Essay: Leadership Traits Of Steve Jobs - Inspiring Innovation And Success.

Choose a well-known* leader and carefully examine how leadership is demonstrated by this leader of your choice. Identify this leader’s traits, motives and characteristics. Compare and contrast the different theoretical perspectives on the leaders’ traits/characteristics and motives as evidenced in the literature. 

Charismatic Leadership

In the current business environment, organizations require the strong leaders at senior position that can take the organizations forward. The objective of this paper is to discuss the leadership style of Steve Jobs. He was the CEO of Apple Inc. and he was the major reason for the exponential growth of the company. Steve Jobs was a true visionary leader that was able to take Apple Inc. to new height (Soekijad, 2011). This paper would not focus on the personal life or the history of Steve Jobs and would concentrate only on the leadership traits exhibited by Steve Jobs.  

Steve Jobs was a charismatic leader who was able to bring the internal change in the organization with any change in the external environment. The four key traits of Steve Jobs can be highlighted as

1. Freedom and independence to employees
2. Innovation and creativity
3. Collaborative working
4. Workforce diversity

Steve Jobs was able to establish an open culture in the organization. One of the greatest things for Steve was the trust and respect that people had for him. He was a true asset for Apple Inc. that developed the positioning of Apple Inc. as an innovative company. He developed the internal culture in the organization where employees were able to link their motivation with productivity. Steve Jobs was a true leader that focused on the training and development of employees (Babbitt, 2014). He always believed that no matter how expensive the training program or how intensive it is implementation and practicing those adopted leadership skills from the training programs is crucial. As mentioned by D'amato & roome, (2015) No one can learn to ride a bicycle, shave with a straight razor, or execute a graceful golf stroke by reading a manual or listening to a lecture.

One of the important leadership traits of Steve Jobs was the he was able to get the best talent from the market. Apple Inc. is a large company an Steve Jobs was able to visualize the success of the company would depend on the support of employees that he would have to recruit from the market. Hiring according to Welch & Welch (2005) is challenging because as a young manager, Steve Jobs was about 50% right in hiring the right people and thirty years later, he improved to 80% (p.95).  Meaning, there is always a wrong hiring in organizations in one time or another.

However, Welch & Welch (2005) give clues in hiring the right people, which are:

Open Culture in the Organization

i) The Acid tests, which involves testing of integrity, intelligence, and maturity.

ii) The 4-Es and 1-P framework which includes positive energy, ability to energizeothers, the edge to make tough decisions, execute - the ability to get the job done and passion – “authentic excitement about work” (p.87).

iii) Besides 1 & 2 above, leadership hiring should focus on:

1. 1. Authenticity – the realness of the leader
   2. Ability to see around corners which means to “imagine the unimaginable” (p.89)
   3. The need to work with people that are better and smarter.
   4. Resilience – ability to bounce back to life despite challenges.  This is a very relevant factor in leaders as organizations face turmoil every now and then.

Welch & Welch (2005) are of the view that whether a hiring is right or wrong will be revealed within one to two years when the hired person continuously falls short of expectations and in such case, it is good to admit the mistake in the hiring process and with good feedback, prepare to send the person out.

Steve Jobs was a great leader as he was able to develop a culture that avoided the discrimination in the company. He was a strong supporter of the fact that discrimination is equivalent to unequal treatment. Usually discrimination is brought about by characteristics that relate to a persons ethnicity, religion, age, beliefs, physical appearance, gender, and other analogous characteristics (Reichard, 2011). While prejudice are those relating to an opinion or an attitude towards a group of people. Prejudice can be a misconception, misunderstanding, overgeneralization, and stereotyping. In the process, a culture was institutionalized that pre-dominantly distinguished Apple Inc. from others in the market. The firm used this strategy to drive its strategic goals. For instance, by living one of the values of having the courage to lead, every one would be looking for possible opportunities to be a leader, either in public arena, in churches or in local set ups. This in the process would assist the firm to achieve its market leadership strategy.

Another key aspect of Steve Jobs leadership was the focus on customer satisfaction. He always believed that the customer satisfaction is the most important thing for the company and the focus of all the employees should be serve employees in the best possible manner (Harding, 2010). Steve Jobs believed that the manufacturing industry must be most customer centric, as not only their end products goes to their clients but also to the customers that their clients serve and resulting in the customer satisfaction. The quality control of the end product from a manufacturing has a higher requirement to be consistent exactly when they don't need to have interaction with the customer.  "Measuring and controlling manufacturing costs is easier than measuring and controlling the ability to meet customer demand with the right product at the right time (Gupta and Ramanchandran, 2008)" Manufacturing industry competes on minimizing production costs and sustain their quality to their target market expectation. Steve Jobs was able to educate the employees about the key things that can increase the customer satisfaction for Apple Inc.

