Essay: Jim Whitehurst – open leadership style

Open Organization Paper
Jim Whitehurst is president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT software solutions and services located in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since he has become CEO in 2008, he has grown the company from a 500-million-dollar net worth to a 3-billion-dollar giant in 2018. In his book, The Open Organization, Whitehurst dives into the depths of what is comprised of an effective leadership and management style that has allowed his company to maximize their success both extrinsically and intrinsically. Furthermore, The Open Organization shows how an open and innovative model can help an organization build community, respond quickly to opportunities, harness resources and talent, and inspire, motivate, and empower people at all levels to act with accountability. As an advocate for open leadership and proper employee management, Whitehurst gives readers a guide to which they can take learnings from and then apply them to the real world. In Advanced Organization Behavior, students are being taught how to promote proper management by utilizing various interactions and strategies with employees to encourage company cohesiveness and success. However, does Jim Whitehurst agree or disagree with what is being taught in the class? Throughout this transparent and honest paper, concepts learned in the class will be identified and put to the test against Jim Whitehurst’s The Open Organization to see where there are agreement and/or disagreement correlations.
The simple definition of leadership is the power or ability to lead other people. Dwight Eisenhower has stated that leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. Pretty simple right? Not likely. The term leadership has much deeper meaning and variable depending on circumstances. According to the selected readings authored by Kouzes and Posner, the leadership process consists of 5 steps; challenge the process, inspire a shared vision, enable others to act, model the way, and encourage the heart. In business culture, the most important step as an effective manager is enabling others to act which comes from developing employee skill/talents and distributing adequate resources to enable the employee to execute the goals set forth by management. However, enablement does not just consist of tangibles. Intangible enablement within companies can be illustrated by the ability to have an equitable say regardless of level within the organization.   Whitehurst would agree that the enablement of employees is a key step to be an open effective leader. Whitehurst references teachers at the Hill Center speaking positively about feeling autonomous and enabled. Whitehurst states, “I wanted to recreate that feeling of empowerment and involvement at an organizational level. Finally, I recognized that a sense of ownership of shared values could foster parity across staff members with varying levels of experience and authority” (Whitehurst 79 2017). This foster of parity across different levels of authority execute Red Hat’s core values of keeping no member to a higher or lower standard which allows for the enablement of speech freedom, honesty, creativity, and shared ideas. Hierarchy is secondary to the merit of ideas no matter where they came from (Whitehurst 62 2017).  Whitehurst concludes, “In the end, an open leader is very much seen as a member of the team rather than the head of the team. This does not mean the leader abdicates a position of authority, but rather understates it in an effort to share power and empower individuals through autonomy to create results” (Whitehurst 13 2017). Furthermore, I argue that this has relation to Pink’s Theory of Motivation which promotes enablement with three intrinsic motivations; autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  Note that Pink understands that money is an extrinsic motivator for employees, but once people recognize that they are being paid fairly, they become more motivated by the intrinsic elements. Whitehurst would agree and demonstrates it by aligning Red Hat’s core values in the organization with the values within Pink’s Theory through the enablement of equality which promotes greater purpose, enablement of self-sufficiency thus promoting autonomy, and finally enablement through shared knowledge, learnings, and resources that promote mastery.
Referencing back to Kouzes’s and Posner’s five step process, Whitehurst would disagree to a degree with the step of challenging the process because repetitively challenging processes to fit a manager’s single mind is not a quality of open successful leader. Note that there are times where this is needed, however, challenging all processes, or processes that have been successful with prior leaders indicates autocratic leadership. A highly controlling leader would negatively influence Red Hat’s core values of equality and autonomy while also slowing the process of openly shared thoughts and ideas that promote an innovative culture. In class, the well- esteemed and absence forgiving professor Robert Moorman concludes that a “control” leader seeks to be in charge of most everything. An “involvement” leader shares control and decentralizes decisions. Furthermore, Moorman speaks on Kaplan’s Model of enabling leadership, which allows “leaders to tap into, bring out, and show appreciation for the capabilities of followers”.   Jim Whitehurst would agree. The open leader style at Red Hat fits the involvement style of leadership and Kaplan’s enabling leadership perfectly with a team of openly shared minds and equitable decentralized power.
Cohesion is the degree to which group members are loyal and committed to the group. While normally cohesiveness is positive, too much cohesiveness can be problematic. At Red Hat, too much cohesiveness could result from the value of equitable power and open minds.  In the diagram shown below, it is noted that the lowest performance comes from too much cohesiveness and too little goal congruity. However, when cohesiveness and goal congruity are both aligned and high, the team will have the highest performance.
According to Bruce Tuckman, a well know researcher in group dynamics, there are four stages in team development that can be used to assess a team’s cohesiveness. These four stages are Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. By understanding these stages, leaders and team members can understand why certain behaviors are happening and make informed changes.  Whitehurst would agree that too much cohesiveness could become an issue especially if goal congruency is not aligned. Yet, the concept of shared open minds can battle the issue of groupthink that is generated from over cohesiveness and social loafing because when Red Hat hires, they use the four stages to assess the individual to see if they can see themselves as equal to the rest of the organization. This equality inhibits negative group think because individuals who are capable of executing Red Hat’s value are people who will promote their own ideas, rather than just agreeing with a percieved leader.
Throughout this class, students have learned that power is the capacity to change behavior/attitudes of another person or keep your behavior/attitudes from being changed. Power is not seen as macho manliness rather that it is represented by control over resources that are important, scarce, and non-substitutable. Traditionally, power was reserved for top individual(s) who had iron like grips on company decision making. However, with the rise of technology and communication, power has been dispersed throughout organizations. Phillip Foster, a contributor to The Open Organization, claims, ” Leaders were no longer the sole owners of power. The 21st century leader leading the 21st century organization began to understand empowerment, collaboration, accountability, and clear communication were the essence of a new kind of power. These new leaders began sharing that power and they implicitly trusted their followers” (Whitehurst 11 2017). Today more and more leaders are switching to influence their organizations through less use of power. Cialdini’s Tactics of reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, and consensus. Whitehurst agrees with the use of subtle, but ethical tactics to influence with as little power as possible as well as the dispersion of power is key to the values of an open organization. Foster continues to state, “Open leaders quickly discover that leader- ship is not about the power we exert to influence progress, but the power and confidence we distribute among the members of the organization” (Whitehurst 12 2017). Company leaders who are overly controlling and take advantage of power will not change with modern progress, however, those leaders who accept that change to share power will have greater chances of success.
In conclusion, Jim Whitehurst has been one of the pioneers to implement the open leadership style within a massive organization. Management concepts taught in class have both agreed and disagreed with Whitehurst’s leadership style of an open organization. Overall, this style of leadership has decentralized and dispersed the power, promoted open idea sharing, and employee enablement in multiple fields.