EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
[ Category: Career & Counselling | Posted By: saira anwar on 2018-01-20 12:36:39 ]
Effective leadership in an organization requires establishing real and attainable objectives. Setting achievable, measurable, specific, and time-bound objectives helps in keeping the focus of the subordinate towards results that can enable productivity and long-term success. It requires the workforce to align their professional development objectives with the goals of the organization. To effectively manage the employees as well as the human resources of the organization, it is necessary for an organization to adopt a suitable leadership style that can help in meeting the strategic goals of the respective organizations (Manimala & Wasdani 2013, P. 13). It also requires effective decision-making to promote the relationship between the selected leadership styles and the capabilities of the employees to achieve the strategic objectives. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the leadership styles adopted by Google Inc. to enable the organization to achieve the strategic its objectives.
Leadership strategy definition
Leadership strategy is the process of adapting well-considered tactics in the process of communicating the vision of an organization according to (Eggers & Lin 2015, 1786). A strategic leadership typically motivates, persuades, and manages staff to share similar visions. It is a vital tool for creating effective organizational structures or implementing effective changes within the business. A leadership strategy hence defines the leadership requirements of the organization as well as their roles in the process of driving the organizational activities towards the set goals and objectives.
Well-defined leadership strategies play major roles in the successful performance of an organization as every organization is created with a purpose to achieve particular objectives. As a result, effective leadership strategies are essential in ensuring the organization coordinates its activities so as to achieve the set strategic goals and objectives. Good leadership is hence the backbone to the success of any organization as the performance of the workforce is solely dependent on direction and motivation from the leadership (Walker, & Aritz 2015, p. 458). Therefore, there are different types of leadership strategies that can be experienced in a workplace or adopted in an organization each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. The types of leadership styles adopted are dependent on the goals and culture of the organization as well as the task to be completed.
Core elements of a well-developed leadership strategy
• Geared towards team-building
Great leadership strategy shows and adopts clear team building skills so as to attract and retain the top talents of the workforce for effective service. Every great leadership or management of an organization needs to recognize that having the best talents also requires good relationships and teamwork so as to promote success within the organization. A good leadership strategy hence needs to build a workforce with complementary skills and set experience towards their duty. According to ////, teams performs best when they are made up of different styles and personalities so as to expand ideas and perspectives for problem solving and effective performance. Good leadership strategy thus facilitates teamwork, healthy discussions, and great consensus among the employees. Such a team will be more promoted to believe in themselves and work towards achieving the strategic plans of the organization. It hence builds trust between the employees and the management and thus promotes the employees to work with little supervision.
• Vision driven
A good leadership style also works effectively toward the vision of the organization. Instead of focusing much on the initiatives and tasks of the organization, a well-developed leadership strategy promotes a deep industrial or professional knowledge towards the strategic goals and objectives of the organization. According to (Manimala & Wasdani 2013) a strategic thinking towards the goals promotes a strong network with a consistent identification of the market trends to as to tune the organization performance towards the dynamics of the market that may affect the achievement of the strategic goals of the organization. A good leadership strategy hence needs to sell the culture and a clear vision of the organization to the employees so that they can by the vision and work towards it. It hence requires a clear understanding of the target customers, propositional values of the organization, competitive abilities, and weaknesses of the organization. Well-developed leadership strategies will hence promote core competencies; develop capabilities and skills that will enhance value promotion towards the strategic goals of the organization.
• Promotes honesty and integrity within the workforce
Honesty and integrity are the primary core values that uphold the accountability and commitment of employees in an organization. Without integrity and honesty, it becomes difficult for an organization to uphold a long-term success and performance. Creating an organizational culture that promotes honesty and success hence require a well-developed leadership strategy with a visionary focus on the basic principles of achieving strategic objectives of the organization. Effective leadership should also be trustworthy and participate in the highest ethical conduct standards as denoted by (Diaz-Saenz & Raile 2011). A good leadership strategy will as well promote the management to admit their mistakes as a step to administer trust and honesty between the management and the subordinate. When all these are adopted, it will be clear that the leadership strategy is focused towards the interest of the success of the organization rather than a personal gain of the management. In such an environment, there is unity in accountability as well as decisions and actions. It hence promoting transparency since sharing both the good and the bad of the organization between the employees creates trust and deeper understanding as well as respect in the workplace (Eggers & Lin 2015, 1786).
A well-developed leadership strategy also promotes unity and good relationship in the working place. It ensures employees develop their skills and strategies through training and development that not only benefits the employees but the organization as well. It should promote an outstanding self-awareness among the employees and the management. According to Johnston and Marshall (2016), every employee has a fault and instinctive behavior that can result in consequences. Understanding the weaknesses and strengths of the workforce through healthy discussions and debates that can be helpful to promote the improvement of the weaknesses and strengthen the workforce. The strategy should also be persuasive and inspirational so as to unite the workforce towards achieving the strategic goals of the organization (Durmaz & Ilhan 2015, p. 4).
