Bill Gates' Leadership Style: Forging Star Trek-Like Mind Melds, Drilling For More Details And Finding Structure In Chaos

Chris Williams, a former Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft, first met Bill Gates in the summer of 1992 in a small conference room.

"It was clear that it was someone you could learn from," said Williams about Gates in a video he posted on his LinkedIn Profile.

Williams described the "grilling" he received from Gates that day as something he'd never forget.

Williams at the time worked as a developer and director of marketing at Fox Software, a company purchased by Gates. The former Microsoft CEO had invited him and a handful of others to "see what he'd bought."

Williams said that Gates was very quick to identify the person responsible for the speed of Fox Pro, which worked faster than Microsoft's offering Cirrus, a forerunner of Access.

Gates let out a barrage of questions at the engineer and forged a "Star Trek mind meld" with him, as described by Williams in the video.

The former Microsoft Human Resources Director talked about the three "power things" he learned working with Gates.

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Dig For Details: Gates questioned Eric Christensen, the developer behind FoxPro, to such a level of detail that they discussed the movement of single bits and size of the Intel 80386 instruction cache. 

"He was always curious, always wanted to understand, always drilling for more detail. As a younger man this drilling was aggressive and harsh," said Williams.

"As he got older, his passion for detail never left, just his method for getting there mellowed."

Smell The Bull: Gates is known to speak his mind and opinion today in the form of his frequent blog and Twitter posts. He was not afraid to speak his mind even when he was in a leadership position at Microsoft. 

"It seems that Bill learned early on that pressing for details until failure, resulted in two kinds of responses," said Williams.

"There were the people who were strong enough to admit, in the face of the then richest man on the planet…‘I don't know.' And there were those who just started making things up. Guessing at answers."

Williams said that Gates' ability to what he called the "odor of falsehood" only got better as he got older.

"Later you could tell you were in trouble just from his facial expressions. That look of disappointment that told you, ‘Oops, perhaps I should retreat here."

Synthesize From Nothing: Gates' greatest skill was to make sense of a mess and find structure, according to Williams.

He said teams would bring a "deeply complex set of issues" to Gates and would have "miles of data and dozens of opinions on the correct path."

"They would say, ‘We're struggling to decide if we should do X and build this, or head toward Y and build that."

"Within seconds Bill had absorbed it all. Somehow, someway, he found the two or three variables that mattered. He would blurt out, ‘Don't you see, this and that are what matters, it's so clear you should do X," said Williams in the video.

He said the effect would be that the whole room would fall silent and people would realize that Gates was correct.

So often was Gates correct that disagreement from other senior managers was rarely forthcoming since he was "virtually always right."

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