Management Essay Example: Leadership Styles and Organizational Impact

Leadership refers to the quality of an individual to ensure that there is the facilitation of activities within a group with an intent to meet a defined goal. The process entails influencing exercise control over others to get to specific goals. Usually, for the leaders considered to be effective in their operations, they keep in touch with the environment to ensure correction of any problem that may be in place. A leader that is true to its people is needed to have good attributes. Such attributes may include humility, intelligence, benevolence, and courage. A leader that is smart is not afraid to face anything and will handle issues at different angles. As a leader, it is not supposed to be a norm to live to what others expect you to do. It is always about how the leaders walk and think of enlightenment and an inspirer to the people. We are going to focus on two leaders who had a greater impact on our business industry. Carly Fiorina and Carlos Slim Helu are two business persons whose culture had a significant impact on their success. Carlos Slim Helu is the second richest person after Bill Gates. He is a Mexican titan whose business principles led to his success. Carly Fiorina is the first woman who raises the genders standards by becoming a pioneer. She created inroads that are significant in empowering women in business. She became the first woman to lead a company then later hired as HP chief executive officer in 1999.

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Carlos Slim Helu

Carlos Slim Helu is mainly a business leader and philanthropist. He has shown some of the most exemplary characteristics that have made the Companies progress on (Haas, 2014). The companies have been able to achieve tremendous profits and this is mainly accredited to his ability to ensure teamwork hence work to realize common goals. For his service and work, he has been widely admired for his intelligence, creativity and of course philanthropic works. He is properly educated and owing to this he has been in a position to instill dedication and knowledge in his job.

Transformational Leadership

Carlos Slim has been in a position to show transformational kind of leadership. In every other business and work that he has engaged in, he has had gradual growth. The growth has been seen amidst simple structures, minimal hierarchies in place. Carlos Slim in most of his work has been able to ensure human development and internal training of executive functions as a means of ensuring that organization improves (Bingemann, 2010).

Flexibility and Rapid Decision-Maker

Carlos Slim is known for his flexibility and firm decision making. Having this advantage has always made Carlos edge his competitors even when he is in charge of small businesses. In fact, this trait has always ensured that he can turn the small businesses into great companies. Often having the entrepreneurial spirit makes sure that most problems that face companies are solved with much ease. Carlos is known for his firmness and patience an aspect that has always paid off. It is undoubted that all times are good for individuals who are aware of how to work.

Carlos is known for his high level of commitment towards the execution of duties. Through his commitment, Carlos has always ensured that there are human development and proper working relationships in a friendly atmosphere (Bingemann, 2010). Owing to this high level of commitment, Carlos Slim has always ensured that things happen so that at the end of the day each business that he takes part in becomes a success.

Integral Leader

Carlos Slim is known to be an integral leader. Being an integral leader one has to exhibit four kinds of intelligence to achieve success. Right from childhood, intellectual intelligence has been seen in his leadership. From the time he was young, he bought shares in National Bank of Mexico a trait that was uncommon in his peers. Carlos studied Civil Engineering at the Faculty of UNAM where he was later to be a teacher. At a younger age, he worked at Grupo Carso where he performed extra-ordinary in different areas of commerce and real estate making him be one of the richest men in the world.

Carlos slim had principles that made him experience success. His ideas are used up to date in different business ideas. He had business organizational structures that were simple. If there are less complicated departments, there is provision or room for human development. Decision making will be faster and the company will be much flexible. Surely these are the advantages brought about when one runs a small enterprise.

Carlos main focus was on growth, simplification, modernization, quality and continuous development to improve the internal and external process of the business. He increased the level of production and competition while reducing the expenses costs. A company should never feel criticized because of its size, rather, it should focus on its brighter side. Carlos was a good leader in its business because he ensured that there are maximum production and minimization of production in assets that are not productive.

He always employed the concept of unity in his business. Whenever people are united, they cannot be defeated to handle anything. They become well versant with the tools and the workers will have a clear vision to achieve an aimed goal. Carlos slim used his corporate creativity not only to solve the companys problem but also in providing solutions to the community.

