Five Tips on Avoiding ‘Terminal Niceness’: Former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst

Vigorous debate is critical for any organization that is attempting to innovate or respond to changing market conditions. When people are willing to question authority and let the sparks fly in discussions, this helps organizations tackle novel problems head-on, view ambiguous situations from different perspectives, and surface the best ideas, regardless of where they come from. Terminal niceness i.e., cultures avoided difficult but necessary discussions, in contrast, can end in bankruptcy. 

The authors recently talked with Whitehurst, who  served Red Hat and Delta Air lines as CEO and currently serving as executive chair at Unity Technologies and as a managing director at Silver Lake. He shared some practical tips to help leaders stimulate candid discussion in organizations that typically avoid it.

1. Create space for open discussion.  When he joined IBM, Whitehurst noted that the agendas for staff meetings were jam-packed with report-outs, leaving no time for open dialogue. “One of my observations early on,” Whitehurst observed, “was when you tell people, ‘Hey, if you have something, bring it up; let’s talk about it,’ … if they have to actually go schedule time with their boss to bring it up, you’ve created a hurdle that makes that hard.”  Whitehurst mandated that leaders leave 30 minutes at the end of their staff meetings for open dialogue.
2. Publicly thank people for providing tough feedback.  Leaders can lower the cost of disagreement by clearly signaling that they value and appreciate feedback, especially when it’s critical feedback. In meetings at IBM, Whitehurst went out of his way to celebrate colleagues who were willing to speak up and thank them for giving tough feedback, even when the feedback was difficult to hear in the moment.
3. Role-model respectful debate.  As CEO of Red Hat, Whitehurst thought of himself as the company’s head debater: He was engaging in candid discussions on important topics and making sure others did the same. He recalled that IBM was different: “I’d walk in a meeting at IBM … and everybody tried to say, ‘OK, what kind of mood is he in?’ And then it’s like they wanted to structure things around what I wanted to hear.”  To counterbalance employees’ desire to agree with the boss, Whitehurst would sometimes argue the opposite side of what he believed. Once team members realized that he was using that tactic, they felt more comfortable sharing their candid opinions. Whitehurst and his second-in-command made a conscious effort to model the kind of open debate they expected from the team. When IBM employees saw two leaders who respected each other engaging in heated exchanges but walking out of the room as friends, they realized that respectful disagreements were not just acceptable but encouraged.
4. Provide basic skills training on critical conversations.  Encouraging constant debate helps organizations navigate uncertainty, but it can be hard on leaders: They must listen to a constant stream of critiques, manage emotional debates that can boil over, and avoid taking negative feedback personally. To help build these leadership skills, Whitehurst’s team at IBM introduced a framework to help structure and lead difficult discussions, and they required all people managers to receive training on using it.
5. Demand progress, not perfection.  When someone is trying to build any new leadership capability, including candid discussions, it’s important not to let perfection be the enemy of progress. Learning to lead and engage in vigorous debate takes time. Whitehurst framed stimulating and managing debate as a behavior that leaders exhibited on their best days to emphasize that the capability was aspirational.