Management Assignment: Critical Analysis On Henry Ford’s Management Styles

Question

Task: Write a 1500-word management assignmenton a great corporate leader for e.g. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg and how they made their company a corporate giant. It is a management project. You need to list what kind of management style they practiced and what success they achieved due to that.

Answer

Introduction
The report on management assignment has prepared to take into consideration one of the great corporate leader Henry Ford. The basic purpose of the report is to present the management style ofHenry Fordwhocreated the company “Ford Motor” a great corporate giant. The report has presented the history of Henry Ford and his company. In the very first part, there is an overview presentation of the company founded by Henry Ford.The overview has presented all the necessary details of the ford company along with the foundation date and revenues. The main topic of discussion in this report is all those management styles that were considered and approached by Henry Ford to make his company giant. The report is not only limited to this, it has highlighted all those strategies and methods that helped Henry Ford to make his company successful. All the reasons have been clearly defined as why the company of Henry Ford succeeded so amazingly in the field where already a pioneer of the industry had thousands of automobile companies. The report has mentioned what were those life skills that were used by the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the company Ford Motor to make his name at the top of the list in the automobile industry. Besides this, the report has also mentioned the life skill of Henry Ford that contributed a lot to the success of the company. the success achieved due to the management styles approached by Henry Ford within the organization is also given. At the end of the report, the report is summarized and the conclusion is written based upon all the discussions done before. Going through the report, one can easily find out how the management style and life skills ofHenry Ford made Ford Motors company a corporate ideal among others.

Overview
Ford Motor Company is an American Multinational automobile manufacturing company that was founded by Henry Ford on June 16, 1903. The company sells commercial vehicles and automobiles under the famous Ford brand all over theworld. The company is dealing with the manufacturing and distribution of automobiles, commercial vehicles, luxury vehicles, pickup trucks, automotive parts, and SUVs. The headquarters of the company is present in Dearborn, Michigan which is located in the United States.Automotive finance, Vehicle services, Vehicle leasing are the main services provided by Ford motors.

Management Style
It is a completely fake belief that Henry Ford spends more of his nights and day pondering over the strategies and ways of how to run his company because he never does so. The management styles practice by Henry Ford is so smooth that he is considered as the transformational and charismatic manager (Szendi 2016). His management style includes a high level of smooth communication in order to achieve the goal in a timely and efficient manner. To manage all of the operational activities of his company, he never hesitated to work alongside his employees. Following are some of the management styles and management strategies approached by Henry Ford to achieve great success among all other companies.

Transformational Leadership Style- Henry Ford is called to be a transactional leader as he does all of the business operations smoothly and flexibly. He manages the work of companies by being a leader that uses awards, incentives, and disciplinary powers to push his employees to perform best for the company.

Mission-focused- Henry Ford is said to be mission-focused because he remains focused on whichever work he does. He believes in the fact that if a person really wants to make something great then will be in favor of that work. He made his employee's spirits high by making them understand these things. As changes are a very common thing found in any working place, this management style helps the company to accept the changes and to act flexibly(Riopelle and Wang 2019). Elimination of small decisions- The process of making the small decision was avoided by Henry Ford because it consumes lots of time and effort. Rather, a big decision for the company can be equal to the ten small decisions. This time and energy were used by Henry Ford to serve the community. In this way, saving time and spending it on the welfare of the community, the company attained huge success.

Effectiveness maximization- This management style was chosen by Henry Ford to increase the effectiveness of his employees in the workplace(Erzurumlu 2018). For the increment of effectiveness, he went with the proactive approach. He worked actively by taking the pre-decision and finding the solution beforehand. In this way, all the hurdles in the way of working were removed and the outcome came positive.

Coaching- Coaching is another highly renowned management style under which the manager tries to foster employee growth, provide mentorship, and encourage employees’ development. It is a collaborative style in which the manager works closely to recognize and identify the area and scope of opportunity. Henry Ford in his entire journey helped and gave lots of development opportunities to professionals.

