In October of last year, I made the decision to return to Red Hat after leaving in 2010. While the opportunity to lead Red Hat’s emerging technology consulting practice in region was the primary reason for my return, Red Hat’s open culture also played a significant role in my decision.
Throughout my career working in IT, initially as a developer and later in pre-sales and consulting, I’ve had the good fortune and opportunity to work for, and with, a number of highly successful organisations. While it comes as no surprise that the real outliers in this group have the brightest and most talented engineers and leadership in the industry, each organisation also has strong cultural values they live by. Hiring based on skill and experience is important, but so is finding people who will be a great addition to the company’s culture. Both inside and outside of work, to be most productive and happy, we all need to find a place we feel like we belong and can contribute.
What makes Red Hat unique, especially for a large public organisation, is that we have remained true to our open culture even as we have grown to be a $2B company. As our CEO Jim Whitehurst writes in his book, The Open Organization, "You can’t lead an open organisation in the traditional top-down fashion.” Jim came to appreciate that “Red Hat is the product of a complex, subtle, and powerful organising system that truly frees people to be more creative, take initiative, and get more stuff done.” At Red Hat, we replace the more traditional, less effective command-and-control approach to a more open leadership system that allows important issues to be discussed and debated. Once a decision is made, associates have a vested interest in making it succeed. While this type of decision-making may take longer, it gives us tremendous momentum to implement and execute on the decision. Contrast this with initiatives that have been passed down: The first phase of the project requires building momentum and convincing people to get on board with the idea.
This open culture and leadership style is the reason I took on my current role at Red Hat, which includes a formal people management responsibility. My personal style is to provide leadership rather than formally manage a team. While there are clearly some important, more formal people management responsibilities within my role, Red Hat’s open culture allows me to spend more time thinking about the strategic direction of my practice, rather than worrying about how things are being done. As an individual, this gives me the opportunity to develop my leadership skills while staying close to Red Hat and the broader industry's rapidly evolving emerging technology.
One of the key focus areas of my team is to help customers advance their DevOps capability. DevOps is an approach to process, culture, and tools for delivering increased business value and responsiveness through rapid, iterative, and high-quality IT service delivery. Done properly, an organisation’s approach to DevOps takes into consideration inputs from developers and operations, and fuses them together through open but honest discussion and debate.
Being a DevOps consultant at Red Hat gives you the unique opportunity to not only work for an open company, but also to act as a catalyst for openness within other organisations. As part of our team, you’ll become an industry expert across hybrid IT while working with industry-leading products and services like Ansible, OpenShift, and JBoss. This is a team that’s breaking down the traditional ways of doing things, working together to make an impact within Red Hat and the industry as a whole.