What’s Your Basic Leadership Style?
We all have a basic leadership style to which we are already predisposed. This exercise will
help you gain insight into your inherent or preferred leadership style. The following describes
eight hypothetical situations in which you have to make a decision affecting you and members
of your work group. For each, indicate which one of four actions you are most likely to take by
writing the letter corresponding to that action in the space provided.
A. Let the members of the group decide themselves what to do.
B. Ask the members of the group what to do, but make the final decision yourself.
C. Make the decision yourself, but explain your reasons.
D. Make the decision yourself, telling the group exactly what to do.
1. In the face of financial pressures, you are forced to make budget cuts for your unit. Where do
you cut?
2. To meet an impending deadline, someone in your work group will have to work late one
evening to finish the draft of an important report. Who will it be?
3. As coach of a company softball team, you are required to trim your squad to 25 players from
30 currently on the roster. Who goes?
4. Employees in your department have to schedule their summer vacations so as to keep the
office appropriately staffed. Who decides first?
5. As chair of the social committee, you are responsible for determining the theme for the
annual company party. How do you do so?
6. You have an opportunity to buy or rent an important piece of equipment for your company.
After gathering all the facts, how do you make the choice?
7. The office is being redecorated. How do you decide on the color scheme?
8. Along with your associates, you are taking a visiting dignitary to dinner. How do you
decide which restaurant to go to?
Source: Adapted from J. Greenberg, Managing Behavior in Organizations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1996), pp. 228– 29. With permission.
Scores: What’s Your Basic Leadership Style?
Count the number of situations to which you responded by marking A. This is your
delegating score. Similarly, count the number of situations to which you responded
B, C, and D. These are your participating, selling,
and telling scores, respectively. These responses align with Hersey and
Blanchard’s situational leadership model. Your basic or preferred leadership style
is the response that you selected most often.
Practicing to Be Charismatic
People who are charismatic engage in the following behaviors:
1. Project a powerful, confident, and dynamic presence. This has both verbal and
nonverbal components. They use a captivating and engaging voice tone. They convey
confidence. They also talk directly to people, maintaining direct eye contact, and holding
their body posture in a way that says they’re sure of themselves. They speak clearly, avoid
stammering, and avoid sprinkling their sentences with non-content phrases such as
“ahhh” and “you know.”
2. Articulate an overarching goal. They have a vision for the future, unconventional ways
of achieving the vision, and the ability to communicate the vision to others. The vision is
a clear statement of where they want to go and how they’re going to get there. They are
able to persuade others how the achievement of this vision is in the others’ self-interest.
They look for fresh and radically different approaches to problems. The road to achieving
their vision is novel but also appropriate to the context. They not only have a vision but
they’re able to get others to buy into it. The real power of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not
that he had a dream, but that he could articulate it in terms that made it accessible to
millions.
3. Communicate high performance expectations and confidence in others’ ability to meet
these expectations. They demonstrate their confidence in people by stating ambitious
goals for them individually and as a group. They convey absolute belief that they will
achieve their expectations.
4. Are sensitive to the needs of followers. Charismatic leaders get to know their followers
individually. They understand their individual needs and are able to develop intensely
personal relationships with each. They do this through encouraging followers to express
their points of view, being approachable, genuinely listening to and caring about their
followers’ concerns, and by asking questions so they can learn what is really important to
them.
Exercise
a. The class should break into pairs.
b. Student A’s task is to “lead” Student B through a new-student orientation to your
college. The orientation should last about 10 to 15 minutes. Assume Student B is new to
your college and is unfamiliar with the campus. Remember, Student A should attempt to
project himself or herself as charismatic.
c. Roles now reverse and Student B’s task is to “lead” Student A in a 10- to 15-minute
program on how to study more effectively for college exams. Take a few minutes to think
about what has worked well for you and assume that Student B is a new student interested
in improving his or her study habits. Again remember that Student B should attempt to
project himself or herself as charismatic.
d. When both role plays are complete, each pair should assess how well they did in
projecting charisma and how they might improve.
Source: This exercise is based on J.M. Howell and P.J. Frost, “A Laboratory Study of Charismatic
Leadership,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, April 1989, pp. 243– 69.
The Case Against Vision
Robert J. Eaton had big shoes to fill. He took the post of chairman at Chrysler
Corp. that had previously been held by “Mr. Charisma,” Lee Iacocca. Iacocca had
taken over the top spot at Chrysler in 1980, when the company was on the verge
of bankruptcy. In only a few short years, Iacocca had turned Chrysler into a
money-making machine. Iacocca’s style was bold and visionary.
He developed several grand strategies for Chrysler. To get the company
immediately profitable, he created a basic compact model —the K car —and used
its platform to create a host of new cars including the incredibly successful minivan. To fill the need for subcompacts, he began importing cars from Japan and
putting Chrysler Corp. nameplates on them. But that was then and this is now.