Life Skills that added success to the company
The physiological abilities that help to adapt the positive behavior so that one can deal with the daily challenges are called life skills. Below-listed life skills helped Henry Fordto gain positive results for the company: Equanimity- Henry Ford always delivered his work with a cool mind. He never got stressed under a negative situation (Candelo et al. 2021). It helped him to avoid taking the negative decision he could take while being under pressure. It enhanced their mental health and supported his emotional regulation during work. Henry Ford developed equanimity by practicing mindfulness and made it a management style.

Problem-Solving- In order to achieve success, Henry Ford is always glued to the concept of problem-solving. It enabled Henry Ford to identify and go with all the opportunities and to control the problem. The strength of problem-solving helped him and his company to gain resilience, analytical skill, creative and innovative thinking, to be adaptable and initiative. This management style added lots of features and initiatives to the company and made the product attractive. Assertiveness- In order to manage the activities within the workplace, Henry Ford used to be very assertive. He used to be rigid with his terms and conditions and never changed his approach when he was told to change by external people. This management style improved his decision-making skills, create honest relationships with employees and stakeholders, gained self-esteem and self-confidence, and created a win-win situation for the company.

Success
The above managerial skills played a vital role to gain huge success for the company. The above-mentioned helped the company to beat the pioneer company of automobile companies. The management styles used by Henry Ford within his organization helped him to get a huge number ofFord Motor users which shows a large success of the company (Cronin 2014). Due to all the listed management styles, the company is constantly increasing its active users. The annual revenue of Ford Motor for the year 2021 was $ 136billion and the revenue is constantly increasing for the last few years. Besides increasing the revenue, the company has added a lot of new features and initiatives to the product is delivered. Using the management styles, the company has gained general as well as commercial consumers. As per the data of 2020, the company has sold vehicles 1.7 and in 2021, the number reached 1.9 million which is itself shows the success of the company.

Conclusion
The conclusion is driven from the report is that management of the works is the vital thing one can do for the success of the company. It can be said that the manager of any company needs to be very skilled in order to bring success to his or her company. Henry Ford started working on his company at a very young age and the result of which can be seen in the statistics. The skills like problem-solving, smooth communication with co-workers, and being assertive played a major role to gain success. It can be definitely concluded that without communicating to the employees of the organization, none of the company can get success because employees are the important part of the company and every activity is carried out by them. Also, encouraging them to work by providing different kinds of incentives is the best practice a manager can do to manage the work and to deliver the work in time. The management styles of Henry Ford were so suitable for the automobile company. The way he saved his energy and time by avoiding the small decision was the best thing he did to get a favorable result. The attitude of being flexible made him choose the benefits of internal and external changes. It can be easily identified that all the strategies mentioned in the report played a vital role to bring success to the company. This is the reason why the company is having a lot of Ford Motor users and the number is increasing day by day.

References
Candelo, E., Troise, C., Matricano, D., Lepore, A. and Sorrentino, M., 2021. The evolution of the pathways of innovation strategies in the automotive industry. The case of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. European Journal of Innovation Management.
Cronin, M.J., 2014. Ford finds its connection. In Top Down Innovation (pp. 13-24). Springer, Cham.
Erzurumlu, S.S., 2018. What can the innovator learn from the operations manager? An operations view of innovation strategy. IEEE Engineering Management Review, 46(2), pp.97-102.
Link, S., 2018. The Charismatic Corporation: Finance, Administration, and Shop Floor Management under Henry Ford. Management assignmentBusiness History Review, 92(1), pp.85-115. Link 2018
Riopelle, K. and Wang, X., 2019. Building a shared present and future: Learnings from Henry Ford and Albert Kahn’s co-Wuity collaborative innovation network on the moving assembly line and mass production. In Collaborative Innovation Networks (pp. 3-41). Springer, Cham.
Szendi, N., 2016. A multinacionális jármipari vállalatok innovációs stratégiája= Innovation strategy at multinational automotive companies. Taylor, 8(1), pp.14-20.