Unlike many of them, Sal Sferlazza actually means it.

For the cofounder and CEO of tech startup NinjaOne, ensuring that employees trust they can speak their mind is crucial to building a culture of creativity.

NinjaOne, which specializes in automated endpoint management for mobile and other devices, counts HelloFresh, Nissan, and Nvidia among its clients. The company aims to innovate by challenging conventional wisdom, Sferlazza tells me from Austin. 

To that end, every one of its 1,300 employees is a product manager, he says. So people shouldn’t feel shy about pushing ideas and concerns up the chain of command.

“And if you don’t get the answer you like, but you have conviction that you’re right, and there’s some new, creative thing that you think should be in the product or a new way to engage our customers, you should escalate it all the way to me.”

Sure enough, Sferlazza receives at least a dozen such messages a week from employees at all levels of the business. “To foster that creativity, you have to create an organization where people are not scared to escalate problems for fear of repercussion from their manager or their peers,” he says. “It’s not about egos. It’s about, ‘Let’s get to the right answer together.’”

There’s evidence that creative companies fare better financially. When McKinsey devised a metric to explore the link between creativity and business performance, it struck gold. Compared to their peers, roughly 70% of businesses in the top quartile for creativity enjoyed above-average organic revenue growth, total return to shareholders, and net enterprise value.

As it expands, NinjaOne is constantly launching new groups—say, to develop another product or enter a fresh geographic market. The company trusts those teams to think like startups, with the freedom to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, Sferlazza explains.

“It’s almost like having multiple incubators,” says the serial entrepreneur. “You guys don’t have to follow all the rules of the large organization in order to foster creativity and find ways to build our brand or build our culture or to build better products.”

That mindset extends to the big picture. When Sferlazza recently met with an employee, he asked for five ideas that would change the trajectory of the business. He sees the leader’s role as “inviting your staff to participate in that journey, versus being the CEO that comes down from the mountain and says, ‘This is the Bible or the vision of how the company is going to be.’”

When recruiting, NinjaOne puts the same premium on creativity. Candidates are asked how they would apply what they’ve done elsewhere to solving problems for their new employer. “The power of creativity is to be able to leverage those past experiences by changing them or making them purpose-built for the company,” says Sferlazza, who holds a monthly “meet the CEO” meeting with new staff worldwide. “Out-of-box creative thinking will be rewarded always.”

For Sferlazza, keeping that culture of creativity alive also means hiring a specific kind of fellow leader. First, he says, they should be servant types who check their egos at the door. The other key quality: “I want to find leaders that agree with me 95% of the time, and 5% they’ll fight me like hell because I’m wrong,” Sferlazza says. “I believe that any leader is only as smart as the collective intellect of the people that report to them.”

Hear, hear.

Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com

IN OTHER NEWS

Flights of fancy
Would you buy a used plane from Dave Calhoun? The CEO of Boeing hardly came off as trustworthy during his recent flambé at a Senate hearing. Calhoun first denied that the snafu-plagued aircraft maker retaliates against workers who raise safety concerns. Then, reminded that late whistleblower John Barnett got 40 calls from his manager in two days, he admitted that “something went wrong.” Understatement of the year.

House rules
Trusting people to work from home—some of the time, anyhow—is a win-win. That’s the takeaway from a two-year study of some 1,600 staffers at Trip.com. With half in the office full-time and the rest only required to show up three days a week, the latter group saw its quit rate plunge 33%. Besides saving the online travel agency millions in recruitment and training costs, hybrid work helped Trip hang onto diverse employees. And sorry, RTO boosters, it had no measurable effect on performance or productivity.

Collect ’em all
Will stocks and bonds go the way of ankle socks? Most rich young Americans have doubts about making traditional assets their sole investment choice, a Bank of America survey of the wealthy reveals. Among respondents under age 44, almost 95% of Gen Z and millennials said they favor collectibles—especially watches, jewelry, and wines and spirits. With both cohorts set to dominate the luxury market by 2030, this is all sounding a bit boujee.

Social call
Not everyone trusts that the U.S. surgeon general’s call to slap warning labels on social media platforms is a good idea. Perhaps surprisingly, critics of Vivek Murthy’s proposal include child psychologists. Some argue there’s little evidence that social media sparked a youth mental health crisis—or that such labels even work. Hearing Murthy accused of whipping up “moral panic” must be music for social purveyors Google, Meta, and TikTok.

TRUST EXERCISE

“As technology advances at warp speed, a striking phenomenon is emerging: the undervaluation of in-person interactions and interpersonal skills, particularly among the tech-immersed young workforce, seduced by remote work options. This mindset is further exacerbated by several years of limited contact with family, friends, and coworkers due to the pandemic.

In this new era, dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) and excessive digital communication, virtual interactions reign supreme. This shift raises significant concerns, including the peril of over-reliance on or addiction to technology, diminished face-to-face engagement, decreased physical activity, and potential mental health repercussions.”

Richard Torrenzano wants us to get real. The chief executive of the Torrenzano Group, whose services include reputation management, highlights the value of in-person interactions in an increasingly digital world. As Torrenzano points out, dealing with other people IRL builds connections and trust that are tougher to forge online. Virtual platforms simply aren’t very good at conveying the nuances of human communication, whether it’s a shrug or a change of tone.

For workers, Torrenzano suggests a hybrid model as a happy medium. He also makes a pitch for empathy, which helps give human relationships a foundation of trust. Leading with empathy is a competitive advantage, too: Research suggests it boosts employee satisfaction, innovation, and financial performance. In the real world of business, the real world matters more than ever.