The business strategies adopted by Google Inc.
Google Inc. is a global technological company whose main responsibility is organizing the world’s information so as to make it universally accessible and essential. It was founded in the 1998 but has grown to become the most outstanding organization in innovation technology and serves millions of customers globally. The organization hires smart and intelligent individuals who are taken through a series of training and development to develop their ability over experience that many organizations embrace as the major qualification. The organization strives to maintain a diverse culture where every employee is a hands-on contributor in sharing their opinions and ideas (Helft 2016, p. 87).
Google Company adopts two major business strategies that have seen it sail through the top of the global technological ladder. According to Thompson (2015), the company adopts intensive growth and generic strategies and the major business plans promoted by its leadership. The strategies adopted relates directly to the nature of the business as well as the dynamics of the technological industry. As a result, the intensive growth strategies adopted enables the company to keep its position as among the best brands globally. Through the generic strategy, it has become a major player that influences the development and competitive landscape of the industries. A combination of the generic and intensive growth strategies has been effective in satisfying the continuous growth and leadership of the firm. Adopting the use of generic strategy has thus promoted its innovation and uniqueness in products as strategic objectives of remaining competitive in the technological industry.
Intensive strategies
Google Company has adopted various methods of intensive strategies in its operations i.e. market penetration, market development, and product development. The firm relies on the market penetration strategy especially for markets outside the United States such as China. Despite having set a market leadership in the US market, it is still competing with other online advertisement firms and larger search engines outside the US market. It thus uses the market penetration strategy to push its way of getting a better market share in the world online advertisement market. The company also uses marker development especially within the US market for its fiber product. For instance, Goodbridge et al. (2015) denote that cable television and Google Fiber services are available in few states such as Missouri, Utah, Texas, and Kansas. With the aim of expanding its Fiber products, the firm uses the market development strategy so as to cover more states in the future. The product development is adopted mainly for the innovation and product uniqueness. Apart from the Google Glass as new products, the firm is also coming up with new models of the Nexus mobile devices. Through these intensive growth strategies, the firm has created more channels for income generation so as to attain its strategic objectives.
Generic strategy
The firm has adopted the strategy based on the Porter’s model of product differentiation involving a broad market scope. Even though the firm offers its products practically every digital individual across the globe, adopting generic strategy has enabled the company to develop various unique capabilities that makes it very competitive. The product uniqueness and high innovation level has led to other products such as Google Fiber Google Glass, and Google Search s its new innovations. They are a clear manifestation of the effectiveness of innovation and product differentiation under the generic business strategy. In addition, its search algorithm has evolved with time giving it a competitive advantage against Bing, Yahoo, among others (Huffaker 2010, 599).
Google Inc. has a vision of providing access to the global information in one click and the business strategies adopted by the organization are a direct manifestation of its vision statement. For instance, one of its most popular products is the search engine optimization services. As a result, the strategies adopted should hence be geared towards the objective giving access to the world’s information. With the vision statement focused towards world’s information, easy accessibility, and single click, the strategies adopted thus promotes the working of the organization through offering products such as Google search engines that are easy to use. According to Thompson (2015), the good performance in the global technological industry by the organization is an evident of effective innovation strategic leadership that enables the organization to achieve its objectives. The innovative leadership style adopted by the company enabled the satisfaction of the universal information accessibility component which its mission statement is making its products globally recognized. The leadership strategies adopted promotes innovation that contributes to the capacity of the company to maintain its industrial leadership and performance.
Implication on the leadership requirements
The implementation strategies of the corporate visions of the firm have widely been successful for the organization. The firm has managed keeping a distinct and intact culture though its growth in the past 10 years. However, with the growth of the company as a result of good performance in the market, new challenges are coming up that are attributed to the leadership and business strategies adopted by the firm. For instance, focus on the product development required a more commitment from the employees so as to achieve the innovation targets owing to the high rate of competition in the global market. At the end of it all, there were complains that the firm was offering compensations that were not commensurate to the demand of the work despite inflation and the high standard of living that demanded more fiancés from the workforce. Poor payment leads to lack of commitment among the employees as well as poor motivation towards the strategic goals of the organization (Teoh & Rashad 2015, 1132).
