Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s biggest leadership lesson, as recalled by former Microsoft CTO Jeffrey Snover, is simple — leaders must “manufacture success with the resources they’ve been allocated” and stop complaining. 

Snover, who worked at Microsoft for over two decades and served as CTO from March 2019 to July 2022, wrote in a recent blog post that when the company promoted him to CTO, Nadella invited him to a meeting with other senior executives. Nadella was in the room, leading the meeting. 

“I didn’t know what to expect but what I got changed my worldview and my life,” Snover wrote.

At the meeting, Nadella “delivered the most concise, precise and actionable lesson in leadership imaginable,” according to Snover. Nadella stressed that the executives needed to create success with the resources they had, instead of “whining” about resources they didn’t have. 

Nadella told executives that only two things were under their control — how they handled their teams and how they distributed resources. 

“If you are in this room, you need to deliver outsized success,” Nadella said. “You need to have courage and be bold.”

Nadella said that executives “may” fail if they were bold, but that he would back them if they were “intellectually honest.” Intellectual honesty means that executives had a theory of success, allocated their resources according to that theory, monitored their theory and made changes to it as new data came in. If they completed those steps, Nadella would back them even if they failed. 

Nadella’s leadership

Snover told Business Insider that he thinks Nadella is “the best CEO in America by a very wide margin.” He is not alone in his assessment. Compensation and career website Comparably ranked Nadella the best CEO in the U.S. in 2018. Brand Finance, a leading brand valuation consulting firm, placed Nadella as the top CEO in the world last year. 

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, rising through the ranks to become executive vice president of cloud and enterprise before taking on the role of CEO in 2014. Under his leadership, Microsoft pivoted from being a Windows-focused software vendor to a cloud and AI-centric platform company. Nadella turned Microsoft into a leading cloud provider that directly competes with Google Cloud and AWS. 

However, employees have also called his leadership into question. Last year, Microsoft employees questioned why the tech giant was undergoing layoffs when it was also enjoying exceptional market performance and growth. 

In a memo to staff, Nadella addressed the disparity between Microsoft’s success and its rounds of layoffs, which affected 15,000 employees out of its total 228,000 workers. He stated that “progress isn’t linear” and it is “sometimes dissonant, and always demanding.”

“Microsoft is being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before,” Nadella wrote in the July memo. “And yet, at the same time, we’ve undergone layoffs. This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value.” 

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