Getting the Best Talent

Steve Jobs was a leader who was able to develop strategies and policies for the long term. He always focused to develop an environment of freedom and independence. The employees were happy under his leadership and he always believed that the employees should be given enough freedom so that they can be creative and innovative (Crawford, 2014). Steve Jobs always believed that employees are the biggest assets for organization. Therefore, organizations must take all the steps to help and support employees. Steve Jobs was of the strong opinion that the contractors and vendors are also the part of the company that should be trained as per the culture of the company. Nevertheless, companies still have to invest time on managing these people, even if they don’t have the same rights that the company’s employees. Contractors still have to be trained to do the job they are supposed to do, they must have objectives to attain, they must be monitored as any other employee, etc.  All of this represents a huge job for managers. Not to mention that contractors sometimes are less committed to the company and to their jobs, because they know that their contract will end soon or because they don’t feel as being a part of the company (Corbridge, 2010). The difference here is that contractors will have a direct contact with their direct managers and will have few or no link at all with the HR department. This is a typical case of devolution of HR tasks to line managers, who have the responsibility for coordinating and directing these people.

Steve Jobs was one of the leaders that brought the concept of performance based reward system at Apple Inc. The performance evaluation is an integral part of employee development. The performance evaluation is a strategic tool and technique that would evaluate the performance in a period of time. Typically, organizations would have an annual or half-yearly performance evaluation system. In an organizational setting, the performance evaluation system would help employer and employees to evaluate their performance vis-à-vis the goals and objectives of the organizations (Rubin, 2013). The performance management system or the performance evaluation is used as a managerial tool to define the goals and objectives for employees and to determine the way employees have achieved these goals and objectives. The tools and techniques under performance evaluation can be used as a managerial tool to get the maximum out of employees. This tool could be used to motivate employees. With this tool, the employees would remain motivated to work with increased productivity so that organization can reach its goals and objectives.

Avoiding Discrimination

The organizational development would play a critical role in a Information Technology environment. It would be correct to say that the Information Technology is a very dynamic environment and a lot would depend on the way leaders develop organizational strategies and policies. The OD (organizational development) professional would have to have a 360-degree view of the organization. It is important that an OD professional should be able to analyze the needs of different stakeholders in the organization (Fedor, 2008). Steve Jobs always considered that the employees are the most important stakeholders and integral assets for any health care organization. Therefore OD professional should be able to analyze the expectations of employees and then develop organizational strategies and policies (Coghlan, 2013).

Steve Jobs was successful as he was able to play the role of manager as well as the role of leader. In an organization, manager has to play a number of roles. The manager is responsible for all the daily operations of the company. The manager is also responsible to ensure that people can work with high productivity. Therefore, it is often said that a manager should exhibit leadership traits and qualities (Ebright, 2013). It is crucial that managers should have a good-decision making ability as they have to make decisions in crunch situations. However the decision-making ability of a manager could be influenced by internal and external factors. The work pressure in the organization, peer pressure, organizational pressure can curb the decision-making ability of a manager. It is also possible that organization has similar objectives over the years that could curb the creativity of managers and employees. It would also have a negative impact on the decision-making ability of managers.

For the employees of Apple Inc. Steve Jobs was a mentor. A mentor could be treated as a guide who guides people towards their goals and objectives. A mentor is one who shows the path to people. It is not necessary that mentor would be someone senior. In an organizational setting, mentor is someone who can influence the team members to perform better. The mentor would be different than manager. It is observed that manager would focus more on the transactional work and a mentor would be like a guide who would visualize the goals and objectives and would share these objectives between team members (Hudson, 2013). In an organizational setting, the mentor would help to motivate employees so that employees could work high level of productivity. I believe that an effective mentor is a guide, a teacher and a friend. The mentees can share all their feelings with mentor in order to learn.

Conclusion 

With the above discussion, it can be said that Steve Jobs was a visionary leader for Apple Inc. He was the one who was able to visualize the power of computing. His biggest asset was the innovation and creativity. He was of the opinion that employees should be given freedom so that they can come up with unique ideas and solutions.

References

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