The firm is also reported to have issues with maintaining its fun image that might probably be as a result of lack of employees' motivation evident from the poor payment. The firm hence needs to adopt proper employees training and development strategies so as to shift focus of the workforce towards the strategic goals and objective of the Google Inc. As it moves towards smartphones platform and cloud computing, it is likely to run into the same sort of backlash in keeping the software priority. To keep such an image, the strategic leadership of the company will need to adopt plans that will motivate the workforce such as salary increment, performance appraisal, training and development, etc that will motive them and promote good working relationship. The firm has to work hard in keeping an open culture and maintain their developers, investors, and customers united in an open communication of innovation and development of not only the products but the workforce as well (Huffaker 2010, 600).
A leadership strategy to support the achievement of effective strategic goals
According to Durmaz and Ilhan (2015), it is necessary that the company focus on its product development efforts and the market boundaries. The firm has always been criticized for engaging in what seems to be disparate product development efforts in different markets and industries. The use of generic strategies as well as the intensive growth strategies has seen it through wide variety of products to build the dominance in the world market. However, there is a need of improving the strategic objectives and alignment. The firm hence needs to change focus towards ensuring the profitability on the current products it offers instead of concentrating on developing new products. It thus requires renewing its innovative leadership strategies towards production and market satisfaction and focus towards a wholesome development leadership strategy that focuses not only on product development and the employees.
Development strategic leadership will also be vital in controlling the spending of the firm for programs such as training and development of employees, resource sustainability, good relationship in a working environment etc. It will lead to great investment and produce good returns that will fuel the innovation strategies and speed the launch of new products. According to Teoh and Rashad (2015) a development and innovation leadership strategy should not only focus on the strategic objectives of the organization. It should also focus on the training and development of workforce since they are the major driving force for the success of every organization. The strategy will as well help the firm in figuring out how to weather any negative economic environment as it maintains a productive workforce full of fun, skills, and diverse knowledge for a productive atmosphere.
In the process of adopting the innovative development leadership strategies, it is also recommended that the organization ensure the leadership is equipped with different leadership skills in all the departments. These include transactional, charismatic, transformational, participative, and autocratic types of leadership.
• Transactional
Transactional type of leadership is where the leader allocates the task to be performed by those under him and finally give rewards or punishments based on the results of performance. The team members and the managers together set predetermined goals which the employees agree to follow under the direction of the leadership to accomplish the goals (Manimala & Wasdani 2013, P. 13). On the other hand, transactional manager has the power of reviewing the results as well as the training and correcting the team members or employees in case they fail to meet the set objectives and goals. The employees are given rewards such as promotions, bonuses, payment increase when they accomplish the goals.
• Transformational
According to Arnold et al., 2015 (p. 485) transformational leadership is dependent on the high level of communication from the leadership or management of guidance and instructions on meeting the goals and objectives of the organization. Martin (2015, p. 25) also notes that such leadership enhances efficiency and productivity by motivating employees through high visibility and communication as the style involves the management in order to meet the goals of the organization. Leaders tend to delegate smaller tasks to the team in accomplishing the goals of the organization as they focus on the big picture of the organization.
• Charismatic
Charismatic type of leadership involves the creation of a powerful self-image depending on the level of his charm and persuasiveness. For example, a business leader having charismatic leadership skills can be enlisted to launch a new product line or orchestrate a turnaround. Charismatic type of leadership is thus driven by the commitment and conviction of the leader towards achieving their cause (Arnold et al., 2015, p. 453). They tend to use powerful oratory with an engaging personality as well as a unweaving commitment toward a positive change in the organization. The charisma in leadership tends to be identified during the crisis as the leaders as seen to exhibit a unique or exceptional devotion and expertise in different facets of positive change and development (Monzani, Ripoll, & Peiró 2015, p. 450).
• Participative
It is also known to be the democratic leadership style where the leaders give high priority to the input of the members as he has the responsibility for final decision making. Monzani, Ripoll, and Peiró (2015, p. 450) note that involving the employees in decision-making processes boost the employees' morale and make them feel that their opinion also matters in the organization. In the case of the need of making changes, participative leadership enables the employees to easily accept changes as they play a role in the changes.
Conclusion
Leadership is the process of influencing the behavior, thoughts, and attitudes of others in the process of setting direction to help others to rise to the challenges to what lies ahead. Leaders thus see the potential in an individual, encourage, and inspire them to greater heights of their responsibilities. Poor leadership strategies tend to degenerate to conflicts as every individual sees things differently and will tend to lean towards different solutions. Leadership is thus important as it helps everything work together for the good of both the employees and the organization. Leaders have the responsibility of training the staff as well as monitoring their progress and completion of responsibilities as he garners enthusiasm for the organization and brings the best out of the employees. The strategic objectives can thus be achieved only if the employees feel supported and safe in their working environment.
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