Jeff Bezos’s Background and Early Life

Discuss about the Engineering Managers and Sustainable Systems.

Leadership is a practical skill to lead a group of individuals or organization in one direction with the objective to attain goals and objectives. Apart from this, leadership is also known as a research type of activity because leader seeks for new and unique ways to get the work done from others. There are various great leaders in the global market who have proven effectiveness of leadership qualities and amongst them, Jeff Bezos has been chosen to discuss in this report because he is known as the biggest leader of this era. Once, he dreamt to sell products and services over internet and converted his dream into reality by utilising his innovative and unique leadership skills. In this report, his leadership style will be discussed which makes the Amazon Inc. world’s largest online retailing company in term of revenues. Further, report will focus over challenges faced by him in his entire career along with the actions taken by him to tackle these issues to attain desired goals and objectives (Stone, 2013).

Bezos was born Albuquerque, New Mexico and graduated from Princeton University in 1986 in electrical engineering and computer science. When Jeff Bezos was a student, he was fascinated with computer technology, electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton University. Later on in 1994, he founded Amazon in the garage in his own house in Bellevue, Washington. At that time, only books were sold over this platform and in 1995, he expanded the product offerings including CDs, videos, clothing material, electronic appliances and much more. In 2011, due to Jeff Bezos’s skillful leadership, the company’s sales increased from $ 510,000 to $ 17 billion. In 2013, Jeff Bezos decided on a new experimental project “Amazon Prime Air”, which made use of drones to deliver the goods to customers. In 2017, he became the wealthiest person across the globe with estimated net worth over $90 billion with an increase of 2.5% in Amazon’s share prices.

Due to unique qualities and thinking process, Jeff Bezos has made its unique and effective image as a leader in the global market. In the starting days, Jeff Bezos practiced autocratic type of leadership style. He used to take all decisions and power was centralised with the top level management. Due to this, labour turnover was quite high and in relation with this, organization faced various challenges and issues. Further, he transformed his leadership style so that the organizational performance could be enhanced. Now his leadership style matches with a transformational leadership style as well as charismatic leadership style. This is because he used to invent new ideas with the motive of standing aside from its competitors (Antonakis & Day, 2017). Under transformational leadership style, he works with his subordinates and takes them feedbacks and reviews in relation with adopting change through which the desired goals could be accomplished. Apart from this, his leadership style also matches with the qualities of a charismatic leader. Charismatic leader is the one who has effective communication skills along with effective convincing skills. Charismatic leaders could easily extract the work from teammates along with showcasing them an appropriate direction to attain goals and objectives (Collinson & Tourish, 2015).

Jeff Bezos’s Leadership Style

Jeff Bezos’ expectations from his employees are bit high in comparison to other leaders in the global market. He expected that an employee should work for at least 60-65 hours a week to attain something great in life (Taylor, 2018). This is another reason of increased labour turnover of Amazon and afterwards, HR managers appointed only those employees who could work in any shift, can handle pressure as well as willing to work for a long time with the organization. This thinking process proves that Bezos is bit different from other leaders in the global market. Jeff is more a transformational leader because he has built an effective workplace environment along with building appropriate confidence amongst his subordinates so that the tasks could be accomplished in an effective manner (Rose, 2015).

It has been observed that great people in history have been failures. Jeff Bezos has failed repeatedly and epically in his entire career. Apart from these failures, he has also faced certain challenges as well as issues through which he has seen criticism by his own teammates. In the early years of 2000, Jeff Bezos faced the biggest challenge from his employees. Bezos believed in centralisation under which he used to take all decision for company by his own. Apart from this, he did not used to bother about his employees. Jeff was treating them as labour and due to which he needs to bear criticism from his subordinates. This leads to generate negative results for the organization and due to this, labour turnover of the organization was increased. Later on, he determined the gap between the management and employees and adopted charismatic and transformational leadership styles. This develops decentralised management system which turned the things for the organization. Apart from this, Jeff Bezos was poor at management skills which also created certain challenges and issues for him. In this period, he was holding all powers with himself. In 1998, when he was trying to expand product offerings on Amazon because he always wanted Amazon as an “everything store”. Without taking feedbacks from his subordinates, he decided to branch into toy market which was totally different as per organizational previous offerings (Johnston & Marshall, 2016).

