Introduction
The concept of leadership can be broadly defined as the intrinsic ability to internalize a setting with the intention of empowering a group or team to proactively and creatively contribute towards problem-solving.
On the other hand, management, in the broad spectrum, can be defined as the process in an organization that is inclusive of setting, strategic planning, managing resources and deploying the needed resources to realize specific objectives that are measurable within a specified period.
Thus, this analytical paper attempts to explicitly analyze the concepts of leadership in terms of its application, scope, and features in the management styles.
Specifically, the treatise adopts reflective research in exploring the components of leadership and management such as transformational leadership and organizational realities in the management style of Jack Welch who spurred growth in the General Electric Company as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Leader Jack Welch
Jack Welch was the General Electric’s CEO from the year 1980 to 2000 where he facilitated the growth of the company from annual revenue of $26.8 billion to $130 billion through the 20 years at the helm of the company’s leadership pyramid. Welch worked in the company for more than 40 years and rose through the ranks over the years to come to the top manager.
Welch developed transformational, situational, and participatory leadership skills in managing operations at the General Electric through life experiences. To promote the ideals of positive responsibility amongst different department, Welch created a good organizational culture by fostering a strong alignment on the set path of achieving goals, missions, and vision.
The main characteristics of Welch’s leadership style include adaptability, empowerment, commitment, contribution, and critical problem-solving skills. The aspect of adaptability influences the adjustments that may be required in exercising influence over a challenge.
Through these adjustments, Welch was in a position to model a unique setting that discerns the wants and desires of the customers. Besides, he inspires self-esteem and confidence among the staff to align their feelings to specific intuition or instinct in his proactive concept.
Jack Welch’s Achievements
Leadership inspires the need to contribute proactively towards the creation of a suitable environment for closing the gap that may exist between a challenge and its solution. Welch used creative leadership, which is a rich recipe for an imaginative response, to stimulate and create a wide chain of adaptation of viable solutions to the demands of General Electric’s clients and employees.
Welch organized the management team of the company into independent units with different performance contracts. Unlike the situation before taking the leadership mantle at the company, Welch was at the forefront of promoting optimal performance through the motivation of the employees in the form of promotions and financial rewards.
Through proactive management, Welch rolled out an organized process within the General Electric business that involved setting, planning, managing customer demands and deploying assets to achieve specific goals and objectives such as offering competitive prices and convenience to customers.
Since management is about reproducing an action plan and implementing the same, Welch developed solutions that addressed the concerns of the company’s diverse customers and employees with different preferences (Huy, 2002). This strategy was successful since Welch inspired trust in the long-range perspective that challenged and concentrated on doing what was right and not ideal for the employees.
Despite task orientation being rated as a high self-leadership assessment strategy, action planning is of importance to create solution-oriented task and strategy implementation secession for quantifying task orientation levels (Huy, 2002).
Welch was a good planner with transformational leadership skills that identified a range of problematic situations individuals faced in their social environment and generated multiple alternative solutions to these problems. He internalized task orientation in practicing a proactive balance in self situational leadership management.
Welch made it his responsibility to establish social welfare amenities for the employees to win their trust and full commitment to his growth strategies at the General Electric Company. Besides, Welch was competent in teamwork and a keen believer in collective responsibility.
His task orientation level is hyperactive since he managed to internalize the need for optimizing output level through pre-planning activities at the company. For instance, Welch managed to organize the company into an optimal performance with proactive production efficiency lines.
The environmental and societal factors that would influence leadership skills at companies of the General Electric magnitude are staff dynamics and creativity promotion.
Welch managed to strike a balance between task orientation and transformational skills to serve competing interests in the relatively changing economic landscape, following the rapid growth of the company through modeling efficiency units in the logistics department (Kouzes and Posner, 2012).
Since leadership inspires the need to contribute proactively towards the creation of a suitable environment for closing the gap that may exist between a challenge and its solution, Welch used creative leadership which is a rich recipe for an imaginative response to stimulate the different maturity stages of the General Electric Company.
Interestingly, he managed to achieve a record growth within the twenty years of his leadership as the CEO of the company.
Self-initiative in situational leadership plays a significant role in setting up the leadership environment for situational occurrence management from external factors. This self-guided approach is based on collaborative procedures that involve designing specific leadership experiences to organize situational management goals on how to monitor automatic response (Rath and Conchie, 2008).
It recognizes the relationship between these responses and cognition ways to test the validity of the relationships. Besides, it provides measures to apply to substitute distorted thoughts with more realistic situational redress.
Several structural and social transformations in the General Electric Company are associated with Welch’s management principles. For instance, the complete transformation of the previous red tape and excessive formal way of operations into an informal and proactive learning environment occurred during Welch’s reign as the company’s CEO.
Conclusion
Conclusively, leadership development focuses on how individuals think about themselves and activities that affect these thoughts and feelings in an organizational environment, especially during selection, perfection, and persuasion procedures. Therefore, it is critical to analyze the concept of leadership in management to understand the unique features that are independent of each other and have the same scope.
Welch successful applied these concepts to develop a successful business out of the previously bureaucratic and underperforming General Electric Company. Welch has been successful in applying the three types of leadership styles involving a realization that a challenge exists, the transformation of this challenge into a development goal after which implementation step concludes by developing a solution to the challenge.
Due to his transformational leadership skills, the General Electric Company has remained one of the most dynamic and profitable organization in the twenty-first century.
References
Huy, Q. N. (2002). Emotional filtering in strategic change. Academy of Management Proceedings, 6 (1), 43-78.
Kouzes, J. & Posner, B. (2012). The leadership challenge. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 9780470651728.
Rath, T. & Conchie, B. (2008). Strengths based leadership. New York, NY: Gallup Press. ISBN: 9781595620255.