to be a dishwasher. [and] I used to clean toilets,” Huang said in an interview in March. at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“I mean, I’ve cleaned a lot of toilets,” he added, addressing a room full of students: “I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined — and some of them you can’t help but see.”
Of course, there’s a big difference between being a teenage restaurant worker and running a trillion-dollar company. But Huang said he still tries to approach his job today with the same willingness to take on anything if he believes he can help his employees improve the company, regardless of whether the task can be delegated to someone else.
“If you send me something and want me to comment on it and I can help you — and in the process of reviewing, share with you how I reasoned about it — then I’ve contributed to you,” Huang said.
Huang is a famously down-to-earth boss, with a number of the staff called him “demanding” and “perfectionist.” He required employees across the company to email him every week with the five most important things they were working on, and then sometimes Huang would even walk to employees’ desks to check on the progress of projects and make suggestions, according to the filing. New Yorker.
Whenever possible, the longtime CEO likes to show employees his reasoning behind a proposal or solution he’s come up with. Doing so helps the company in the long run, and Huang also finds it personally rewarding and an opportunity to learn new things himself, he told the Stanford audience.
“I always show people how to reason things out: how to strategize, how to forecast, how to analyze problems,” he said. “You’re empowering people everywhere.”
He tries to get his most complex work done early in the day, so if someone needs his help the rest of the day, he can “always say, ‘I have plenty of time.’ And I do,” Huang said in his opening remarks. at the California Institute of Technology last month.
And, while many CEOs try to limit the number of people reporting directly to them to a handful of employees to free up their management schedules, Huang actually likes to have about “50 direct reports,” he says. told CNBC in November. That structure improves Nvidia’s performance by allowing information and strategy to flow more directly between Huang and other Nvidia leaders, Huang said.
“The more direct reports a CEO has, the fewer layers there are in the company. This allows us to maintain a constant flow of information,” he said.
Huang said at Stanford that his goal is to put employees in the best position to succeed and contribute to Nvidia’s overall success. The job of any good CEO is to “lead others to greatness, to inspire others, to empower others, to support others,” he added. “That’s why the management team exists: to serve all the other people who work in the company.”
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