Introduction
Eric Schmidt moved from Novell to Google after he was employed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google. He had also worked as a Novell’s Chief executive officer, where he was in charge of management, technology innovation and implementation of policies. Eric’s aim ate Google is to form a company’s infrastructure which will be used to improve and maintain the effective developments within the company and allowing the product values and standards to stay high.
In company with the two founders, Eric shares roles for Google’s daily processes. Eric experience at Novell ended a record of 20 years of success as technology specialist, industrialist and developer of enormous technologies and his great achievements and experienced goes together with Google’s requirements as an energetic and fast developing search engine with an exclusive corporate culture.
Eric Schmidt also worked at Sun Microsystems in a position of corporate executive officer where he showed great skills in managing the innovation of modern technologies. He also worked as a member of research panel at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) (Bloomberg, 2012).
Eric pursued his undergraduate degree, electrical engineering, at Princeton University and later went to university of California, Berkeley to do his masters and Ph.D. in computer science.
He joined the National Academy of Engineering in 2006, after he was acknowledged from his contribution on “the development of strategies for the world’s most successful Internet search engine company” (Bloomberg, 2012).In 2007, he became Hellman Follow at American Academy of Arts and Sciences and he presently cheers the New America Foundation’s board of directors (Bloomberg, 2012).
Management Styles and Skills
Understanding Employees
Eric’s achievements in all his former companies and now Google can be mainly contributed by his efforts at energizing software engineers. He is familiarly alert to their weaknesses and strengths, for instance the employees’ mania of being honest and specific.
When workers are being ask anything, they are more probably to provide the answer to just that particular question and are so particular about being honest. Anybody who does not understand this conducts can consider that the engineer is hiding some facts or even cheating. Most professionals consider that society stereotypes technologists and engineers possess inappropriate social skills and they are very social within their society (Ahmed, 2011).
They communicate successfully among other fellows and are put into several and separate sub-groups such as UNIX people, Linux Aficionados, and other sub-communities. Engineers often like publicity and they are intensely concerned in contributing to any impact, and creating the universe the better place. This management skill, which Eric employs, offers advantages on the “Vision-Direction” aspect. It aids Eric create a vision which his fans and partners are more probably to follow and be motivated by.
Create Effective and Fair Work-Related Promotions
Eric concluded that most engineers have never thought of having bigger positions like being managers or executives. The companies’ common way of promoting employees into managers is considered by engineers as unattractive. Eric proposed an effective system which will be used for promotion of employees and not related to the executive ladder.
Eric proposes acknowledgement of employees for their productive work they do to the company and the company should implement some motivating events like stock options grants. Most successful and active employees should be offered some incentives to acknowledge their performances. These strategies would boost their morale and would create them to be more innovative and active.
These strategies were implemented by Eric while working at Novell and it showed good results where it boosted the morale of employees and later was seen from the income and performance of the company. Although the management attempts for these cognitions are minimal, it acts as a major incentive booster to the employees who are being acknowledged and improving their confidence and dedication to the company (Ahmed, 2011).
Allow Employees to Adjust
This leadership style is designed to understand company’s employees. Engineers often prefer to work on complex issues and they are stimulated by the challenge created by inflexible problems. They also work on issues which are important to them. A manager with good understanding of the desires of his employees can convert the issue into one which the employees or engineers addicted to. The manager requires articulating a demanding and important end product, but count out the particular steps the employees should follow.
This permits the employees to understand and internalize the objective using their innovative powers in attaining the leader’s objectives. This management strategy has being greatly used by Eric in all his positions to achieve company’s goals. Currently at Google, Eric has placed the company’s objective as “…Organizing the worlds information making it universally accessible and useful” (Carlson, 2009). Google’s engineer indexing millions of web pages may simply make out using Eric’s praiseworthy objective.
As a sensible issue, the aim of creating information generally available is a more consequential objective for the engineer involved in building his spot on the society, instead of an ordinary objective of rising Google’s incomes by $400 million dollars. Eric believes this relocation of possession to be very vital to both the company and engineers.
Let the Employees to Work outside the business Hierarchy
The effective approaches to manage the employees are to allow them to work outside the business structure and this management type is mostly used by Eric to manage his engineers. He opposes limitation of employees since it makes them not to research more about the up-to-date technologies which should be innovated to meet the rapid change in the technology setting. The group leaders are answerable to the manager in the ordinary company hierarchy but it is not compulsory for them to spend all their time on the supervisors’ precedence.
Through permitting engineers to select their own teams, it satisfies the engineers’ desire to fit in. As the participants joined without being directed by the management, they have a high likelihood of performing to their best. The employees as well have the freedom to work on an issue which interests them the most.
Eric has allowed engineers at Google to have the freedom of spending 25% of their time to research for fields they believe interesting (Ahmed, 2011). This allows them to gain innovative spirits, hence providing Google unique competitive benefit over its opponents. Software history changes frequently, where people turn up with excellent brands of software. This effective technique of organizing groups has allowed Google produce creative and inventive results such as iGoogle and Google+.
Assess Team’s Outcomes by a Trusted Employee
Although the earlier management skills raise the likelihood of team achievement, it is not reliable. Groups of excellent engineers will become unsuccessful if they follow incorrect concept or have ineffective implementation. Analyzing and reviewing the steps frequently permit to identify issues. The problem is the way to communicate these undesirable issues to the team members and the management approach used by Eric is to allow the processes of the teams be evaluated by a person the team choices and respect.
Most companies have at least one person who is most referred or generally respected than anybody else and this person has an approach of articulating codes and fine reminiscences. Teams are free to obtain responses or results even though the conclusion goes against them and this method mostly offers advantages in the Pride-Self-respect dimension (Carlson, 2009).
Conclusion
The above discussion on the management skills and styles used by Eric Schmidt talked about just engineers because they are workers he mostly manages. However, these types of management strategies can also be used in all kinds of employees. Briefly, Eric offers wide range of styles and skills except “Protection-Security.”
However, the exclusion of “Protection-Security” dimension in his styles of leadership is not a big issue as it can initially appear because this factor has more significance during conflicts or crisis. Vision-Direction is the factor which gains most from leadership skills and styles employed by Eric.
Other elements which also gain from these types of managements are Achievement-Effectiveness, Inclusion-Belongingness and finally Pride-Self respect in that order. Successfully facilitating daring (arranging global information) and important (creating it collectively available) objectives permits the engineers at Google to be motivated and very dedicated.
Through applying Eric’s objective and vision, Engineers would enhance their own understanding recognizing a series of inventive results. These expanded targets guarantee the consumers that they will obtain the highest and most applicable search products. Therefore Eric Schmidt, in his position as a person in charge, has expressed the correct conditions allowing his engineers’ achievements and as a result the Google’s accomplishments.
References
Ahmed, M. (2011). Eric Schmidt (Ex CEO and current Chairman – Google) management style and CIO. Web.
Bloomberg. (2012). Eric E. Schmidt Ph.D. Web.
Carlson, N. (2009). Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “We Don’t Really Have A Five-Year Plan” (CLIP). Web.