Robert Eaton has joined an impressive group of chief executives who no longer
buy the notion that leaders need to provide grand visions or long-term strategies
for their companies. In its place, they are emphasizing the short-term bottom line.
“Internally, we don’t use the word vision,” says Eaton. “I believe in quantifiable
short-term results —things we can all relate to—as opposed to some esoteric thing
no one can quantify. ”That view is also being articulated by CEOs at Apple
Computer, IBM, Aetna Life & Casualty, and General Motors. When asked for his
recipe for an IBM comeback, the recently appointed chairman, Louis V. Gerstner,
said, “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision. ”It appears that, at least
among some leaders, grand visions are out of fashion. They’re concentrating on
the nuts and bolts of running their businesses
Questions
1. Isn’t this short-term focus likely to hurt companies in the longer term?
2. What’s the purpose of a grand vision? What takes its place if a company’s leader
doesn’t provide it?
3. Don’t organizations need radical new ideas to win in the marketplace?
4. Eaton says his goal for Chrysler is “getting a little bit better every single day.” Is that a
viable goal for a real “leader”?
Source: Based on D. Lavin, “Robert Eaton Thinks ‘Vision’ Is Overrated and He’s Not Alone,” The Wall Street Journal,
October 4, 1993, p. A1
Leadership and Bill Gates
It is literally impossible for a month to go by and not have Bill Gates leering at you
from the cover of one or more business periodicals. As co-founder and chairman of
Microsoft, he seems to be everybody’s pick as one of America’s foremost corporate
leaders. First a little background on Gates, then some comments from a recent
interview. Gates grew up in Seattle, Washington. His father was a prominent attorney
and his mother a supporter of community cultural and educational activities. He
attended a prestigious private school, went off to Harvard for college, but quit to start a
business. He and his friend from high school, Paul Allen, began a business writing
software for the first personal computers.
While executives at the big computer companies like IBM, Digital, and Control Data
saw no future in PCs, Gates and Allen disagreed. They envisioned a world where
everyone would own one or more personal computers. And as part of Gates’ vision, he
saw his company, Microsoft, providing the basic operating software and programming
software for these new machines. Of course, history has proven Gates right. PCs
became the computer of choice by both business and individuals. Meanwhile, almost
all those PCs have Microsoft software inside them. And Microsoft has become a
company valued at more than General Motors. As Microsoft’s largest stockholder,
Gates is worth in excess of $20 billion.
In 1995, Gates published his first book, The Road Ahead. It was an immediate best
seller. Not a biography, the book essentially described Gates’ interpretation of what has
happened, so far, in the communication revolution and his vision of what the future
holds. Several chapters describe how he and Allen saw the potential for PCs well
before the large computer companies. Gates tells how he believed he had no choice but
to drop out of Harvard —while he loved college, he figured time was of the essence. If
he and Allen didn’t move quickly to begin writing software for PCs, the opportunity
would be filled by someone else. Ironically, that concern with moving quickly to grab
opportunities continues today. Microsoft, the company, reflects the ambition,
aggressiveness, and paranoia of its co-founder and chairman. Never satisfied to rest on
its accomplishments, Microsoft behaves like a company fighting for survival. And as it
does, it makes life miserable for its competitors.
One of the more interesting topics in Gates’ book is his description of what he thinks
most of us will be carrying around with us in a few years —a wallet-sized PC. This
“appliance” will do almost anything for you. It will allow you to check on your bank
balance, get a stock quote, access your e-mail, talk with friends or business associates,
send messages to people, make flight reservations, check highway traffic patterns, or
search the Internet for shopping bargains. It will even provide you with digital
currency. You won’t have to carry money with you since your wallet PC will be your
money source. And the appliance will allow you to transfer funds from your bank
account to the wallet PC when the latter gets low on money.
Critics of Gates fear the power he is amassing at Microsoft. Some even think he
wants to rule the world. He laughs off that claim, but one can’t ignore the power
that comes from controlling the operating systems of 80 to 90 percent of all
computers and having the wealth to buy just about anything or anybody.
When asked why so many people are worried about him and Microsoft, he says he
thinks it’s because of the focus on the information revolution and the change it is
bringing about. “It is bringing change, and change does cause problems. People
are afraid of change. You know, the status quo, even though you can complain
about it, you like a lot of things that are going on. And so Microsoft, almost
iconically, represents this pace of change, and doing new things, and people
imagine that we actually know exactly how it’s going to unfold, which certainly
isn’t the case.”
Questions
1. Bill Gates is at the top of nearly everyone’s list of corporate leaders. Why?
2. What characteristics make Gates a transformational leader?
3. Do you think if Bill Gates had finished Harvard, earned an MBA, and joined IBM, he
would have risen rapidly up the IBM ranks?
4. Do you think he would have been seen as a leader at IBM? Explain.
Source: Based on “The World According to Gates,” ABC News Nightline; aired November 23, 1995.NT
2A S
EINCIDENT 1