“I don’t think people you work with need to be your friends,” O’Leary tells Fortune. “They have to respect you, and you have to lead them forward on their careers, make the money, and help them achieve their goals.”
“I don’t spend a lot of time on likability, I don’t care about that. It seems so irrelevant. If you spend your time worrying about that, you’re going to fail for sure, because you’re going to miss the signal,” O’Leary continues.
“The signal is not having everybody like you—that has nothing to do with success…You can’t worry about whose feelings you bruise. You’ve got to get it done.”
Silicon Valley CEOs aren’t known to be the most friendly or personable—and the late tech mogul Jobs was no exception to that rule.
“Over time, you want to be part of that momentum, because you’re on the winning team. We made a lot of money with Steve Jobs, he was right. ‘You make the software, I’ll deliver the market. Just go do it right.’ I listened to him, and he was right.”
O’Leary notes that it’s more important to be respected than well-liked. His leadership strategy revolves around leading his business partners forward in their careers, making them lots of money, and helping them achieve their goals. It might require some tough love, but the most successful people he’s worked with, including Jobs, aren’t hung up on being enjoyable.
“I don’t think that’s certainly how Jobs operated, and so I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about that stuff,” O’Leary says. “I know a lot of people don’t like me because I’m blunt and I tell the truth—I don’t really care. It’s the truth today, it’s the truth next week, it’s the truth in six months. You’re gonna deal with it anyways.”
“It created a high-pressure environment,” Chris Neck, professor of management at Arizona State University, wrote about Jobs’ intense leadership style. “He pushed the original Mac team with impossible deadlines, often clashing with engineers but producing a revolutionary product.” Neck noted that this abrasive approach lost Apple some key talents, such as Macintosh computer designer Jef Raskin, who decided to leave the company in 1982.
O’Leary told Fortune that he thought Jobs’ leadership style was “something else”—but he admired how he was able to command teams, keep his eye on the prize, and stay in that “signal” mode. It’s a mindset and strategy that’s infectious to work with, he says.
“I’m not saying I liked him that much, but damn, I respected him. Because he had incredible execution skills—he could say, ‘I’m going to get from here to there, and get it done.’ He didn’t give a damn who got in his way,” O’Leary reminisces.
