Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. manufactures home furnishing and accessories. It assembles its products in its manufacturing facilities and operates in wholesale and retail segments. The company tries to achieve its vision through good governance. Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., has ten key leadership principles that they embrace in their daily endeavors to remain competitive in the turbulent market environment. Leadership principles at Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. are:
- Good leadership: the company provides leadership by example
- Change: they understand change and are never resist to any changes but embrace change in good manner.
- Accessibility: at Ethan Allen Interiors Inc, there is a well established recognition of other people’s contribution in the company as well as good support to all the industry players.
- Speed: timely response to new technology and opportunities is a more respected in the company.
- Client Focus: customers are the most respected in this company. The company strives in an exemplary way to ensure that they prioritize the needs of the customer.
- Hard Work: there is hard work in this company, and in its daily operations there is consistency in the companies’ operations
- Excellence + Innovation: at Ethan Allen Interiors Inc, there is always passion for excellence and extreme acceptance of the new technological innovation.
- Priorities: in this aspect, the company weighs its options of weighty issues, and not big issues in the company. There is community involvement; this is seen when Farooq Kathwari the CEO of the company sets example at a community leadership activities, he advices the local leaders in the community.
Recommendations
According to Kotter (1996), leaders in different organizations need to enhance their capability of good communication within and across the company in good way that brings peace and order. With well stated Vision of a company, there would be environment of excellence operations and opportunity of good learning. Leaders of the organizations should communicate the desired vision not what they want done their way. If it happens their way, there would be dictatorship in the vision. There need to be shared vision that is clear and achievable that everybody works towards (p. 89)
Some of the ideal concepts that leaders of organizations should posses/ follow in pursuit of communicating the companies’ visions that I would recommend a company to pursue are:
- Team Learning
This is the process of modifying the existing knowledge, values, and skills. When there is good learning in an organization, people would know the procedures which brings good results to organizations and growth in understanding. In learning there need to be a good dialogue and consensus hence an environment of good operations. The aspect of team leadership is seen at Ethan Allen Interiors Inc, where the company provides leadership by example (Senge 1994, pp 297-328).
- Creating an atmosphere and context for change
Leaders should front for change on the way the employees approach their work, there is always change that occur in companies. At Ethan Allen Interiors Inc, they understand change and are never resist to any change. This is one of the greatest policies in the company. Leaders should encourage this atmosphere so that employees can trust in their work as they learn and embrace new skills, contents, way of thinking, technology and put them to use. To perfectly understand this process, leaders should ensure that training is well done, encouraging staff to involve themselves in decision making, in this way, they would voice their concerns and would not resist to changes (Collins 200, pp. 67-100).
- Developing and communicating a shared vision for change
To improve on reforms of a company, there is need for a leader to create and share with the employees at large a vision on how the company strategies will be. Every employee need to know the importance of sharing a vision, for this will bring about common focus in the company. For the leaders to develop a communicating shared vision, all players in the company should be involved. The employees need to have a shared image of how the vision should be and constant references to the vision throughout the company using every opportunity available to refer to the vision.
- Leaders should act as teachers
Collins (2001) admits that teachers always ensure that students learn the best things. They guide them and help them achieve their goals. Leaders in an organization need to continuously guide the employees by communicating to them the way. As teachers, leaders foster learning to the employees, managing tension that may arise concerning vision. The leaders would invest in professional development and training for the employees, this would be well organized in order to communicate the vision of the organization. When training is done, new skills would be learnt by the employees and vision would be inclusive. When all the aforementioned strategy is ongoing in a company then there would be a better understanding of the vision of the company (pp.67-100)
- Planning and allocation of Resources
Leaders should have a well organized plan that translates the vision of the organization. Without plan, people would be moving to no place at all. When they provide a plan, leaders would provide to both the industry players a clear direction that should be followed. Through good allocation of enough resources, effectiveness would be achieved in the company all training and development and communication of the vision would ensure that the organization is working in effective, efficient and reliable manner. The leaders should monitor and evaluate the progress of the stated plan, and ensure that they are working as planned (Kotter 1996, pp. 67-100).
References
Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap and others don’t. New.York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Kotter, J.P. (1996). Leading change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Senge, P., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R., Smith, B. (1994) The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.