NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang manages 60 direct reports and discourages one-on-one meetings, preferring to address everyone at once so information reaches everyone equally. He believes feedback should be public to foster collective learning and has removed roughly seven layers of hierarchy.
Questions this video answers
60 direct reports
May 29, 2024
Approximately seven layers
Chapters
Nvidia's leadership team is 60 people, 60 direct reports. 60 direct reports, yeah.
Which is not conventionally considered the best practice.
I'm certain that's the best practice. It's not conventional, but I am certain it's the best practice. The reason is because the layer of hierarchy in your company really matters. I don't do one on ones and almost everything that I say, I say to everybody, all at the same time. And the reason for that is because I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that somehow only one or two people should hear about. These are the challenges of the company, or this is the problem I'm trying to solve, or this is the direction we're trying to go into. This isn't working. That's working well. All of this type of information, everybody should be able to hear. I love that everybody's working off of the same song sheet. I love that there is no privileged access to information. I love that we're able to all contribute to solving a problem. And when you have 60 people in a room, everybody heard the reasoning of the problem, everybody heard the reasoning of the solution, everybody heard everything. I believe that when you give everybody equal access to information, it empowers people. And so that's number one, empowering. Number two, if the CEO's direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you've removed in a company is probably something like seven.
And so I rarely find myself having to stand up for conventional wisdom. But if I were to kind of steel man the other side, I'd say, well, one on ones are where you provide coaching, where you maybe talk through goals together, personal goals, career advancement, you know, what have you, where maybe you give feedback on something that you see somebody systematically not doing so well and so forth. So anyway, there's all these things that kind of one is again conventionally supposed to do in the one on one. Do you not do those things or do you do them in a different way?
Really good question. I do it right there. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. In fact, this is really a big deal. First of all, feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this now? You created the conditions because of some mistake that you made or silliness that you brought upon yourself. We should all learn from that opportunity. So for me to explain to you why that doesn't make sense or how I differ from it, half the time I'm not right, but. But for me to reason through it in front of everybody helps everybody learn how to reason through it. And so the problem I have with one on ones and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning. Learning from mistakes, other people's mistakes, is the best way to learn. Why learn from your own mistakes? Why learn from your own embarrassment? You got to learn from other people's embarrassment. That's why we. That's why we have case studies. And isn't that right?
Have you succeeded in getting other leaders at Nvidia to adopt this practice?
I give people the opportunity to decide for themselves, but I really discourage one on ones. I really discourage one on ones. Nothing is worse than the idea that somebody says, oh, Jensen wants us to do this. Why does that have to be said to anybody? Everybody should know.