Bezos spend almost $120 million on purchasing toys from various manufacturers without taking advice from other Amazon executives and kept them in inventory with the motive of being the leader in toys market as there were not big distributors available for toys in the market at that time (Stibel, 2014).This decision by Jeff Bezos affected organizational performance. At that time, company was quickly acquiring the market share and becoming the online leader in those categories but selling toys becomes the worst decision for organizational wealth. But Bezos is known for his unique thinking process and he did not taken a step back. This made the organization towards dark side but Jeff Bezos tried to invent new ways regularly with the objective of recovering the loss (Jones, Michelfelder & Nair, 2017). After Christmas in that year, approximately $50 million toys were left with the organization which were later on distributed to children’s charity and selling the rest to exporters for a fraction of the value. Today, organization is standing on the peak position with largest product offerings in more than 168 countries.

Jeff Bezos’s Expectations from Employees

Primary objective of leadership approach is to guide a group of individuals in one direction so that the desired goals and objectives could be attained. Jeff Bezos is a great leader of this era and he has numerous solutions for every sort of situations. He is a transformational as well as charismatic leader along with effective thinking process (André & Pache, 2016). His leadership styles describe his uniqueness which proved him as the vibrant leader of the giant enterprise. Irrespective of these attributes, there are certain gaps in the leadership style of Jeff Bezos which could be fixed with following measures:

Employee empowerment: Bezos should adopt this strategy in order to decentralise the decision making process. Under this strategy, certain degree of autonomy will be given to the employees for taking decisions at their own level. For example: product offerings needs to be expanded to compete well with the competitors. This decision could be taken by the employee assigned with the duty and responsibility of managing stock and expanding product offering. In relation with strategy, employee who has taken decisions on behalf of the company will be accountable and responsible for his actions as well as for the outcomes originated from his decisions (Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock & Sands, 2016).

Openness in communication or open door policy: Jeff Bezos could introduce open door policy at workplace. With the help of this, employees could easily approach its superiors as well as top level management regarding any concern. If an employee wants to share reviews or wants to give feedback to the top level management in relation with the policies or wants to complain against any employee irrespective of their position, he/she could approach to the top level management without any glitch in between (Mazurenko, et. al., 2016).

Creative positive synergies in organization: Under this strategy, team work will be given much preference rather performing the task by an individual. There are various benefits of team work and it also encourages employees to show their talent and knowledge with regards to the accomplishment of the tasks (Dwertmann, Nishii & Van Knippenberg, 2016).

These three strategies are recommended to Jeff Bezos to adopt in his leadership. This will help him to develop positive relations with employees along with developing reliability amongst them. Apart from this, he could focus over taking feedbacks from employees in relation with the workplace environment and over their superior’s behaviours with them. Team building exercises could also be adopted as it will promote organization towards attainment of desired goals and objectives.

References

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André, K. and Pache, A.C., 2016. From caring entrepreneur to caring enterprise: Addressing the ethical challenges of scaling up social enterprises. Journal of Business Ethics, 133(4), pp.659-675.

Antonakis, J. and Day, D.V. eds., 2017. The nature of leadership. Sage publications.

Collinson, D. and Tourish, D., 2015. Teaching leadership critically: New directions for leadership pedagogy. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 14(4), pp.576-594.

Dwertmann, D.J., Nishii, L.H. and Van Knippenberg, D., 2016. Disentangling the fairness & discrimination and synergy perspectives on diversity climate: moving the field forward. Journal of Management, 42(5), pp.1136-1168.

Jeff Stibel. 2014. Jeff Bezos: A Profile in Failure. [Online]. Accessed from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141201155043-461078-jeff-bezos-a-profile-in-failure. [10^th May 2018].

Johnston, M.W. and Marshall, G.W., 2016. Sales force management: Leadership, innovation, technology. Routledge.

Jones, S.A., Michelfelder, D. and Nair, I., 2017. Engineering managers and sustainable systems: the need for and challenges of using an ethical framework for transformative leadership. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, pp.205-212.

Mazurenko, O., Richter, J., Swanson-Kazley, A. and Ford, E., 2016. Examination of the relationship between management and clinician agreement on communication openness, teamwork, and patient satisfaction in the US hospitals. Journal of Hospital Administration, 5(4), p.20.

Rose, G., 2015. The Man Who Sells Everything: A Conversation With Jeff Bezos. Foreign Affairs, 94(1), p.2.

Stone, B., 2013. The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. Random House.

Taylor, S.P., 2018. Organisational behaviour, leadership and change. International Journal of Housing and Human Settlement Planning, 4(1), pp.21-36.