Admirable Qualities in a Leader

Admirable Qualities in a Leader

One of the most admirable leaders I know was able to transform the entire marketing and sales organization of a high technology manufacturing company by re-energizing the entire staff with a renewed sense of purpose. This leader was able to also successfully win back lost customers and in so doing, brought valuable revenue back into the company, helping to save entire departments in the process. The intent of this analysis is to explain how this leader was able to accomplish a transformation of a company through the use of exceptional management and leadership skills and insights.

Analysis of an Exceptional Leader

The many traits of this exceptional leader can be categorized as transformational as they completely changed a high technology company from being focused on price alone as the differentiator to value. This leader made the transformation occur not by ordering the shift in strategy but by concentrating on showing through example of how competing on value can deliver greater much greater results. He also showed through personal sacrifice that his brleif in selling on value would eventually pay off. He took himself off the executive compensation program until the company generated a profit. He also asked every Vice President to contribute their bonuses to revitalizing the company by investing in new technologies. The bonuses, some formidable, where enough to support entirely new technologies for driving new software development. The development of new software applications funded with the bonuses made it possible for the latest generation of technology products to be sold into the Apple and Microsoft customer bases. Within nine months the investment had paid off and the company was back to profitability. Within a year we were hiring again. Only then did this leader define profit sharing across the entire company. This level of self-sacrifice was exceptional and set the pace of continued commitment to turning around the company for years afterward.

In addition to this approach to motivating the entire company to focus on continued commitment and sacrifice for the goal, this leader also re-organized jobs by getting managers out of the way of workers. He did this by concentrating on creating a very high level of autonomy, mastery and purpose in each of the roles in sales operations, marketing, sales and customer service. He said he learned those concepts from the Dan Pink books on motivation and thought it made a lot of sense. The result was remarkable. People were getting projects done in record time and meetings drastically dropped to only those discussions needed to actually get work done. He gave everyone a renewed sense of owning their jobs. People started liking their jobs again.