Introduction
Nowadays lots of books, manuals and trainings are worked out to teach people leadership. All of them introduce completely different visions of what leadership actually is. According to Richard L Daft (2008), most common definitions of leadership include such elements as influence, intention, personal responsibility and integrity, change, shared purpose and followers (5). Five most important leadership practices, singled out by James M. Kouzes& Barry Z. Posner, are modeling the way, inspiring shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act and encouraging the heart (26).
Despite the fact that theoretic data on leadership is fully available, leadership studies also require consideration of specific examples. In this assignment we would concentrate on analyzing leadership style, philosophy, strengths and weaknesses of Google CEO, Larry Page, paying special attention to organization-related issues.
Lawrence (“Larry”) Page is well-known as the U.S. computer scientist and co-founder of Google. He was born in 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan. Mr.Page did his bachelor and master degree from University of Michigan and Stanford University respectively. Google’s current CEO is often called a pioneer of artificial intelligence as he created an algorithm, which underlies Google’s search engine’s ranking system. Invention of Google’s search engine provided Mr.Page and Mr.Brin with an opportunity to transform a small company to a world giant. Nowadays the story of Google is world’s best-known start-up story and top one desired employers in the world ). The company enjoys having lots of affiliates all over the world and combining involvement in different sectors of business, all of them related to IT business.
Analysis
It is clear that outstanding growth of Google is a merit of both its cofounders, so it would not have been possible without contributions of each of them. To start the analysis, let us refer to leadership style of Mr. Page. According to Peter Guy Northouse (2010), leadership style consists of two styles of a person’s behaviour, which are task (directive) and supportive (relationship) behaviours (91). The most important principle, which Mr.Page uses in his leadership practice, is “do not be evil”. This principle is also world-known as the motto of Google. A peculiarity of such an approach lies in the fact that Mr.Page pays special attention to supportive practices due to the fact that one of crucial elements of Google’s philosophy is concerned with viewing all the employees as united as a family.
This approach manifests itself not only through words. Employee benefits, used by Google, encompass a large spectrum, which includes even the right to take pets to work and do fitness. Total flexibility allows employees both not to feel stressed and allocate their time in such a way, which will help them as more productively as possible.
Moreover, employee benefits serve as manifestations of care, so employees are able to experience the same feelings with respect to mission, goals and objectives of the company. On the other side, flexibility is a display of trust, which serves as an important link between an employee and organization and, therefore, with an employee and organization’s CEO, who is the main representative of organization.
As a company, which operates within a highly competitive IT and new technologies sector, Google is currently looking for new ideas, which can serve as a source of profit in the future. By their own experience, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, understand that brilliant technical or organizational idea can become a basis for discoveries, which can ensure success of an organization over white a long period of time.
So, both co-founders of Google and representatives of its top management are always open to communication with employees, independently on their positions. No complicated bureaucratic procedures underlie implementation of ideas, so an employee, who presented the idea, can see it implemented quite soon. Moreover, flexible system of encouragements is used to promote employees’ elaborating on ideas, which can potentially contribute to the development of the company.
Leadership style and philosophy, used by Larry Page, are perfectly aligned with Google’s culture. Such a correlation can be explicitly seen from comparison of values Larry Page emphasizes while leading and values of organization. It may be partially explained by the fact that Mr.Page was a cofounder of Google, so he might have been taking an active part in formulating Google’s corporate values.
The first and most important value of both Google as the organization and its cofounders is special focus on people (Holden , 2008). Such a value has several manifestations. Firstly, Google aims at hiring best of best and promote their talents. So, a special environment is created to help people develop ideas. It is emphasized that to develop an idea an employee should not be at his/her desk all the time. Secondly, all the ideas are challenged openly and valued only with respect to their usefulness, not personalities of their developers. The third value, which is respected within Google, is innovation. It also deals with ideas and challenging them openly, however, focuses on promoting people’s ability to use gadgets to solve complicated problems. It may seem that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are obsessed with ideas, however, both of them adhere to one of most important principles of Google, according to which is better to do one thing very well than to do lots of things badly. So, each idea, presented to either of representatives of Google’s top management, is thoroughly examined before it may be decided that it can be implemented. Fourth value is active involvement of employees. Activeness of involvement is reached with the help of several ways including developing family relationships within Google team, using flexible system of encouragements and training employees in such a way that they feel themselves representatives of Google, who are obliged to act appropriately. Other values, which help Mr.Page support employees in acting Google-like are fun, which helps to create energetic and interesting environment for creative work; an aspiration to do good things to earn and maintain customers’ loyalty every day, and even to make a contribution into improving and changing the world a whole.
