Fluke Pongsakorn

What is leadership?

“Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.” (Prof. Bennis, 2010). Leaders aim to bring in the best possible results for themselves and all people in the team. They create a vision, set direction, inspired others and make some difference. Leadership is all about trying to find the way they have to go to “win” together as a team or as an organisation. While leaders should not just set the course, they need to use management skills to direct their people efficiently and effectively in the right way (Mindtool, 2020).

Leadership theories.

There are many leadership theories in this world. Here is some that many successful leaders are currently using.

Autocratic Leadership

The autocratic leader provides instructions for their employees to be followed. They can determine the group’s policies without asking them for their opinion, and do not have to give the detail of the plans, just tell people what they need to do. Speed is a significant advantage of this leadership style. When it comes to making decisions, people in the group does not have the ability to make a decision; It only depends on the leaders. However, Autocratic leadership negatively impacts group morale. Many members also dislike how decisions are made and only help them in a limited way (Cherry, 2019).

Democratic Leadership

This type of leader only gives orders after they have discussed with the team. The policies are usually set in a group debate and with approval from the group. This leadership style demands the engagement of workers and values their views. This boosts employee productivity and increases the acceptance of ideas from the management. On the other hand, the decision-making process will be more time-consuming. Decisions made may be compromised and trying to make everyone comfortable without providing a good solution (Luenendonk, 2016).

Laisse-Faire Leadership

This style of leadership provides people in the team with freedom. The employees usually have the flexibility for their task. The leaders fully abdicate his role, giving all their responsibility to the team which he is supposed to lead restricting his power to only establishing communication with people outside the community. People in the team gets a chance to improve themselves, and they have the opportunity to speak out and act fairly independently. However, The group might take the wrong direction without the leader, and there is also a chance that this may lead to results being inefficient or even worse, chaos. (Iedunote.com, 2020)

Transformational Leadership

This style of leadership encourages, gives inspiration and promote employees to develop themselves and make a difference. That way, the company will evolve and succeed quickly. This leadership style can create and manage changes to the company since employees have a lot of freedom, but sometimes it can be risky since leaders will lose power if people disagree with their vision. (Thompson, 2019)

Which style is the best?

As the world is changing, none of these can fit in every situation. In the old days, Autocratic leadership style had been used for a long time. But then, the Democratic leadership style became popular until the existence of Laisse-Faire leadership style. Recently, many leaders are beginning to use the Transformational leadership style. Leaders have to change and adapt depending on the situation they are facing.

Challenges for Leaders.

There are many challenges for all leaders around the globe. Sometime, leaders might need to take on some hard people. In the team, there will be some people who are difficult to work with, and it is the leader’s responsibility to handle them in the right way. The pressure is another significant factor. It always included in every working environment, but you will benefit from your ability to accept and release some of the pressure in the long run. Another challenge is culture. Some members might not be getting along well as a team. When working as a team, communication could be a problem too. Inevitably, someone in your organisation will do something that you did not expect them to do. Leaders need to be clear and brief when communicating with employees. From this point, you can see that leaders’ lives are tough. Being a leader is not only doing those difficult things but also about being responsible for something you and your team do. (Wolven, 2018)

“One Size Doesn’t Fit All.”

Here is an example of two different leaders who succeeded by using two different leadership styles.

Steven Paul Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs

An American inventor and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive and chairman of Apple Inc. (Biography.com, 2017) Apple Inc was in a bad situation. Their financial report was decreasing quarter after quarter. They kept changing the CEO, but none of them could help to bring Apple Inc back to the top tech company. Until one day, Jobs came back to the company. The boot is on the other foot. Apple Inc has become one of the biggest tech company. His Autocratic leadership style has transformed the company entirely. By giving orders and his innovative idea, he launched many revolutionary products, including iPod, iPhone, iPad etc. (Weinberger, 2020)

Ricardo Semler

Ricardo Semler

A Brazilian CEO of Semco Partners who was given the company by his father. He once used the Autocratic leadership style and faced a ton of problems and obstacles. His employees were stressful and unhappy. Then he changed the company entirely. He brought the Democratic leadership style to the company and changed the company completely. He let his employees make decisions by themselves. The flexible working-hour policy allowed employees to worked happily during the time that they preferred. (Fisher, 2005)

What next for the leaders?

There will be more leadership theories coming into the world. To be a good leader, they need to adapt and learn from today’s changing world and try to find the best way that suits the current situation they are facing. With more skills, leaders will be able to share the information with their team and work together more effectively to achieve their goal.

References are on the next page.

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What is organisational culture?

