Jeff Bezos Leadership Approaches, Challenges He Faced, and Lessons from His Leadership
• Choose one of the following current Global inspirational and/or business leaders: The leader should be a figure whose leadership approach has been discussed in writing in a public available form. • Steps to completing assignment: 1. Briefly describe this leader's background — including details such as their current role and organisation, work history, educational background, family background if relevant, industry involvement. 2. Describe their approach to leadership, drawing on at least one leadership theory from the academic literature. Provide evidence to support your assessment of their leadership approach. That is, describe two specific examples of actions they have taken that demonstrate this particular leadership approach you have described. 3. What are two key challenges they have faced as a leader? How have they managed this challenge? What could they do differently to be even more effective? 4. What have you learned about leadership from studying this particular leader? The essay needs to have a clear and coherent structure, be clearly expressed, with few errors. In your essay refer to at least ten (10) references, eight (8) 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 — these are not counted in the 10 references. The academic references could be about the leadership theory you have chosen, about important leadership capabilities that this person has had to demonstrate (such as creating a strong organisational culture, creating a motivating environment, influencing others or managing change), or about the challenges they face.
LEADERSHIP
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Jeff Bezos Leadership
Introduction
The paper aims at discussing the meaning of leadership and the leadership approaches. To have a clear understanding of the topic, we are going to choose Jeff Bezos as a leader and look at his leadership styles, his strengths and the challenges that have faced him as a leader. The reason for selecting this leader is because he has demonstrated the qualities of real leadership through his invention of the Amazon.com.
Background
Bezos was born on 12th January 1964 in New Mexico to his biological father Jorgensen and a teenage mother, Jacklyn. The mother and the father of Bezos were married for less than one year after they separated. When Bezos was four years old, his mother remarried to a Cuban-American immigrant Mike Bezos (Murrell, 2014). At an early age, Bezos developed the love for computers, and he turned his family's garage into a laboratory. He also had a business mind from his young age. He started his first business when he was still in high school.
In 1982 Jeff went to Princeton University to study computers and physics. Due to his enormous potential and leadership skills, he was selected to join the honor societies Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa at the Princeton University. Still, in the university, he used to do summer jobs as a programmer and an analyst (Dugan & Komives, 2010). After his graduation from the Princeton University, he worked in several places in Wall Street including Investment firm D.E. Shaw and Fitel Bankers Trust. In 1995, Bezos founded Amazon.com which developed into a public company in 1997. Today Amazon.com is the largest online book store.
Jeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and the pioneer of e-commerce. Jeff is also the founder of Blue Origin which is an organization that organizes and takes ordinary people to affordable space travel (Antunes & Franco, 2016). The primary traits of Bezos that has made him so successful as a leader and as an entrepreneur are that he has the customers in mind. His priority is the customers and making the products that the customers require available and affordable to them. Jeff has a dual personality which means he can turn from a compassionate person to a harsh and rough company executive within a second. He is super-intelligent and an ultra-driven individual whose ambitions are unmatched since he seeks to take the modern technology a notch higher beyond the imaginable.
Jeff Bezos Leadership Approaches.
The greatest strength that has enabled Bezos to excel in his exploits is his transformational leadership approach. He is a charismatic leader who can influence and motivate his follower's actions. A transformational leader is one who can utilize the full potential of his staff to the maximum limit by motivating them and leading them as an example (Antonakis & House, 2014). This kind of leader is someone who can take control of the situations by communicating the dreams and the vision that the group needs to achieve. Another unique characteristic of transformational leadership demonstrated by Bezos is the ability to make the rest of the followers or the group feels recharged and energized for the task that they are assigned.
Intellectual stimulation is one of the qualities that make transformational leaders outstanding. This quality has greatly helped Jeff Bezos to challenge the status quo and motivate the followers to be creative. Followers are energized and motivated to learn and create a new way and methods of doing things on behalf of their leader (Rockstuhl, 2012). The transformational leaders are always the role models of their followers. Followers respect and trust their leaders, and this makes them copy or emulate this person and internalize his concepts and ideas.
One of the things that Bezos has done to demonstrate his transformational leadership approach is motivating his staff to believe in his vision. When Bezos was starting Amazon.com in 1995, no one thought that an online book store could grow into a successful business venture that is has become today (Schoemaker, Heaton & Teece, 2018). The investors doubted his over-ambitious vision since the ideas were too unrealistic to them. E-Commerce was not known to anyone, and that is why no one could believe in him. Due to his ability to motivate others, he motivated his workers to believe in is his vision and they worked hard to help Bezos build the Amazon.com. Jeff helped the employees to internalize his ideas through inspiring and motivating them which is the quality that has worked out things to his favor.