Introduction
• Positive Leadership emphasizes performance that exceeds the expectations, enabling progress and addressing obstacles of progress and facilitating best human conditions (Cameron, 2012). Positive leadership is associated with making people’s lives better (Cameron, 2012).
• To understand positive leadership, we compare and contrast two leaders whose leadership leads to different conditions in their area of leadership or the world at large. Bill Gates and Jeffrey Skilling are perfect examples of leaders whose actions have had different results in their organizations. Bill Gates is the founder of Microsoft while Jeffrey Skilling was the CEO of Enron.
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Background Information
Bill Gates
• Bill Gates was born and raised in Seattle (Roza, 2017). During his childhood days, computers were huge machines meant for use by the military and universities only. He was enrolled in a private school where he met his partner, Paul Allen, with whom they co-founded Microsoft (Roza, 2017). While in this school, Gates and Allen got interested in the school’s computer known as teleprinter (Roza, 2017). It is as a result of this interest that the two pursued making computers user-friendly. The teleprinter was tedious and cumbersome.
• Bill Gates joined Harvard to study law in 1973 but dropped out to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams in the world of computers with his friend Paul Allen.
Bill Gates contribution to the World of Computers
• Together with his friend, Paul Allen, Gates founded Microsoft in April 1975 (Stevens, 2018). Microsoft is known for its flagship product, Windows Operating System.
• Bill Gates helped shape the world of modern computers. Through Microsoft, Bill Gates helped to make computers more user-friendly, thus promoting the advancement of computer technology in homes, businesses, schools and other organizations (Roza, 2017).
• Microsoft develops software that helps make computer usage easy, thus enhancing communication and business transactions across the globe (Stevens, 2018).
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Together with his wife Melinda, Bill Gates started the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity organization meant to help the less unfortunate across the globe ("Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation," 2018).
• The foundation focuses on improving the lives of people especially across the African Continent ("Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation," 2018). The foundation has bestowed billions of dollars to other charity organizations which work to improve people’s health and also improve agriculture. Some of the countries where the program has made tangible contributions include agriculture and polio elimination programs in Nigeria and Ethiopia (Stevens, 2018).
Jeffrey Skilling
• Up to the year 2001, Jeffrey Skilling was the COO of one of the largest energy companies in America, Enron from 1996 (Matulich & Currie, 2009).
• Before joining Enron, Jeffrey worked with McKinsey Company. During his time as the COO, Jeffrey helped transform the company from a natural gas pipeline to a global market leader in energy trading (Matulich & Currie, 2009).
The Collapse of Enron
• Enron collapsed in the year 2001 (Matulich & Currie, 2009). In the year 2006, Jeffrey Skilling was charged with felony charges including massive fraud, insider trading, and securities fraud and falsifying statements to the auditors during his time as the COO of Enron. It was as a result of his actions that Enron collapsed in the year 2001.
• The collapse of Enron damaged thousands of American lives. Investors lost billions of shillings while over 20,000 employees lost their jobs (Matulich & Currie, 2009). The US stock market, which is core to the U.S. economy was severely damaged, affecting the performance of the whole economy (Matulich & Currie, 2009).
What makes Bill Gates an Exemplary Leader?
Gates’ leadership can be ‘questionable’ at face value. He is known for disregarding his staff’s ideas as ‘stupid’ during numerous staff meetings. But this approach is not only truthful and real, but it positively pushed the staff to be imaginative, innovative and think outside the box in a bid to impress the boss. The result of this is that he continually pushed his staff to discover their hidden potential. That is the hallmark of leadership; challenging the subjects to discover their hidden potential.
Another leadership tactic of Bill Gates is his direct participation in the affairs of Microsoft. While many influential business leaders like Warren Buffet would prefer to take the backstage in management and let managers run the organization, Gates prefers to be actively involved in policies and inventions. This, in my opinion, sets him as an exemplary, easy to approach kind of a leader. He believes in building personal relationships with his staff. The challenge of leadership is actively engaging with the subjects. Many leaders prefer to sit in their high thrones and let their top employees deal directly with the lower employers.
