Jeff Bezos leadership Style& Management Skills

Question

Task: You must analyse and research on one of the following successful business leaders:

• Tim Cook (Apple)
• Alan Joyce (Qantas)
• Christine Holgate (Australia Post)
• Jack Ma (AliBaba)
• Mike Cannon – Brookes (Atlassian)
• Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook)
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
• Mary Barra (General Motors)

Or current business leader of your choice (approval has to be sought from your Lecturer first).
You will be required to prepare an essay covering the following areas listed below:

• Background of the leader ( relevant to their current role eg education/work history)
• Explain what skills and competencies have contributed to their success
• How would you describe his/her management/leadership “style”? Give details/examples.
• Identify two key challenges they have faced and assess how they dealt with the situation
• What have you learnt about management and leadership from studying them?

The essay needs to have a clear and coherent structure, be clearly expressed, with few errors. In your essay refer to at least eight (8) references, at least five (5) of which need to be current academic references no older than 2010. An academic reference is a journal article or academic book. It is likely you will also have references from websites and news media about the leader Essays must be submitted via the Turnitin link on Moodle by the due date. Late submissions will lose 5% per day up until day 5. After this a zero mark will be awarded.

Essays must be submitted in Microsoft Word using the Harvard referencing system. Students must
acknowledge the source of all articles used using the Harvard System. You must reference any material you use which is not your own.

Answer

Introduction
The present study is based on the Jeff Bezos leadership styleand management skills. Jeffrey Preston Bezos is the current CEO of Amazon. He is the founder and President of Amazon, an organisation who deals with multinational Technology. He has been introduced as the first centi-Billionaire and the world's richest person in 2017, featuring in Forbes wealth index. Since 2017 he has been considered as the richest man in modern history. In 2018 July, Amazon experienced an increase of 150 billion dollars. In this paper, a discussion related to the different aspects of Jeff Bezos leadership style which have helped him to manage and lead the organisation making it reach to the best position will be discussed with supporting evidence.

Background of the leader
In the year 1986 Bezos graduated from Princeton University. He got job offers from Bell Labs, Intel and other organisations however he joined Fitel which is a telecommunication startup of fintech and his job role included building a network for international trade purpose. Since childhood, he always had a knack in scientific objects and technological proficiency. Jeff Bezos attended Miami Palmetto High School in Florida and while in his high school days he worked for McDonald as a short-order line cook (Applegate 2017). He used to work there for the breakfast shift. In the University of Florida, he also attended the Student Science Training Program and he was a National merit scholar who has won the Silver Knight Award in the year 1982. He completed his graduation in 1986 from Princeton University. He also has worked in the banking industry where he was at the position of a product manager (Kriger and Zhovtobryukh 2016)..

Which Jeff Bezos leadership style and competencies have contributed to the success?
Jeff Bezos has become a successful entrepreneur because of his skills and abilities to deal with any hard circumstances. Jeff Bezos has a very innovative mind that he uses very accurately regarding any business strategic decisions. In the e-retailing business, he has invented many unique ideas for expansion. From the designing to implementation, Jeff Bezos has thought very rationally and changed the pattern of the business to a futuristic way by adopting innovative ideas.Moreover, Jeff Bezos had developed kindle programming to compete with Apple iPad. Therefore, his innovative mind always found a rational solution in any circumstances. Additionally, Jeff Bezos is very realistic in his attitude. He adopts every single thing after evaluating its cost-benefit ration efficiently (Solanki, 2019). Before launching of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was very much serious about this project and also assessed its value in the market to collect investment.

Jeff Bezos believes in regret minimisation theory very hard, because he does not want to lose anything due to rush in his life. Therefore, he had resigned from his earlier job and founded Amazon through the personal venture. His skills are very unique and very real time-based. Therefore, he had to face minimal difficulties in his entrepreneurial life. Also, he has outstanding competitive skills that helped him in understanding the pattern of the market very comprehensively. In that time when Jeff Bezos started his business then the e-retail industry was not developed yet. However, Jeff Bezos is a risk-taker and outstanding analyser that helped him to build the industry effectively over time. Apart from these, Jeff Bezos is very experimentalist by his nature and that is the reason for his great success (Burfeind, 2019).

DescribingJeff Bezos leadership style and management capabilities
Jeff Bezos is considered to be the most efficient and successful leader in the modern world. He has reached this summit of success with the help of extraordinary Jeff Bezos leadership styleand people management efficiencies. Being the Chairman and CEO of Amazon he has set an example for the whole world to showcase how to be a successful leader. Amazon was founded inlet 1993 where the primary idea of the company was to sell books (Lang et al. 2018). However, when the company was finally found it in real in the year 1994 5th July in his garage it was named as Cadabra. The name was later changed Amazon. This is how the journey of Amazon started based on some predefined strategies.Jeff Bezos leadership styleis considered to be the main factor in making the organisation successful in every way (Matthews et al. 2018).

Bezos has been practicingtransformational leadershipapproach primarily and worked on self- management effective communication strategic planning taking responsibilities along with setting predefined and time-bound goals so that he could efficiently manage his people as well as himself in leading the organisation successfully. For instance, Jeff Bezos believes in disruptive company as he utilises the change of culture with Amazon to accelerate the engagement. Bezos believes in communicating powerful narratives talking about the upcoming future.

