Transform Time With Your Team

This week marked another monumental earnings report for AI tech giant Nvidia. In the midst of all the financial reporting, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang sat down with the CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison and shared some of his driving strategies and best practices for team leadership. Here are some of the highlights of this extraordinary interview.

• Nvidia's leadership team consists of 60 people, all reporting directly to Huang, which he believes is the best practice. (That ratio gets smaller further down the management chain as specific technical tasks require more supervision).
  

• Equal access to information empowers people and allows for everyone to contribute to solving problems in the company.
  
  “I believe that your contribution to the work should not be based on the privileged access to information. I don't do one-on ones and my staff is quite large. Almost everything that I say, I say to everybody all at the same time. 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.”
  

  

• Feedback is given in front of everyone as a learning opportunity for all, and it's important to reason through mistakes and differences.
  
  “I give feedback right there in front of everybody. Feedback is learning. The problem I have with 1 on 1's and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of other people that same learning.”
  

• Learning from other people's mistakes is the best way to learn, and the speaker discourages one-on-one feedback in favor of group learning.
  
  “Other people's mistakes are the best way to learn. Why learn from your own mistakes and from your own embarrassment. You’ve got to learn from other people's embarrassment. That's why we that's why we have case studies - isn't that right? We're trying to learn from other people's disasters, other people's tragedies. Nothing makes us happier!”
  

• Jensen Huang prefers to improve employees rather than firing them, as it signifies giving up on them.
  
  “I would rather improve somebody rather than give up on them. There a lot things in life you can learn, and I believe you should have the benefit of trying to do it. I’d rather torture you into greatness because I believe in you. Coaches will often torture their teams to greatness. Don’t give up. One day something you will click. Don’t give up right before that moment!”

• In the role of CEO, Huang tries to keep his calendar focused on things that matter for the larger direction of the company - rather than getting caught up in operational details.
  

  “I try not to have regular operational meetings because I've got amazing people in the company for those regular operational meetings. So CEOs should be like pinch hitters. We should be working on the things that nobody else can, or no nobody else is. Wherever we can move to needle.”

• On work-life balance:
  
  “I work from the moment I wake up in the morning to the time I go to sleep and I work seven days a week. When I’m not at work I think about work… When I’m at work I go to problem meetings or idea meetings, or brainstorming meetings or creation meetings or whatever it is. Those are the meetings I go to, and usually I call them. I try really hard not to have Outlook manage my life, so we purposefully decide what kind of things that we want to do, what we want to work on. So I try to live a life of purpose and I manage my time accordingly.”