A Crisis Causes Andrea Jung to Change Her Leadership Style



A Crisis Causes Andrea Jung to Change Her Leadership Style

1. Andrea Jung used the directive style to solve Avon’s financial problems.

In this particular story, Jung set up goals to solve the financial problem and keep Avon continuing growth in a global scale. Like Paula Stern said: “She has her hands directly on the levers that to be moved.”

2. The leader style of course will not be consistent all the time according to “Consistency Theory”. It depends on the leaders’ situation control.

“Consistency Theory” focuses on leaders characteristics. One of the most important features is “least preferred coworker” (LPC) . Avon had been cutting lots of positions before. During the financial crisis, Jung cut another quarter of her best 1000 managers in the world. Her is a low-LPC leader that considers workers in a negative light and concerned employees with good performance. She increased her situation controls even sacrifice her family time with kids to maintain the companies good work. This type of leaders is highly effective under both “low situational” and “high situation” controls.

But it doesn’t work well in-between. So she may keep Avon a successful performance while she remains the high situation control. But once she wants to spend more time with family or “employees” decide by themselves or being lazy for a while, Avon’s performance might drop.

3. According to “Path-Goal” Theory, a leader can affect the performance, satisfaction, and motivation of a group. But, it also depends on situational factors: the environment and the subordinates’ characteristics.

Her problem is:

When a group is working on a task that has a high structure, then directive leadership may not be very effective. Also, after Avon is having a very good system running very well, her directive leadership may reduce worker’s satisfaction.

4. “Transactional leadership occurs when the leader rewards or disciplines the follower depending on the adequacy of the follower’s performance.”

She cut off 7 layers of management and changed her mindset, changed Avon’s marketing and product development and also herself worked with a high enthusiasm.

In this particular story, Jung started to change her leader style with “active management-by-exception”. She started to serve Avon Company as a role model and even sacrificed her family time. Her performance and enthusiasm encourage employees.

The High Cost of Ethical Neutrality

1. Carly Fiorina changed HP’s priority from nurturing employees to financial performance. Another good approach to improve HP’s performance is to “enhance” the current culture instead of totally breaking it and build another one, depending on how strong the current culture is or how much the effort and potential cost is. And also, if HP’s culture was really bad and had to be changed, she could “innovate” it gradually by promoting ideas while sharing her values to current workers. She was obviously not effective in changing the culture. In another word, she did change the culture for a short period time to focus on revenues, but also made HP’s long term earning drop and caused problems as employees’ satisfaction decreasing, reputation dropping and even violated some common ethical beliefs.

2. In this example, we can actually see Fiorina’s impact on all four aspect of ethical climate which are sensitivity, judgment, motivation, and character:

She made workers so sensitive about the “numbers” because they may be “replaced” if they fail. Also sensitive during her investigation of the info leak; Salesmen started to give discounts and focus on their own earning of the season instead of thinking for the companies long term benefit; During the Compaq merging battle, “private investigation” was also a huge damage to HP, regardless from the aspect of ethical motivation or moral and human rights challenge;

It was a very bad influence to HP’s ethical climates.

3. I am going to analyze Fiorina from aspects below

a. Leader’s perception by others.

Fiorina is a very self-centered leader. She was not sensitive enough to how she was perceived by coworkers. She was focusing on the numbers employees can make other than aiming at strong ethical behaviors. And she “was rarely mixed with coworkers” and “blames others for failure rather than take personal responsibility”. In this situation, she was badly perceived by employees.

b. Guidance from leaders.

She had a very strong control and focus on “numbers” which was not necessary to be bad. From the article, it mentioned the “current revenue boosted”. But that was based on future expenses. Financial analysts started to question HP’s reports. She failed in guiding employees ethics to contribute to the whole group. Instead, employees started to focus on their own seasonal sales and earnings.

c. Legal problems

During the investigation of info leak, HP started this private spying on workers. Obviously she was not aware of avoiding the legal issues, and didn’t control or encourage the investigators to do the right thing.

d. Ethics and Effectiveness

It didn’t mention directly that if she focused on ethics in professional life or personal life. But from her behavior as : changing priority from nurturing employees, consolidating divisions under her control, lay off huge amount of workers and so on, we may see her was an unethical leader. This kind of leadership is unstable and unsustainable.

Skullcandy: Developing Extreme Headphones

1. Original Skullcandy headphone can be viewed as:

product innovation, incremental innovation, competence-enhancing innovation and component innovation.

DJ headphone can be viewed as:

both product and process innovation ( because the company created a new group and process to invent the new product)

radical innovation,

competence-enhancing. (Because the new product was based on the existing knowledge base. )

and involved both “component innovation” and “architectural innovation.

2. I would describe Skullcandy a small size organization at first, but eventual has grown to a big organization. Big size companies have their own advantages in innovation.

a. They offer better economies of scale and learning effects.

b. They are more likely to take on large scale or risky projects.

But also, it has disadvantages.

a. the efficiency may decrease.

b. Large firms have more bureaucratic inertia

c. More strategic commitments tie firm to current technologies

That is why they tried to build an “innovation group” to make the size smaller and avoid disadvantages in big firms.

3.

a. maximizing fit with customer requirements:

Since 2009, Skullcandy targeted the hip-hop music market working with key music industry individuals and companies. Obviously they found a neglected low-end market and it not only meets customers’ requirements but also may bring potential profits. They tried to maximizing DJ’s needs such as thinking of the sound qualities, working habbits, cool looking requirements and many other options.

b. minimizing cycle time:

They have a clear deadline which was in September of the year “before” the Christmas sells begins.

c. controlling the development costs

They tried to build a SLA to create the parts even it might cost them $300, but that pattern will make the product very cheap when it is massively produces.

I would describe this innovation a partly parallel process. Because the eventual concept of the development was actually formed in the designing process, and also , produce design has overlaps with process design. It is not an extremely step-by-step process.

I think the design group actually acted like the product champion as a whole and each individual also put their enthusiasm. But Alden was more likely to be the one because he can give the mandate that the product “don’t look like headphones”. Also, the Mike who influenced the design might also be a champion too.

4.

a. It is a small group in big company, which is a very good thing. It has enough money to support as a big size company, but also has small size advantages.

b. The group was under “Organic structure” since the article mentioned it had informal atmosphere. This structure encourages creativity and experimentation. It is good for innovation.

c. From the article, it mentioned how the team members with multiple functions worked: someone went to China to negotiate with manufactures, and someone who is good at electronic knowledge and so on. Having members knowing and function differently makes a team have greater coordination.

This kind leadership doesn’t have a strong situation control, it works really good and gives each co-worker enough space. I would suggest high LPC leadership should keep a not very strong control, but not too weak either. If the leader insist to change. I would :

a. Bring new blood in, because new product needs different thinking. New comers have to bring new abilities too.

b. If the new group has problems like: higher costs or disagreement on something. The leaders have to take in charge and give orders, otherwise it might break the good culture and atmosphere of the group.

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