Jeff Bezos leadership stylehas also practiced transactional leadershipapproachwhich has helped him achieving better people management process. Along with this according to the needs of the organisation and the situation Jeff has tried several leadership skills to manage the workforce and process of work efficiently along with maintaining the organisational culture. For instance, Jeff Bezos takes transactional leadership approach and he promotes the strictrules to the employees by giving them two types, both punishments and rewards. Bezos takes this approach to gain higher limit of success within Amazon. Jeff Bezos leadership stylehas efficiently succeeded in managing change within the organisation and this has provided him with several advantages making the organisation fit for getting competitive advantages from the market (Kennedy 2018). For example, the performance of Amazon is tracked by approximately 500 measurable goals which are mostly connected to the objectives of the customers which is a proper definition of the mission vision and goal of the organisation.

Identify two key challenges they have faced and assessed how they dealt with the situation
Managing people is considered to be one of the most challenging parts of any leadership style. It is needed to establish a proper mission and vision of the organisation. The next step is considered to be very challenging as it is important to generate the same idea and sense of the organisation and the future goals of the organisation to the employees working init (Chaston 2017). Jeff Bezos has efficiently dealt with all the challenges which he had made in his journey to establish Amazon as the best organisation to work in for the employees along with for the customers to choose their product and services (Lang et al. 2018). He believes in long-term things and does not promote quarterly results. The most challenging part is to manage people within the organisation and making them feel the true mission and vision of the organisation.

In 2019, Amazon faced several issues regarding international performance. They had a hard time by getting weak returns from the international segments. The expected rate was 21% whereas the return was only 15%. It was found that the Indian market was down during the Diwali holiday which has resulted in lower growth of the company (Cnbc.com 2020). This called in for the development of new strategies to deal with the challenges. They offered massive discounts and Diwali sale and Ad campaigns to overcome the challenges. Secondly, it was important to simplify the language of understanding the different work process in which the workforce of the organisation should work Twister blister measure successful organisation (Arenas 2019). Now, this needs a solid plan and along with it great patience and presence of mind. It was quite challenging to bring all the employees on the same page and generate all these qualities in them. Also, it is needed to have a thick skin so that the criticism also could be accepted positively and this will help in improvement.

Learning of Jeff Bezos leadership styleand management and leadership
From the above segments, it has been learned that Jeff Bezos has a wide range of skills and abilities along with leadership skills that constitute his success. Jeff Bezos leadership styleand management skills are listed below.

I learnt that Jeff Bezos has built a very small group as a team. Jeff Bezos
leadership style and skillsare known as two-pizza skills where the team is formed only with five to seven people. Therefore, excellent ideas can curate within that team that supports the business effectively. Moreover, I think, Jeff Bezos is always very open to accepting any out of the box idea in his business. Acceptance and adoption of new ideas in the business can be learned from his leadership skills. In addition, Jeff Bezos always decides after considering its long term effects and benefits (Sudha, and Shahnawaz, 2020). Therefore, futuristic outlook and analysing capabilities is another management skill that should be learned from him. I learnt about comfort culture in the workplace that helped the employees to develop unique ideas to the business despite all other negative thoughts.

Jeff Bezos leadership style always gave freedom to his employees regarding the internal management system. Therefore, it helped him to manage all internal issues effectively. Hence, strong employee relations can be learned from his outstanding management skills.

Conclusion
Jeff Bezos leadership style is considered to be both transactional and transformational through which the organisation has gained the most competitive advantages evolving in one of the best companies in the world.Jeff Bezos leadership stylehastransformed the idea of leadership and showed results by making his organisation the best of the decade he is considered to be the living example of the best transformational leader. However, having all the qualities and be efficiently knowledgeable cannot be considered to be all to manage people efficiently. This is why Jeff adopted various leadership styles according to the needs of the situations and the organisational process so that he could create an efficient workforce who can successfully deal with any such challenges and would not fall weak by the signs of troubles.

Reference List
Applegate, L.M., 2017. Amazon: The Brink of Bankruptcy. Harvard Business School Publishing.

Arenas, F.J., 2019. A casebook of transformational and transactional leadership.Jeff Bezos leadership styleRoutledge.

Burfeind, J., 2019. Leading Cultural Change in the Newspaper Industry: How Jeff Bezos saved The Washington Post. Manager, (29), pp.125-138.

Chaston, I., 2017. Leadership and Structure.In Technological Entrepreneurship (pp. 49-72). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Cnbc.com. 2020.Bezos leadership issue. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/jeff-bezos-amazon-leadership-principle-that-surprises-people.html [Accessed 29th Jun 2020]

Kennedy, D., 2018. The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century. University Press of New England.

Kriger, M. and Zhovtobryukh, Y., 2016. Generic approaches to strategic leadership: Stars, teams, clans, and networks. In Strategic Leadership for Turbulent Times (pp. 17-29). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Lang, D., Handley, M. and Jablokow, K., 2018.The competencies of innovation leaders. Innovation Leadership, pp.15-28.

Matthews, B.L., Harbin, J. and Daigle, J., 2018. The New York Times Versus Amazon: Is Jeff Bezos' head still in the clouds?. Journal of Organizational Psychology, 18(3).

Solanki, K., 2019. ‘To what extent does Amazon.com, Inc success be accredited to its organizational culture and ND Jeff Bezos's leadership style?. Archives of Business Research, 7(11), pp.21-40.

Sudha, K.S. and Shahnawaz, M.G., 2020. Narcissism personality trait and performance: task-oriented leadership and authoritarian styles as mediators. Jeff Bezos leadership styleLeadership & Organization Development Journal. 2(2), pp.12-14.