Management Styles of CEO’s
CEO Jeff Bezos
Bezos is best exemplified with the pacesetting style. He founded Amazon with a clear vision of the utmost in customer service (Anders, 2012) and this inner motivation to achieve this has earned him the following and loyalty of talented employees. His senior team averages 11 years with Amazon in spite of Bezos’ intense harsh style. He is known for setting clear goals, high standards for performance and speed of execution of his objectives. This was apparent when Amazon was starting-up and Bezos was rushing to capture the market and beat competitors.
Amazon absorbed huge losses in the internet bubble burst and Bezos can be coercive as a leader in those times. It’s a fact that he is exceptionally intelligent having graduated summa cum laude in engineering in Princeton University. Being aware of that makes him confident of making final decisions with finality, even brutally at times. He’s quoted with “Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”. Rather than ugly outbursts of temper, Bezos is known for cutting sarcasm; such restraint can be a sign of self-regulation and empathy for challenged employees.
CEO Ken Chenault
Chenault has a rare combination of hard and soft leadership traits in being decisive and compassionate. Being the leader of the 70,000-man American Express, one can easily evolve as a hard-nosed and decisive executive but his self-awareness, empathy and social skills make him doubly effective. He has captured the loyalty of employees from the top echelons to the lower ranks. He regularly joins non-management employees in brown bag lunches and maintains an open email account for everyone. He adroitly uses his social skills to spread his influence throughout the organization. Even in times of low morale, Chenault’s empathy is able to shine. There was a time that American Express had to cut 16,000 jobs and Chenault’s showed compassion by telling them directly 18 months before their time. All of the above sides of Chenault exhibit an effective balanced affiliative style that endears but doesn’t spoil. (Yakowicz, 2013)
Chenault believes not just in leading but creating as many good leaders American Express. He quotes “ I don’t believe in the imperial CEO. The best organizations create thousands of leaders.” He again leverages his keen social and motivating skills to carry out a successful coaching style which became part of the American Express culture.
CEO Jack Welch
First and foremost, Welch believes in his ability to choose the right people for GE and that includes coldly terminating employees who he believes will not fit into his perceived culture of performance. His deep sense of motivation springs from his almost spiritual belief in the potential of people for creativity and productivity and his contribution is to establish a management culture that will grow and nurture people’s strengths.
(Byrne, 1998)
References
Anders, G. (2012, April 4). Jeff Bezos Reveals His No. 1 Leadership Secret. Forbes. Retrieved February 28, 2016 from http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0423/ceo-compensation-12-amazon-technology-jeff-bezos-gets-it.html
Byrne, J.A. (1998, June 8). How Jack Welch Runs GE. BusinessWeek. Retrieved February 28, 2016 from http://www.businessweek.com/1998/23/b3581001.htm
Yakowicz, Will. (2013, November 13). How American Express's CEO Learned to Lead 70,000 Employees. Inc. Retrieved February 28, 2016 from http://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/american-express-kenneth-chenault-how-to-lead-70000-employees.html
