Richard Branson’s Leadership and Its Impact on His Business Success
According to Richard Branson, leadership plays various roles within his organization. As a leader, one should be a team builder. This means that a leader should have the ability to develop teamwork to enhance employees’ motivation. While developing a teamwork consensus, it crucial for a leader to ensure that employees are empowered (HiTec Holdings, 2006).
In this effort, Branson went ahead to develop a working environment that would enable people to have fun through teamwork culture hence boosting the morale of work. Richard Branson believes that a leader, being a team builder, should create teams or develop a cultural trend in an organization that will be suitable for all employees through reduction of disagreements.
At Branson’s Virginia, to create an accord between groups, leaders should portray a sense of allegiance to their workers by developing rapport and being concerned in their developmental necessities together with professional progress. Leaders must be ready and open to ideas brought forward by employees. This means then they should have the will to use the power they possess together with the employee to execute innovative ideas brought forwards by the employees
According to Branson, another quality of a leader is being a role model. A role model is someone whose traits or achievements others can admire (Hogan & Hogan, 2008). For instance, a good role model is one with hopeful wishes and confident. Role models possess a number of qualities such as caring for others and setting ample examples to the followers.
They are good at listening to others’ ideas and opinions. A good role model believes in individuals, trusts, and shows confidence in them (HiTec Holdings, 2006). Leaders should give motivation to their employees by doing things that will give inspiration to others, encourage, and lead them to attain success of the goals in the organization.
In such a situation, employees will be willing and eager to do jobs. Borrowing from Richard Branson’s leadership styles, another way for leaders to inspire their employees is by enhancing their confidence and encouraging growth.
How the Unique Aspects of Leadership Style Mesh With Virginia Group
Virginia Group has been described as a fast-growing entrepreneurial company. This growth has been achieved through the deployment of unique strategies of leadership, which mesh the attributes of multifaceted organizations such as the Virginia group. Indeed, Branson’s leadership is unique in several ways.
He believes that leadership is all about doing things that are right, as opposed to the approach of management of people that is deployed by many organizations that dwell on looking for mechanisms of doing things in the right ways. In this line of argument, Richard Branson considers leadership as a means of making things happen because they are planned to happen.
His approach to business is also unique in the sense that he does not fear engaging in any business. Consequently, his leadership models lack aspects of risk management.
Although failing to evaluate the risks associated with his expansive business empire has made Richard Branson successful, it is a great disadvantage since risk management is important in the evaluation of the business decision that may open an organization towards susceptibility to failure in the end. Nevertheless, his charisma and situational leadership approaches make him a respected Briton.
Ways in Which Richard Branson Can Motivate Employees to Achieve Goals
Richard Branson models for leadership seek to keep employees motivated in several ways among them being delegation of responsibilities and adoption of a democratic leadership style. The Virginia Group is well aware that, in case it encounters situations that make people run away, and yet they are well remunerated, there must be an ample reason why this happens.
In such a scenario, the quickest response adopted by the group is to know whether the employees wishing to leave the organization have perceptions of being undervalued. Should this investigation give positive feedback, attempts are made to rekindle the hopes of employees through delegation of responsibilities.
Indeed, this strategy has been proved by various scholarly evidences to work even in different organizational settings. For instance, Hogan and Hogan (2008) argue that, when monetary rewards cease from being sources of motivation, organization consider delegation of responsibilities as a means of keeping employees motivated (p.43).
Richard Branson also believes that giving ample attention to what his people think helps the Virginia group to move to the next business level. People’s opinions are thus given the first priority. This strategy perhaps depicts well the democratic leadership style, which Kedharnath (2011) argues that works well in organizational settings where employees have high skill levels and knowledge.
In such an organization, focusing on directing pushes employees towards perceiving themselves as being underrated in the extent that they are not permitted to make vital decisions for the organization, yet they have the required expertise and knowledge base to do so.
Ability to Articulate and Communicate Vision to Employees and Stakeholders
Communication is a vital ingredient for leaders. It normally involves sending and receiving of messages. Apart from behavioral skills, communication skills constitute one of the attributes that a leader must possess. Communication involves having an eye contact with listeners’ body movements (Hogan & Hogan, 2008).
