By: Ronke Oyemade, MBA PMP, CISA, CRISC
What defines Leadership for you?
Many people define leadership in terms of skills and qualities, having a vision, being an inspiration, giving guidance, and having influence. I content that Leaders are not born but made. Leadership is responsibility.
Leadership style: There are four traditional leadership styles which include –
• Authentic Leadership
• Servant Leadership
• Transformation Leadership
• Value Based Leadership
Today, the concept of leadership style is changing, a new type of leadership style has evolved called Collective leadership. With collective leadership, there is a shift from the ‘I’ culture to the ‘WE’ culture. (“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” Nelson Mandela)
One measure of an individual’s leadership ability is how they maintain work-life balance. It is just as important to display the traits of a leader at home, as it is in the business environment.
One of the main challenges that today’s leaders face is the diverse, multi-generational workforce because there are four generations of employees found in the current workforce. These generations are as follows: veterans, boomers, generation X and generation Y. Leaders such as Steve Job engaged and employed generation Y for their loyalty and willingness to work hard at a minimum wage rate and their ability to think outside the box.
Steve Jobs’ type of leadership is the entrepreneurship leadership style. Jobs was a corporate leader, a technologist and able to aspire customer loyalty. Entrepreneurship leadership foresees growth of the company and employees embrace the company’s vision. Jobs was very skeptical about market research and did not believe in focus groups but rather spent his time concentrating on the product and how he can use the product to affect customers’ lives positively. He believed in the integrated approach to leadership. With assistance provided by management schools in the US, he built up case studies with which middle management can learn about how top management made decisions at Apple. This led to the creation of the Apple University. His philosophy was ‘Think, Innovate, and Rethink’. He believed that innovation had to be nurtured. You have to kick start your brain, creating dreams and not products. He believed in focusing and paying attention to details. Technology was not enough. There has to be artistic creativity. He believed in simplicity and pushed for impossibility and perfection. He tolerated ‘A’ players only and inspired people to get the best things done. No mediocrity allowed. He engaged in face to face discussions and had spontaneous meetings, meeting with his team every week. This approach led to creativity. He practiced end-to-end accountability / responsibility by having someone appointed as the ’Direct Responsible Individual (DRI) for a project.
Annually, Jobs would go on retreats with 100 of the most creative individuals in Apple, often in secrecy. During this meeting, the next set of Apple products was imagined.
Steve Jobs was a self-proclaimed hippie and a spiritual seeker who connected his engineering side to his artistic side to create products. He combined the hierarchy leadership approach (Apple was run by one person, Steve Job) with the networking leadership (the company was decentralized, adaptive and with collaboration between employees) to run Apple. This combined approach brought out the best of leadership for Apple under Jobs.
Steve Jobs never accepted failure or excuses but always envisioned success. Jobs’ personality, his life principles, and his style of leadership contributed greatly to the success of his company, Apple.
References:
Long Walk to Freedom: With Connections, Nelson Mandela, 1994