Five of Rudd’s Traits
According to Rudd, a leader must possess a variety of qualities that are related directly to the leader’s resourcefulness. For instance, Rudd claims that a good leader must be very analytical, which is an essential quality for the person who is running a company. The specified feature contributes to good leadership greatly, as it allows one to locate new and original avenues for addressing stock problems. Clear thinking also helps in decision making, as it provides an overview of every single opportunity available.
Strong convictions will help a leader build the workplace environment with a set of rigid standards for organisational behaviour and corporate ethics, therefore, preventing the possible instances of fraud. High-performance standards help the company raise the bar among the staff in terms of qualifications and quality of the services and goods delivered. Finally, being a technocrat can be considered a major advantage in the era of information technology, when the proper use of the corresponding tools defines the quality of the company’s performance.
Rudd’s Leadership Style
According to the existing descriptions of Rudd’s approach towards management and the distribution of roles and responsibilities, his leadership style can be defined as a task-oriented one. While previously Rudd clearly tended to focus on the relationship aspect of leadership by creating a very strong image of himself as the head of the company and, therefore, inclining towards developing a charismatic leadership style, his current approach seems to be focused on the staff’s performance. Revolving around the idea of increasing the company’s output and enhancing the performance rates among employees, the approach suggested by Rudd concerns primarily the completion of tasks set by the company managers.
Indeed, a closer look at the approach, which Rudd adopts in order to manage his company will show that an autocratic leadership style is the brand characteristics of his organisation. The decisions that are taken by the staff in most cases, are based solely on the solutions that Rudd makes and are linked to the ultimate goal of performance enhancement that Rudd pursues in his career. In many ways, the concept of task-oriented leadership, which seems to be the basis for Rudd’s approach towards management, is predisposed by the company leader’s background. Facing the necessity to work his way to the top, he seems to have become obsessed with taking every single process within the organisation under his control.
Based on Hersey’s model of situational leadership, the approach towards managing an organisation must be based on the leader’s ability to respond to the changing environment quickly and promote the necessary alterations in the framework of the company’s processes. Primarily, the production process, as well as the processes of information management and communication, deserves to be mentioned. In other words, Hersey model presupposes that a leader must be flexible enough to adjust to the changes in the internal factors.
Seeing that Rudd’s leadership approach, in its turn, can be described as rather stiff, one must admit that Rudd needs to change his style of running a company slightly. However, the above-mentioned resourcefulness keeps Rudd’s leadership style quite close to the principles that Hersey’s model promotes as a desirable approach to running an organisation. Therefore, it can be suggested that Rudd should switch to a less personality-centred approach and focus on the needs of other stakeholders as well, including the company’s staff.