Most of above-,mentioned values are the ones, which ensure ethical behavior of Google’s employees The most important value in this regard is “do not be veil”, which can be seen as a set of such values as integrity and making profit by doing things, which are good for customers. Despite the fact that it may sound strange, an important role in ensuring ethical behavior belongs to fun as it allows people to create an appealing working environment, which is comfortable for all the employees. A crucial value of Google is openness as it prevents leaders of the company from treating employees unfairly. Philosophy of Google includes respecting diversity as it is an important tool, which helps to find unexpected ways to create and implement ideas.
Since leadership became of interest to scholars, a debate on whether it is an art, a science or a combination of art and science, takes place. The search for the traits of leaders has been ongoing in different parts of the world for centuries. As it was stated by A.Weth (2007), the general traits, needed to be a leader, are intelligence; adjustment; extraversion; conscientiousness, open-mindedness and self-efficacy (7-12). To my mind, three most important strengths of Larry Page are intelligence, openness and flexibility. Main weaknesses of Larry Page are connected with the fact that he is more scientist than CEO, so it is hard for him to keep an eye on organizational issues, tackle current legal matters and even communicate with employees. So, he can be believed to lack adjustment to his new position. Most important benefit of Mr.Page consists of two elements. Firstly, he is a scientists and has good understanding of IT ideas. Secondly, he is open to various ideas. Such a combination allows Larry Page to have a wide range of ideas to thoroughly challenge and select the best ones (White, 2007). This quality is critical due to invaluable importance of ideas to Google.
It is important for Mr.Page to elaborate on his communication skills as particularly communication and collaboration are factors, which are crucial for the implementation of ideas, which may be produced both individually or also as a result of communication or collaboration. Communication of people with different backgrounds can become a source of especially fruitful and effective ideas. Social power is extremely important for operation of the organization as it helps to affect behavior of group members, so that they become adhered to particular goals and objectives (Tedeschi, 2008). Politics also influences the company in terms of being an important external environment factor, which determines law-making, which can, by-turn, exert a significant influence on operations of the company.
Conclusion
Leadership studies are often concerned not only with theory of leadership, but wth studying practical experience of business’s leaders. Leadership style, developed by L.Page is concerned with support and promotion of initiatives of ideas and employees, so that large-scale aspirations of the corporation can be met. As Mr.Page is a cofounder of Google, his personal values are aligned with corporate ones. His main strength lies in being able to select best ideas. On the other hand, he still needs to improve his adjustment and communication skills as communication and collaboration play an important role in Google’s functioning. Dynamics of Google is influenced by wide range of factors including social power- and politics- related ones.
References
Daft, R.L.(2008). The leadership experience (4th edition). Mason: Cengage Learning
Holden, G. (2008). Go Google: 20 Ways to Reach More Customers and Build Revenue With Google Business Tools. New York, NY: AMACOM
Kouzes, J.M., Posner, B.Z.(2010). The leadership challenge (4th edition). New York, NY: John Wiley&Sons
Northhouse, P.G. (ed). (2010). Leadership: theory and practice. London: SAGE
Tedeschi, G. Social power and political influence. New York, NY: Transaction Publishers
Weth, A. (2007). Key Leadership Traits of an Effective Cio for Managing and Developing Teams in Culturally Diverse Work Groups. Berlin: Grin Verlag
White, C. (2007). Sergey Brin and Larry Page: the founders of Google. New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group
