Bill Gates as a Business Leader

Leadership in business can have enormous impact on an organization and it can be either negative or positive. In this business world there are several success stories and bell weather organizations that displayed successful leadership strategies in long term run, but usually poorly led and run business have grabbed headlines due to huge toll on average workers. This essay argues the qualities and business leadership style and approaches that Bill Gates adopted in order to be a successful leader in corporate sector of the world. William Henry Gates is an American business entrepreneur, software developer, investor, and humanitarian. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation.

Firstly, Bill Gates possess numerous leadership qualities that led to the success of his organization like focus on the big picture, clear communication, creativity, people oriented and task oriented etc. But the two qualities that contributed the most in the success of his organization his ability of good communication and task oriented behavior. As a good leader directs a mass of actors to achieve their goals; his communication fosters the understanding that is needed for the employees to choose the right course of action and to choose it together (Dewan and Myatt 2008). Bill’s ability to communicate clearly unified the organization to act on objectives to achieve goals of the organization. The task-oriented behavior makes him define the roles of their followers, focuses on goal achievement, and establishes well-defined patterns of communication. In a task-based organizational culture employee who interacts in order to resolve a common task or project, they are expected to end up sharing the same kind of psychological contract (Tabernero, Chambel, Curral and Arana, 2009). His task-oriented behavior made him focus on every detail and step to achieve success in the world of IT by developing Microsoft products that changed the course of this world.

Secondly, a leader can show several leadership styles. The best leadership styles that define the leadership of Bill Gates are authentic and transformational. Like every authentic leader, Bill Gates has four dimensions of self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing and internalized moral perspective Purwanto, (Wijayanti, Hyun, and Asbari, 2019). Alavi et al (2018) stated that authentic leadership style has aptitudes, especially for multifaceted adjustment of an organization due to the efficiency and effectiveness to bring changes with numerous methods in the developments of organizations. (Somson, Richart and Timothy 2017) Transformational leaders are known by their special ability to bring about innovation and change to the business. Bill Gates didn’t just bring innovation and change to his organization but to the whole world. After the development of “Windows”, he didn’t just end his quest instead he faced the challenges of the ever changing world and introduced numerous different products proving the success of his organization through his transformation ability to ever change world. As a transformational leader, he has the ability to arouse trust, pride and respect for their subordinates and is able to communicate effectively the vision and the mission of the organization he leads.

Thirdly, Bill Gates is gifted with several qualities which pushed Gates toward the gate of success. He always focus on future and reasons and lesson he learnt from past. As he says 'It is fine to rejoice success but it is more important to pay attention to the lessons of failure'(Gates). The success of organization depends upon the ability of its leader to take crucial decisions and measures in order to achieve success and goals of the organization. But it doesn’t go as planned every time. Sometimes you have to face failure, disappointments and breakdown in an organization. The decision taken during this time of downfall can be decisive of the future of the organization and it can put organization in either to heights of success of complete jeopardy. During these moments, Bill Gates rather than regretting and feeling helpless focused on the mistakes of the past and learnt from them and took decisive measure in order to get out of current situation while focusing on the bigger picture of future ahead. Another important quality that led to the success of Bill’s organization is his priority of organization culture over the products. As organizational culture is the entire basic assumptions that a given group has invented, revealed or developed while learning to solve problems of adoption to the environment and internal incorporation (Szczepańska-Woszczyna 2014). Bill Gates transformed the culture of his organization from “Know-it-all” to “learn-it-all” which means he didn’t pressure his employees and team members to learn everything about the organization rather he encourages them to learn more and more to do their job and perform their roles properly without any obstacle. In Microsoft Corporation Bill Gates introduced a culture in which everyone values innovation to bring something new to invent something different. Along with that he introduced openness in the organization to let the employees reach the higher management to discuss their concerns and ideas. Bill also introduced diversity and inclusion in Microsoft Organization. He attempted to promote the culture of diversity and inclusion to all organizational stakeholders through numerous communication channels.

In conclusion, people are born with leadership qualities and then the culture and environment nurture and nourish that in-born talent. Through continuous learning from mistakes and experiences a person transforms into a good leader and change the course of the whole organization and in some cases like Bill Gate may change the course of whole organization through continuous hard work and effort. The attitude of never giving-up and persistence of a leader lead the organization towards the routes of success.

Bibliography

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