In managing profits Carlos slim had to reinvest the companys profits. He believed that every time that they had was an opportunity given and they should handle it in whatever way it comes. Patience at the end of the day would bring greater rewards. One of the outstanding leadership traits of Carlos is the fact that he was highly practical in his undertakings. This was clearly shown in Grupo Carso as he led the company in making several changes. Carlos is also attributed to having a very sharp mind. This has always enabled him to cut on costs and run businesses efficiently with little costs involved. Carlos was brought in when the market was at its lowest in the 1980s. In 1990, the Mexican government put Telmex, state-owned telephone company for sale, Carlos made a strong financial decision for Telmex. While building the business empire, Carlos has been very cautious to ensure that his businesses do not become very monopolistic owing to the near monopolistic control of telecom, blocking of innovation and competition practices he had in place.

Carlos is known to be good, visionary and business leader who facilitated a good relationship between Mexico and the United States owing to the media role in his businesses. He seems to be having a strong business philosophy that makes his business to operate well.

One of the traits that make businesses grow is credibility. Carlos has shown credibility given that Telmex remains to be the only major privately owned telecommunication company that is widely accepted in Latin America. Also, Carlos worked hard to ensure that he addressed the will of people through the ideological spectrum. Carlos can be described as relationship-oriented leader as he runs the Telmex Company guided by the traditional, family-adopted structure. Even though he is the head of the company, he is the final arbiter in most of the issues that face the company. He has been quite strategic in his business segments with a bias in telecommunications and internet. Carlos largely targets to ensure a reduction in competition or even acquiring some of the well-established domestic companies. The old style leadership that Carlos shows has been quite good and important as part of the current leadership dispensation.

Carly Fiorina

Dynamic and Headstrong Leader

Carly Fiorina is known to be a dynamic and headstrong leader. She is acknowledged for moving mountains and shaking up HP Company. She is also acknowledged for giving very motivational speeches that have ensured the workers and co-workers deliver especially the women. Even though she is known to be strong, she lacks in several leadership areas.

One of his weakness was the inability to delegate tasks. In most cases, she would take on projects, re-organize the different divisions. Interestingly, she was always incapable of letting go and turn over to co-workers or employees once she had the tasks in place (Fortune, 2003).

Carly is also known to be too swift with her actions. Carly was too fast and drastic in changes that she made. Most of the changes that she introduced were so drastic that most employees could not cope up with so easily with fast and hard changes that she demanded in the creation of large employee turnover. Owing to this kind of weakness in Carly, she needs to adopt people-centered leadership skills in the highly dominating leadership style. Another recommendation would be to use the staff and give them space to their work.

Job-centered Leadership Style

Carly Fiorina was known for her job-centered leadership style. She is focused and job-driven to the extent that a year after she was the CEO of HP, she put in place a plan to re-organize the company. At the time when the top executive positions thought that it would require a whole one year to make the changes, she implemented the changes in just three months. As much as she had a couple of changes in place, Carly Fiorina was known to be exerting and so much of authoritative in her leadership style. Owing to this, she ended up having high employee turnover. Even though Ms. Fiorina was credited for being successful in turning HP in the six-year period, one of her weakness was a lack of implementing the needs of the employees (HP, 2005).

Looking at the acquired needs theory, Ms. Fiorina is rated highly. She is known to be a motivational speaker and able to encourage the employees. The encouragement enabled her to ensure that the employees achieve power and affiliation. She was a charismatic leader who always praised her employees. Her aim was to make them feel that what they were doing in the company was for their own self-appraisal. She rewarded employees who were performing. This shows how she had a positive support to her workers. When employees are rewarded in whatever good they are doing, they become motivated and do exemplary work. Although, the positive reinforcement did not last in the company. She became a leader who delivered false promises to the people. She became popularly known simply because of the false inspirations. She is known for reducing the number of workers in her company so that she could spend lavishly on the personal item.

Ineffectiveness is seen in Fiorinas Leadership style. When it reaches a stage where the employees loose trust in you, this means that things are not as good as they used to be. Herself as a leader, she was always accused of the downfall of the company. People became demotivated and the respect level went down. People in the company only recognized her with the position she held in the company. Fiorina may have wanted the best transformation for her company but the decisions that she was making as the head of the company failed her and the employees. Her refusal for failure in several interviews also pictures her as a transactional leader.

Fiorina lacked focus. She wanted to compete with companies that had strategic management. The companies that she was targeting include; IBM, Dell, and gateway. Some of the companies on her list were below HP and therefore there was no impact that she was going to make. Her way of planning things to be operative was too diffuse.

Fiorina was a bad manager who did not listen to the advice that she was being given. She opposed the ideas that the board members, the shareholders, and the public gave her. All the important tasks that are in the company were delegated to a team of her chosen workers. The workers com...