Bill Gates to spendmore time at the company. Gates agreed to spend a third of his time meeting with development groups. “It will be fun to help define this next round of products, working together,” Gates said in a welcome video, showing that humbleness and servant leadership can even apply to one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Qualities to Look for when Hiring “The one trait I look for in new hires is whether they create clarity and energy,” said Nadella in conversation with Gerard Baker in 2016. He wants to flip the employer-employee equation around. “What if you change this equation? Instead of saying ‘I work for Microsoft,’ what if Microsoft worked as a platform for every one of our more than 220,000 people? Throughout his years at the company, before becoming CEO, Nadella hadmarveled at what a great platform it was to have an impact. “That’s what made me stay and be ambitious,” he says. “Of course, a CEO has to live the culture, but if you can switch on every employee’s mindset to think that the company is working for them, then you’ve really achieved something. Also, don’t wait for your next job to do your best work. Think about every job you get as the most important job,” he told Baker. COVER STORY WINTER 2022 / REAL-LEADERS.COM 39 Creating a Culture of Collaboration Nadella reads and writes poetry and is fond of quoting lines that help stress his point in meetings and speeches. This unusual pastime came about on a flight many years ago with one of his first managers, that he described to Walter Isaacson, former CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2014. “I had brought around 15 magazines to read on the flight,” recalls Nadella. But then the manager hauled out a book on Irish novelist and poet James Joyce and started reading. “I looked at him and said, ‘What the heck are you doing?’ He replied, “This is the way to renew yourself.” It was a moment of realization for Nadella, who had assumed that the latest news and trends in the magazines were of paramount importance. Instead, new inspirations and ways of thinking might be found in poems from the early 1900s. Despite his love for English and American poets, the haunting words and imagery of Indian Urdu poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries inspires Nadella the most. Ideas of innovation can be found in poems by American-British poet T.S. Eliot, who wrote: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time." The lesson here is that humanity will want to progress, but once it does, it will return to where it started and understand what drove it to progress in the first place. Deep thoughts and ponderings like these feed Nadella’s quest for meaning and ultimately find their way into his leadership style and company values. In 2014, when Nadella took the helm at Microsoft, the company had a very proprietary culture andmindset that suggested, “This is howwe do things. We don't necessarily want to cooperate with other firms or competitors.” Nadella changed this mindset and became more collaborative across the board, from customers to competitors. Three years later, he explained to Rubenstein his thinking in this regard. “I started by not viewing things as a zero-sum game,” says Nadella. “Customers are heterogenous by nature; they will engage with some of what we do and some of what our competitors do. My approach was to figure out a way to combine forces so that it was bothmarket-expansive and satisfied customers.” GETTY IMAGES / JUST IN SULL I VAN 2021 MICROSOFT IMPACT SUMMARY
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