Leadership Assessment and Companies Problems

Leadership is defined as the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, in order to accomplish what you set out to do. People often assume that anyone in a management position is a leader but I find that statement to be false. To be considered a leader, you must have very strong beliefs, and to work hard at your goal and stay focused. A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is the highest ranked executive manager in a corporation and in my opinion one of the most important.

A CEO can range from being the founder of a company, the owner of a business, or they have a great significance within the corporation. A CEO’s responsibility can vary depending on how involved he or she is within the corporation. Although there are many tasks at hand in which a CEO bears, such roles can include significant responsibility, accountability, and authority within the organization. CEO is also response for making sure that the vision, mission and overall direction is being followed through properly.

Demonstrating these roles is vital to make sure that the organization’s mission is successful. At my previous employer, I worked for a company call Florida Light and Power (FPL) and although I only met our CEO on a few occasion his name was Armando J. Olivera, and his leadership style impacted me greatly. Mr. Olivera’s leadership style was charismatic style and he did it very well. He was always known as a person who had such an enthusiasm attitude and was always positive minded. Mr. Olivera always wanted to give back to people and teach people something new (Salisbury, 2011).

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His attitude made me want to come to work each day. Mr. Olivera started with the company with back in 1972 as an engineer trainee and became the CEO back in 2003. The CEO would always adhere to the standards and rules and he really set an example of how he expected his employees to act. He always projected himself in a businesslike manner, and conformed to the rules. He was never the type of person to leave early just because he was the CEO or to take holidays off while the rest of the employees worked.

He personally impacted me in a positive manner when I first started. The training period is an intention training that involves several classes that included videos to watch, and during those videos Mr. Olivera was actually in the videos speaking and explaining his vision and what he expects and his story of how he started out. The story really made me look at the company differently and because Mr. Olivera was all about how to make the customer happy and the great lengths that he would endear to make sure that that happened.

In order to ensure that FPL employees were always on the right path the CEO would produce training videos for team development that displayed such qualities like integrity, drive, consideration, and self confidence. The CEO always made sure that his expectation was made to be clear and the vision and mission statements were followed through properly. FPL vision statement states as followed “we will be the preferred provider of safe, reliable, cost-effective products and services that satisfy the electricity related needs of all our customer segments” ("Fpls commitment to,").

Divisional structure was the type of organization structure at FPL. Since FPL was such a large company with over 10,000 employees in the state of Florida, we operated in a wide geographic area and targeted difference areas with difference specialized groups. This was a huge advantage to our company because it helps meet more rapid demands and is able to handle a larger division. This also helped the company move into other forms of energy sources that they could provide to customers. Within the organizational structure at FPL there are levels of hierarchy that distribute the responsibility within the organization.

Divisional structure at FPL allows common culture to build and contribute to a higher and better knowledge of the company and its services. (Gillikin) Ethical conduct refers to an organizations moral standards concerning the action of individual members and also the decisions of the organization as a whole. At FPL the CEO has placed this responsibility on to Human Resources to ensure that all employees were following the code of conduct and conducting themselves in the upmost professional manner; no employees including the CEO were exempted from this.

As their ethical practices have become an economical benefit for the company, it also prevents disrespectful behavior, bullying between coworkers, prevention between personal phone calls at the companies expense, improper use of company equipment, and excessive sick days etc. The code of ethical conduct has greatly effected the way business is properly conducted. FPL strives to not only do the legal thing but the ethical thing as well in order to ensure our customers with satisfactorily service.

FPL has a public image to obtain as they are the largest energy provider in the state of Florida. Also unethical business can not only hurt a companies reputation, but it can prevent prospective employees from choosing to work for FPL. (Vossos) There are many ways to motivate employees, and may different techniques that seem to work better than others. First off the most motivating thing in the work place is money, so offering employees bonuses for reaching a mark or being the leader in sales with a nice bonus will encourage all the employees to work harder and better for the extra money.

