Self-made billionaire Ray Dalio has some sage advice for those who dream of following in his footsteps: Don’t confuse leadership with tyranny.
In a tweet on Monday, Dalio shared a top tip for anyone whose ambitions involve being someone else’s boss.
“If you want to be followed, either for egotistical reasons or because you believe it more expedient to operate that way, you will pay a heavy price in the long run,” Dalio, who founded and built Bridgewater Associates into the world’s biggest hedge fund, said.
“When you are the only one thinking, the results will suffer.”
Dalio himself has plenty of experience letting others in when it comes to leading a business.
The legendary investor, who has an estimated net worth of $16.5 billion, stepped down as Bridgewater co-CEO in 2017, and fully ceded control of the company last year.
As he handed Bridgewater over to “the next generation,” Dalio said he felt “great about the people and ‘machine’ now in control.”
“Over the last two years I have watched and mentored them so they could run Bridgewater without my interference, and they did great,” he said at the time. “I can now visualize it doing great things for generations without me. That’s as good as it gets.”
Authoritarian managers don’t develop their subordinates
In Monday’s tweet, Dalio urged leaders not to be tempted to simply “give orders and try to be followed.”
Instead, he advised, those in charge of a team should do their best to understand the people they’re working with and “get in sync.”
“Authoritarian managers don’t develop their subordinates, which means those who report to them stay dependent,” he explained. “This hurts everyone in the long run. If you give too many orders, people will likely resent them, and when you aren’t looking, defy them.”
He added: “The greatest influence you can have over intelligent people—and the greatest influence they will have on you—comes from constantly getting in sync about what is true and what is best so that you all want the same things.”
Radical transparency
Dalio has long been a champion of what he calls “radical transparency”—where employees can give one another honest feedback and share their ideas no matter how senior they are within a firm.
“Being radically truthful and transparent with your colleagues and expecting your colleagues to be the same with you ensures that important issues are apparent instead of hidden,” he wrote in a past blog post.
“It also enforces good behavior and good thinking, because when you have to explain yourself, everyone can openly assess the merits of your logic. If you are handling things well, radical transparency will make that clear, and if you are handling things badly, radical transparency will make that clear as well, so it helps to maintain high standards.”
In a 2017 TED talk, Dalio shared details of how this notion applied to everyone at Bridgewater—including himself—by showing the audience an email he received from employee Jim Haskel after a meeting.
“Ray—you deserve a ‘D-‘”’ for your performance today in the meeting…you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized,” the email read. “In the future, I/we would ask you to take some time and prepare and maybe even I should come up and start talking to you to get you warmed up or something, but we can’t let this happen again. If you in any way think my view is wrong, please ask the others or we can talk about it.”
Dalio often shares business-related advice on social media, in a series he has dubbed “principle of the day.”
Earlier this year, the Bridgewater founder urged new college graduates to “realize [they] know virtually nothing” as they enter the world of work.
