One of the more interesting insights in The Nvidia Way, the book on Nvidia’s rise under CEO Jensen Huang, is his use of the weekly Top 5 Things emails (T5Ts). In these emails, employees across the company send him their top five updates about their work, observations, and priorities, providing Huang with an unfiltered view of what’s happening. The book notes that he pours a glass of scotch every Sunday night and reads hundreds of them.

A while back, a mentor explained to me that one of the most important attributes of a leader is their ability to see the company through the eyes of the people who aren’t in the room. If you can’t do this well, you’ll lose the trust of your team, and their engagement will fall. And you’ll probably make a lot of bad decisions. Tools like the T5T and things like skip-level meetings, mini town halls with Q&A, engagement surveys, and insisting on a culture of transparency and openness where people feel comfortable telling hard truths can help leaders get their arms around the problems and opportunities on the ground and ensure they’re seeing the world accurately.

This goes the other way as well. I’ve written before about how important it is for employees to understand the context around decisions made at high levels. I once had a job where I wasn’t on the senior management team, but I had a lot of access to the senior management team. I’d often hear employees at lower levels being very critical of decisions being made at the top. I remember thinking, “These people just don’t have the context; I wish they could somehow get it...” It’s crucial that leaders take the time to give their teams the context around their decisions. The aspiration should be that the lowest-level employee would make the same decision as the highest-level employee because they’re operating with the same information and context.

The key to all of this is that for anyone to make good decisions, they must operate with a strong understanding of the truth — of what’s actually happening. You could probably directly measure an executive's success by how capable they are at this because it’s literally the only way they can make good decisions. This obviously scales to the company, too. I’d bet you could tightly correlate the quality of shared context across an organization directly with its financial success.

It sure is working for Nvidia.