Many large companies do this to motivate such as google and Microsoft use this technique. Another way to motivate is offer extra time off or paid time off for the employee that has preformed the best for each quarter. The third way to motivate employees would to add some perks for them while they are at work such as child daycare or pay for any food they might want or have free drink machines. These are just a few ways to make the work space more enjoyable and move appealing for employees.

The Hawthorne studies in the early nineteenth century examined and studied how managers can motivate employees to work more efficiently, with quality work at the maximum rate of return. One of the areas of information derived from the Hawthorne studies was that something more than pay incentives was improving the employees’ output within work groups. Researchers found that there was improvement in the work due to the fact that employees felt important because someone was studying them at work.

One of the concepts that leaders can derive from this historic discovery is that leaders must find ways to motivate and reward their employees besides the perceived rewards of being employed and having a pay incentive. (Cook) Companies today are faced with a host of issues, which may cripple their functionality, or in some extreme cases render the organizations obsolete. For example Kodak once a leader and innovator in the photo industry but they fell behind and had to file for bankruptcy.

These challenges are dependent on the nature of operations of the company, these challenges face a large amount of different organizations. Technological advancements today are on the increase more than in the previous century. Technology changing creates a problem for businesses because when technology changes the company has to stay up to date with the technology so they would have to teach all there employees how to run the new programs and buying the new technology can be very costly.

Another problem companies face generational gaps have created a difficulty in determining consumer behaviors, yet most companies are investing heavily in customer behavior analysis to determine the most appropriate way of matching a customers’ needs. Once again times change and so do customers taste and opinions change and businesses need to stay current with the changes if not they will end up like Kodak. A problem that we can all relate to as of lately is unstable economies and currencies are another factor causing constant instability in the running of corporations.

Though this has of late been caused by other external factors such as exchange rates, amount of exports and imports and political factors. There has been a relatively high incidence of economic instability in the recent past. The national economies are recovering from a global economic meltdown today, most organizations have been negatively affected by the meltdown leading to massive layoffs. There are many more challenges that many companies and leaders encounter when managing.

Diversity can help organizations compete in global markets by having a plan of other ventures that will bring new technology or and item to the market when a company has more than one option to make money successfully will make the chances of that company higher for them to succeed. or example lets look at Fuji film they diversified there company by making lcd screens and medical companies just to name a few things fuji film did to keep there companies head above water.

An effective business strategy to address these challenges such as the change in technologies, generation gap, and unstable economies. The first step would be to build a good tech team that can stay on top of the technology an help keep the companies technology up to date. Then the generation gap a company hat has developed great ways to bring in new generations would be google they have done a many things to keep young talented employees to continue to come work for them for a few reasons they build a different environment that draws the new generation in.

They also make the work environment more relaxing and stress free. A good way for a company to tackle this issue would be to listen to younger employees ideas and add some relaxing eliminates such as a gym, swimming pool or shona which employees could relieve stress before or after work. Then prepare for the unstable economies there is a few things that can help with this first being diversifying the companies assets look into other business ventures easier said then dont also expand the company into different economies. A company that has multiple, unrelated businesses.

Unrelated businesses are those which require unique management expertise, have different end customers and produce different products or provide different services. One of the benefits of being a diversified company is that it buffers a company from dramatic fluctuations in any one industry sector. However, this model is also less likely to enable stockholders to realize significant gains or losses because it is not singularly focused on one business.

Reference

1. Cook, J. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http://thinkingleader. hubpages. om/hub/How-Google-Motivates-their-Employees-with-Rewards-and-Perks
2. FPL’s commitment to quality. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http://www. fpl. com/about/quality/fpls_commitment_to_quality. shtml ("Fpls commitment to," ) Salisbury, S. (2011, December 19).
3. Fpl's ceo to retire after 40 years; successor named. The palm beach post. (Salisbury, 2011) Gillikin, J. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http://smallbusiness. chron. com/advantages-disadvantages-divisional-organizational-structure-611. html (Gillikin) Vossos, T. (n. d. ).
4. Retrieved from http://www. ehow. com/info_8660312_ethical-conduct-within-organization. html (Vossos)

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