Having seen the leadership styles
and failures from three CEO’s in the past 5 years [exhibit 2], employees within
HP faced uncertainty and lacked clear vision, goal and lost trust in our
leaders. HP, the innovator in technology was sinking and then came Meg Whitman;
Forbes quotes “Meg Whitman Jolts HP as Its Reluctant Savior". In this
article I am going to draw some of the best practices I learned from Meg and how
her leadership style brought HP back on track.
Clear Strategic Vision:
Unlike the past leaders who focused only on stake holders Meg understood that
HP’s strength is in its 350,000 employees. She quickly articulated a clear
long-term vision [exhibit 3] with a timeline for fixing and told us it’s a
“multi-year journey” and we are at step 2 in the 4-point process .Meg, for all
her accomplishments, is a real person. So we began with the end in mind and our
vision was “Focus on outcomes the right
way”.
Build Clarity and Empower by
leading:. Meg is regarded as warm, honest and her credibility is not in
doubt within employees. One anecdote perfectly describes why our faith would
not be misplaced is this incident. After Dell had beaten HP on the last 5 deals
from Microsoft, Whitman called Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, “Tell me where
we came up short, Don’t sugarcoat it. I’d like to know so that we can do better
the next time.” Soon afterward Microsoft sent a multipage memo to Whitman,
listing nine ways that HP had fumbled its opportunity. For Whitman the memo
wasn’t an insult; it was a battle plan. She convened a war team of HP’s
enterprise computing division. Our
job was to figure out how to make HP
more competitive. When Microsoft’s Bing
bought a further $530 million of servers in January, vindication arrived. This
time HP, not Dell, seized the order. Blunt, folksy and persistent is
what we saw in her. She’s decisive without being abrasive, persuasive without
being slick. She’s a team builder who knows that turnarounds call for repairing
hundreds of small failings rather than betting everything on a miracle cure
that might be a mirage. Meg during our All Employee meeting said “Run to the
fire; don’t hide from it.”, this made us believe that if we were afraid of ever
making a mistake, we will be paralyzed from taking action or taking even
calculated risks. We believed that mistakes happen in the course of doing business
and that one learns from making mistakes, we will have a more productive team. With
this new way of thinking HP beat street estimates with best fiscal results and
stock price jumped 22% during Meg's turn around phase.
Bring the 4 I’s: Meg
during her first 6 months as CEO she had 305 one-on-one meetings with individual
team leaders (CII leader style) and travelled 20 countries to meet the country
Managers and the employees to understand their issues and problems .She made
herself more available and also opened an employee forum where she and her
management team answer and give guidance to some of the questions posted by HP
employees. She took the CEO position with a $1 base salary. We saw her as a
truly transformational leader with Individualized consideration, Motivation
through inspiration. She was regarded as a leader who respected individual employees
and put follower’s needs above her own and showed an Idealized influence
characteristic which is an important characteristic of a transformational
leader. This in turn increased HP’s employee retention rate tremendously when
compared to previous years.
Limitations: The leader's
values may not be in alignment with the values of followers, and this may lead
to a conflict of interest. This may destroy the trust that followers had built
on the leader. The Leader should constantly show progress and improvement
towards the long term goal otherwise employees may lose their confidence .The
Leader of this type are generally Risk seekers , so there is a possibility of
failure and leader should have a plan in case of failure.