Essay Example on Business Leaders: Guiding & Influencing for Success

Business leadership entails guiding the organization and staff towards achieving the company's goals. It involves developing strategies that will help a company in living up to its dreams. Leadership theories such as contingency and influencer theories are often applied when discussing leadership. A leader has followers whom they nature to achieve a specific objective. Leadership involves being influential and charismatic to keep your followers in line. An excellent example of a leader is Russel Creedy of Restaurant Brands, a food and beverage company based in New Zealand. Creedy is the current Chief Executive of the Company, which has gone international with three regional branches in Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand. This article aims to discuss the leadership skills portrayed by the sample leader and company and explain how this leadership plays a role in achieving diversity and corporate social responsibility.

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Restaurant Brands has its headquarters in Kiwi, New Zealand. The company deals with four subsidiary food outlets, namely K.F.C., Carl's Jr., Pizza Hut, and Starbucks Coffee. The company runs 300 stores, both locally and internationally. Russel Creedy is had obligations t make the strategic decisions of the company, which will see it through reaching its vision. Creedy also performs the leadership and management roles of the company. Being in the company since 2001 has sharpened Creed's leadership and managerial skills making him more experienced and competent for his current position (Khan et al., 2018). Creedy joined the company as Supply Chain Manager and was later appointed as the General Manager of Pizza Hut in 2004. Creedy has held the Chief Executive Officer position since 2007. The C.E.O. receives reports from his juniors such as Grant Ellis, the Group's Chief Financial Officer, Arif Khan, the Group's Chief Operating Officer, and Jennifer Buddle, the Group's Chief People's Officer.

Leadership at Restaurant Brands New Zealand Limited runs through four main aspects to achieve diversity and corporate social responsibility. All activities revolve around people's planet, food, and progress, which are carried out to make corporate social, environmental, and governance ethics directed towards health food for the public. The industry is mainly driven by the spirit of service delivery through innovation. The company's success is reliant on the Kiwi consumers, suppliers, staff, investors, and franchisees who form the most extensive stakeholder base. Therefore, as the C.E.O, Creedy works hard to coordinate all these essential assets of the company (Batty et al., 2016). Ensuring that there is a mutual understanding between or among the stakeholders is utterly crucial. Maintaining good relations with the host community is also essential. For instance, the company participates socially by giving donations to non-profit organizations within their locality.

New Zealand-based stores have a record of 3,596 employees in the entire country who serve over seventy-two thousand clients each day. The employees work under favorable conditions while operating in the company. The working hours are convenient for every staff member. They are always sure of secure employment and remuneration. Job security and good pay are important factors that maintain workers' loyalty. Restaurant Brands was the first company to erase zero-hour working and give newbies a free way to nurture their skills and competence towards better payment. The company also supports employees by providing resources that help nurture their career and competency skills. Carl's Jr employees benefit from online classes that help improve their skills (Alka &Manasseh, 2018). There are safety and security measures across all the branches which help forge towards zero injury records at the workplace. Importantly, the company has a collection of employees from various nationalities, a diversity aspect that has hired twenty percent of New Zealand citizens aged below twenty years (Mackenzie, 2015). Employee diversity also involves workers aged between 15 and 73 years, with 56 percent of females well distributed even in managerial positions.

The main product offered by Restaurant Brands is food. Therefore, healthy food provision to clients is another dimension of fulfilling corporate social responsibility. The primary goal for this company is to offer high-quality food with locally sourced ingredients that help build the immunity and wellbeing of a person. The company is aware of nutritional diseases such as heart failure, obesity, and diabetes. Therefore, the company puts more prominence on sugar, sodium, and fat reduction in the foods they offer. Nutritional information about these foods is published on the company's website. The company sources its ingredients from reliable supplies, with 90 percent representation of local vendors (Anand &Yeung, 2018). For instance, K.F.C. acquires fresh chicken from Ingham and Tegel, which is hormone and steroid free. The chicken is often seasoned with grain feed hence the delicious taste. The country's Environmental Health Officers routinely monitor the company's stores. Thus, they ensure clean packaging for the safety of the environment. The company is aware of children watching their advertisements hence does not send messages directly to children. The products advertised are free from sugar, especially the beverages.

Under the leadership of Creedy, the company has a positive impact on the community. Creedy ensures that the company pays wages to employees in good time, and taxes are made early enough. The services and goods offered by the company contribute to the economic growth of the society and, eventually, the business impacts the Gross Domestic Product of New Zealand. Creedy also leads the company through the K.F.C. department to offer donations to the Surf Life Saving initiative for the last ten years. The company administers campaigns on safety while at the beach hence ensuring Kiwi people are secure. At least 13,700 people have been saved since the establishment of the campaign (Bahl & Atttanayake, 2018). The company also runs the DEAME DINGLE initiative that helps transform students from primary to secondary education. Creedy oversees STARS that encourages students to have a positive attitude towards teachers and their peers for improvement through their academic journey.

Lastly, the company contributes positively to the planet through environmental conservation. Creedy leads his stuff through actual packaging by us of recyclable materials sourced from reliable timbers. The company also has measures to ensure that all paper and cardboard are recycled. For instance, the by-product of cooking oil is soap and biodiesel. It has joined the Public Place Recycling Scheme that guided the recycling process for citizens away from home (Samkin et al., 2014). The company avoids sourcing packaging materials from Asian pulp, which is on-recyclable. Pizza boxes are made of fiber hence possible to reuse. Eighty percent of cooking oil waste is recycled into the soap, while 20 percent is reused into creating biodiesel.

Conclusively, this paper involves research on a business leader and company in New Zealand and further discussion on how the company fulfills corporate social responsibility and diversity. The study focused on Restaurant Brands New Zealand Limited, which operates in the home country, Australia, and Hawaii. The company-mothers K.F.C., Starbucks, Pizza Hub, and Carl's junior as its inns. It operates 300 stores nationally and has 3576 employees locally. Russel Creedy leads the company as the Chief Executive Officer and other able members. It has a broad market domestically and internationally, serving the community according to consumer needs. It also has set measures for healthy product and service delivery through appropriate packaging, nutritious foods, and proper waste disposal. Finally, it is the charisma of Creedy that has forged success for the company through good relations with employees as an influencer.

References

Samkin, G., De Villiers, C., & Pinto, S. (2014). Corporate social responsibility disclosuresvduring the global financial crisis: New Zealand evidence. New Zealand Journal ofvApplied Business Research, 12(2), 33.

Bahl, P., & Attanayake, L. (2018). Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (C.S.R.) on the financial performance of industrial companies in New Zealand.

Mackenzie, M. J. (2015). Corporate social responsibility in the New Zealand hotel industry: An explorative study (Doctoral dissertation, University of Waikato).

Anand, D., & Yeung, D. (2018). Employee development and its effect on employee performance at K.F.C. Restaurant Brands.

Alka, A., & Manasseh, S. (2018). Corporate social responsibility: Managers perception of C.S.R.

Khan, M., Lockhart, J. C., & Bathurst, R. J. (2018). Institutional impacts on corporate social responsibility: a comparative analysis of New Zealand and Pakistan. International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility, 3(1), 1-13.

Batty, R. J., Cuskelly, G., & Toohey, K. (2016). Community sport events and C.S.R. sponsorship: examining the impacts of a public health agenda. Journal of sport and social issues, 40(6), 545-564.