Philanthropy is another hallmark of leadership. With money comes power. With power comes elevation and detachment from ‘common’ people. Such leaders prefer spending their millions in executive golf clubs and cruise ships, but Gates would prefer to be actively involved in charity works. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates actively gives back to the society, providing solutions and answers the generation desperately needs. It is acts of philanthropy that win the trust and loyalty of workers (Offermann, Kennedy & Wirtz, 1994). They want to be associated with leaders who understand their challenges, and other than just writing their paychecks, they take into account the feelings, fears, and concerns of their employees.
Jeffrey Skilling as a Bad Leader
A leader is someone who is continually thinking of new ideas and new ways of doing things. However, Skilling heavily relied on his previous success as the president of Enron to lay the foundation for his CEO career in 2001. When a leader gets carried away by their success to the point where they prefer to use the same models they had used to achieve success, their successful career is bound to come down. Rather than developing a new business model, Skilling tried to extend the model he had used on natural gas to electricity, water, broadband, and such new areas of operations.
Another factor for Skilling’s fall as a leader was that he refused to take the blame. Once certain markets began to fail, Skilling refused to admit he was wrong. He could not accept that the company was expanding too fast, or that the business model was not working in some areas. Since the success of Enron relied on the public’s misconception that it was financially stable, Skilling never attempted to improve the hopeless direction in which the company was heading, but instead focused his energy on making the company appear to be successful.
Skilling’s ego led him to believe that both the company and himself were invincible. He possessed a measure of genius and slid into the illusion of personal preeminence. Being an incredibly talented businessman and a Harvard Business School graduate, Skilling thought he had all figured out and needed no help in reorganizing the company. Unfortunately, his feeling of invincibility and belief that he had all the solutions to Enron’s problems ultimately led to him ignoring numerous risks of his business model, and subsequent downfall.
Gates’ and Skilling’s Leadership models
Skilling’s leadership model showed signs of the Great Man Theory where he believed he was a great leader arising when there was a great night. He led in an aristocracy kind of leadership and believed that as a ‘Lord,’ no one could show signs of great leadership than him. That explains why he did not take advice from the people he considered inferior to him. This also explains why he believed his model would work in all environments. He based his argument on the notion that ‘once successful, always successful.’ It is this belief and feeling of superiority that caused the distance between him and his staff. He was unapproachable and unteachable. He believed he knew everything and had everything under control. With this kind of attitude, one’s leadership. No matter how great it seems, is bound to come crumbling down sooner or later.
This is in contrast to Gates’ approach to leadership, which takes more or less a Behavioral Theory. Bill Gates believed that leaders could be made through nurturing, and that successful leadership is based on definable, learnable behavior. It can be said that Bill Gates recognized the fact that he would not always lead Microsoft, and preferred to groom his staff to be better equipped for when that time came when they had to take over complete managerial tasks. Known for his criticism, Gates desired to push his staff to believe in something bigger, to have bigger dreams, and see things from an innovation perspective (Offermann, Kennedy & Wirtz, 1994). Gates believes that through nurturing, one can become a great leader and that everyone has the poetical of becoming an outstanding leader, if only they believe and push so hard. That is why he constantly pushed his staff so hard. And by believing that anyone could become a leader, he also acknowledged the fact that he was not better placed or more favored than those who would be considered beneath him. This feeling of humility is what lays the foundation for his direct contact with his staff and employees. And also his philanthropic works, Gates believes that one’s financial or social disposition does not determine their success, and all that person needs is love and support to achieve their dreams ( Offermann, Kennedy & Wirtz, 1994).
Literature Review
Definition of Positive Leadership
Characteristics of Positive Leadership (Cameron, 2012)
Impact of Positive Leadership (Cameron, 2012)
Difference between Positive and Negative Leadership
World expectations of leaders
References
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (2018). How we work. Retrieved from https://www.gatesfoundation.org/
Cameron, K. (2012). Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance (2nd Ed.) . San Francisco, California: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Matulich, S., & Currie, D. (2009). Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance. Boca Raton-London-New York: CRC Press: Taylor and Francis Group.
Offermann, L. R., Kennedy Jr, J. K., & Wirtz, P. W. (1994). Implicit leadership theories: Content, structure, and generalizability. The Leadership Quarterly , 5 (1), 43-58.
Stevens, N. (2018). Bill Gates: A Biography of the Microsoft Billionaire . CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Roza, G. (2017). Bill Gates: Founder of Microsoft. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
