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Soumi answered on
Jan 30 2021
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP USING ROLE MODEL LEADER
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Stage One: Observation of the Chosen Leader 3
1. Sundar Pichai’s Background 3
2. Qualities and Behaviour of Sundar Pichai 4
3. Leadership Traits, Knowledge and Skills making him Effective Leader 4
Leadership Style 5
Technique of Authority Exertion for Leading 6
Stage Two: Leadership Development Plan 6
Stage Three: Feedback 9
Conclusion 9
References 10
Appendices: 11
Appendix 1: Skills Audit 11
Appendix 2: Feedback from Leader— CEO of a Local IT Start Up 15
Introduction
Leadership within an organisational setting acts as the regulator that uses the human resource in the most convenient patterns possible to generate the best results for the organisation, especially in the aspect of productivity, performance and quality consistency. Different leaders take different approaches to team management and directs as per their perspective and the effectiveness of different leaderships prove to be authentic in specific contexts. It is seen that eminent leaders develop their own patterns of leading their workforces, which proves to be a directive guideline for aspiring leaders, or candidates to want to elevate themselves to the level of a leader. In the cu
ent assignment, Sundar Pichai has been chosen as an eminent leader in the technological industry and has been used for assessing leadership qualities of aspiring leaders, who want to become successful corporate leaders in future to ensure better human resource management and stable organisational growth.
Stage One: Observation of the Chosen Leade
1. Sundar Pichai’s Background
Sundar Pichai is 47 years old (born in 1972) and comes from a middle class Indian family. Sundar caters his knowledge from Indian Institute of Technology, and later pursued higher degrees from the likes of Stanford University and The Wharton School. At the start of his career, he joined McKinsey and Company, playing the role of management consultant. However, in 2004 he joined Google and helped the company with new idea development and product development. It can be said that Sundar Pichai has contributed majorly in the development of Google
owser, namely Google Chrome, software for laptops and Google powered tablets, namely Chrome OS (Operating System) and the cloud storage services, namely Google Drive. Sundar Pichai is also responsible for the improvements of Google’s popular applications such as Google Maps and Google Search engines. Sundar Pichai’s accomplishments made him the CEO of Google in 2015, where he replaced the former CEO Andy Robin (Success CDs, 2018).
Sundar Pichai, immediately after his appointment at Google, realised the fact that same products and technologies can never be prefe
ed always, therefore, the introduction of new products and services are important. In order to develop new products that would have the ability to generate value for the organisation, Sundar Pichai have also invested careful consideration for talent management and hiring of new talent in the company. It is seen that all the leadership activities undertaken by Sundar Pichai is complimented by his attitude and behaviour, making him one of the top leaders in Information Technology industry.
2. Qualities and Behaviour of Sundar Pichai
In general perspective, the leader of a taskforce of a company is expected to possess a smart, outspoken and formal attitude, both at the workplace and in real life, to generate a sense of awe among the taskforce that follow them. As supported by Haffar et al. (2019), leaders must possess authoritative attitude, and therefore, should incorporate the elements that generate awe and motivation among employees. In case of Sundar Pichai, the leadership attitude is very different from that of the popular perspectives. Sundar Pichai is very polite and is often termed as shy. He is authoritative in terms of his approach to goal attainment, however, he is passive in his exertion of authority over his tam and he tends to allow the team members to take responsibility for their own actions, offering his expertise only when they are necessarily needed.
Despite being shy and polite, Sundar Pichai is very well versed and he is capable of delivering motivating speech and envisions future prospects with ease. At the workplace, Sundar Pichai uses motivation more than directing the teams he is allocate to operate. As mentioned by Chu and Westerheijden (2019), a leader with the ability to motivate his or her taskforce at the workplace is a key strategy of attaining success for the respective organisation. Sundar Pichai is also very inclined towards learning new trends and technology and the learning attitude makes him prosper as a leader.
3. Leadership Traits, Knowledge and Skills making him Effective Leade
In apparent perspective the leadership qualities and traits of Sundar Pichai is very hard to assess and it requires considerable amount of time to assess his leadership attributes. Sundar Pichai is very humble, soft spoken, sympathetic and polite, which makes him a very likable person in the organisation. As affirmed by Koburtay and Syed (2019), the likability of a leader helps him or her to take control over the functionality of the taskforce and ensures the abidance of the taskforce in terms of any guideline or directive providing. The elements of likability lead to simplicity of leadership, which as seen in the case of Sundar Pichai leads to better communication with the taskforces. Sundar Pichai is also very thoughtful and dedicated to what he does, as he believes in the possibilities. Believe in goals, as mentioned by Cheng et al. (2019), make leaders take difficult decisions easily and overcome odds that undermine the efficacy of the process of reaching the goal.
Sundar Pichai is also very tolerant to facing failure. As Sundar Pichai allows the team members to pave the way for developing a new product or service, failures come up. Considering the fact that al goals are not practical and not accepted by people in general, Sundar Pichai accepts facts and tries to use the learning from the failure in future endeavours. In addition, Sundar Pichai has ample theoretical knowledge as well as practical knowledge, which makes him a great leader. It is found that Sundar Pichai uses his theoretical knowledge to understand the potential implications of new technologies and often offers suggestions to the engineering teams working at Google (Quartz, 2017). Lastly, and most importantly, it can be said that the charismatic appeal that Sundar Pichai highlights and the acute sense of the market trend that he utilises, makes his character a role model for aspiring leaders such as myself.
Leadership Style
Observation of the traits of Sundar Pichai and his way of leading his team to success hint at the fact that he is a transformational leader, who exerts the transformational leadership over his team, allowing them to work freely to reach a mutual goal, based on Sundar Pichai’s vision. As supported by Jensen et al. (2019), transformational leaders create vision, motivate taskforce and work along with the employees to reach goals, offering empathy and liberty as the key motivators. It is noticed that Sundar Pichai does not directly determine the course of action, which allows his team members to use their personalised skills to reach a better development stage of envisioned project. Instead...