How people coordinate their body movements while speaking and their facial expression also tell a lot. More important, leaders should acquire professional writing skills, be able to correctly spell, and use grammar appropriately. Good leaders speak eloquently. They have the ability to listen to their employees. Leaders should communicate with people from different cultures. This means that they should be multicultural.
Communication is central to the success of the Virginia Group. Richard knows it too well that a good idea emanates from all people irrespective of their status in the organization. He therefore does not take for granted any idea from employees, business partners, strangers, or even friends. This means that Richard Branson communicates his vision of business to all people in the effort to garner their views. He does this through engaging his employees in direct conversations.
Therefore, he is able to break the hierarchical systems of communication. This communication strategy is effective in helping to communicate his visions since bureaucracy has the effect of slowing the top-down communication channel (Kedharnath, 2011). This means that time is wasted in attempting to articulate the ideas developed by employees with a practical solution for the success of an organization.
Richard Branson’s Leadership Style as a Good Fit for a Manager: Evaluation Criteria
The criteria for evaluation of the effectiveness of Richard Branson’s leadership style need to be based on the existing scholarly finding of the functions of leadership and management in an organization. Armed with this information, it becomes possible to determine whether Richard Branson’s leadership style is a good fit for a manager working for the Virginia Group. With regard to HiTec Holdings (2006), the purpose of leadership in any organization is to avail new ideas and innovations.
It also ensures that people abide by values that encourage growth of an organization through integration of organizational behavior. Essentially, leadership plays four main functions within an organization. These are piloting, direct, scheduling, and managing (Lussier & Achua, 2004).
Based on these criteria and considering how Richard Brinson has managed to build his success in his business empires, it is possible that his leadership style is not a good fit for a manager because the work of management is different from the work of leadership. While managers strive to compel, leaders such as Richard Branson attempt to influence in the effort to make things done his way.
Is Richard Branson a Global Leader?
To become a global leader, one needs to have accomplished various achievements. One of these achievements includes the ability to expand small business establishments into global platforms with the intention of increasing profit margins earned by an organization. In this extent, I agree that Richard Branson is indeed a global leader.
This inference is justified by the actual realization of efforts of expanding the Virginia Group to become a collection of successful business empires ranging from airlines to other service sector businesses, with all of them having a global appeal.
Becoming a global leader also requires one to have highlighted good leadership approaches, which can be used as benchmarks by other organizations. In this end, Richard Branson has managed to embrace incredible motivational skills, which have realized immense increase in productivity of his Virginia Group of businesses.
From this success, it is evident that his strategies of success can be deployed by organizations seeking to gain large growth through the utilization of employees as the source of competitive advantage.
Prediction of Richard Branson’s Success as a Leader Over the Next 5 Years
Based on the current performance of a leader, individuals stand a better chance of predicting the kind of leader one would be in the future. Any organization employing people from diverse backgrounds recognizes the fact that people are the most important assets for attaining success in the long-term. This fact is particularly true when the purpose of leadership serves the functions of taping the potential of various employees to influence the success of an organization.
Such an approach to organizational leadership best explains the approaches deployed by Richard Branson to succeed in the global domain. In fact, he is a transformational leader. Transformational leaders are influential to their followers. Consistently, they seek new ways of ensuring that they are able to achieve more things that would be of benefit to their followers and themselves (Bass & Steidlmeier, 2009, p.183).
Branson constantly looks for such ways and evaluates them critically to determine whether they can help to drive success of his line of business. Since various management scholars have identified such approaches as influential in aiding an organization to remain competitive, it is anticipated that the Virginia Group will continue to succeed in the next five years by growing at a rate of10 percent annually.
Reference List
Bass, B., & Steidlmeier, P. (2009). Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership behavior. The Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 181- 237.
HiTec Holdings. (2006). Profiles of leadership. Web.
Hogan, R., & Hogan, J. (2008). Assessing Leadership: A View from the Dark Side. International Journal of Selection and Development, 9(2), 40-51.
Kedharnath, U. (2011). The influence of leaders’ implicit followership theories on employee outcomes. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 7(5), 1-24.
Lussier, R., & Achua, C. (2004). Leadership Theory, Application, Skill Development. Minnesota, US: Southwestern.