Satya Nadella Says Business Growth Comes Down to Mindset More Than Metrics

The leadership principle that helped Satya Nadella transform Microsoft.

EXPERT OPINION BY MARCEL SCHWANTES, INC. CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, EXECUTIVE COACH, SPEAKER, AND AUTHOR @MARCELSCHWANTES

Satya Nadella. Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Getty Images

Are you a business leader? A CEO? How do you speak to your workforce about the state of the business? I’m asking because so many leaders talk about growth in the language of finance —quarterly revenues, market share, earnings per share—you get the picture. And yet for many companies, that’s really where the rubber meets the road: the primary job of a business is to satisfy shareholders.

Yet some of the most effective public-facing leaders push in the opposite direction. Take Satya Nadella, for example.

When Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a company that had become intensely competitive internally and deeply fixated on metrics that mattered more to Wall Street than to the people building the products.

Nadella made a conscious shift. Instead of rallying employees and knowledge workers around financial outcomes, he focused them on something far more personal: a growth mindset.

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Here’s what he told The Seattle Times years ago:

“I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.”

“I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.”

He knew that if employees focused too much on financial results, they would begin optimizing for the wrong things. He understood that financial growth stems from smart, creative people building amazing products. It is rarely the work itself.

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