Culture in an organisation means how people do things repeatedly, consistently, observable patterns of behaviour. (Watkins, 2013) How people feel, think or believe. It also focuses on the forces that shape organisational behaviour. The outcome of this is ethics, how they make a decision, and how they operate the organisation.

The organisational culture may decide trends of organisation, such as the culture in which most people tend to ignore the issues in the organisation, it will be a culture of inaction. And in the future become a standard of human behaviour in that organisation. The pattern of organisational behaviour that emerges from a corporate culture can either be a supporting factor or an obstacle to the operation of the organisation, especially the decision to solve issues. Culture affects the form and content of general-person relationships within the organisation.

About Pinterest

Pinterest, Inc. is an American social media company. The company was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in December 2009. (Meng, 2019) It is a social network platform using a pin to bookmark their online content. Pinterest has 300 million active users per month as of August 2019. (Fiegerman, 2019) Pinterest is available in more than 27 languages. It makes money by digital advertising market competing with Facebook, Instagram, Google and Amazon. The company grow slower than all of its competitors in the industry.

The culture of Pinterest is far away from all its competitors in the social media industry, where they actively encourages their employees to confront and debate. For example, the CEO of Amazon asked employees to “disagree and commit” which means, employees are welcome to disagree, but when they made a decision, they have to do their best to achieve it. (Weise, 2017) Pinterest has always wanted to be a different company. Kent Buller, one of the Pinterest’s manager until late 2017, said “They wanted it to be truly progressive. As long as you focus on your business goals, we will make a world-class experience.” (Rodriguez, 2019) This provides a culture where people can do meaningful work without anyone being in disagreement. But the philosophy sometimes backfired.

Problem with Pinterest

Pinterest seeks up to $9 billion in valuation, $3 billion different from their expectation of $12 billion in 2017. (Walko, 2019) The company shows slow growth but steady: It has $756 million for its revenue in 2018, up 60% from its previous year. However, early investor, Andreessen Horowitz, expected $2.8 billion as he said in 2015 presentation. From the interviews of Pinterest’s staff at many levels, they shared some experiences working in the company. It reveals situations where a lack of clear input and quick decision-making contributed to employee turnover and strategic errors.

The consequences of being so nice

Meetings at Pinterest were always full of complement, but no direct feedback was given. They usually arrange more meetings. Positive feedback will be delivered directly, but the negative one will be shared privately. This causes the company to take a misstep and make it slower to make a decision.

What makes the perfect team?

The answer could be found in defining its characteristics (Mullins, 2016):

A belief in shared aims and objectives
A sense of belonging to the group
Acceptance of group values and norms
A feeling of mutual trust and dependency
Full participation and consensus in decisions
A free flow of information and communication
Open expression of feelings and disagreements
Conflict resolved within the group
Low levels of staff turnover and absenteeism

This phenomenon is not good according to the characteristics of a perfect team which is the open expression of feelings and disagreements, to keep sharing feedback for each other (Mullins, 2016). The company should insist on all employees to be more open, discussing their opinions and even disagree sometimes. This dynamics will help the company to get direct feedback and can make the right decisions quickly.

The organisational iceberg

Culture is seen as the recognisable values and behaviours within an organisation; influenced by the rewards the workplace policies and environment, and the identity and value of the company. All of these are part of the culture. But like an iceberg, most of what drives behaviours within the organisation are unseen and completely hidden far below the surface of what anyone in your company consciously thinks about. (Rick, 2014)

Despite the underlying conflicts in the communication pattern and the employees’ “too-nice” attitudes, Pinterest is still performing well, which implies the company’s steady revenue growth. It shows a significant increase of 60% compared to its previous year and reaching up to $756 million in 2018. This indicates that the behavioural aspects of the company have not shown any impacts to its formal aspects. Nonetheless, if no measures are taken to cope with the issues, it will undoubtedly tremble the whole business’ stability and threaten its sustainability.

Look closely.

When looking closely onto the problem at employees level, it can be explained by the Johari Window. It is the model which describe the relationship and mutual understanding between members of the group (Loschinin, 2015).

From this diagram, employees at Pinterest might have massive hidden behaviour. This shows the state of an individual known to him but not known to the others. These employees are introvert and do not like to share their feelings, ideas or thoughts to anyone. That makes it hard to find the mistakes in the company and to make the right decision since their employees do not open up enough.

What is next?

There are several improvements needed to do within Pinterest’s organisational culture. To move forward quicker, every employee must open up enough to each other, disagree sometimes and share their idea to improve their organisation. To do that, all the managers level in the company must show how important the disagreement is. That is how they can improve their organisational culture. These will help the company to find the mistake and fix it in time. Then the company can move to the right direction and accomplish the target profit that they hope.