Selection of a Leader
The leader that I have chosen is Warren Buffett. “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact” (Warren Buffett biography, 2015, para. 1). Below we will describe Warren Buffet’s several personal and business-related traits, the development of his business abilities, and his formation as a successful businessman in order to establish a link between his personality and enormous success
The Leadership Style of the Warren Buffett
There are several angles of the style of leadership of Warren Buffett from which he could be described. It appears to be that the style of leadership of Warren Buffett represents a sequence of democratic, assistant and self-empowered leadership. Buffett displays a role of a democratic leader, as he is willing to engage himself in the conversation with his workers about the tasks or appointments that are needed to be achieved or performed. The servant leadership is expressed in the empathy of Warren Buffet towards his every worker. As a result, he would rather criticize his employee on the basis of his accomplishments or mistakes than of his or her character and traits. The last but not the least, Warren Buffett is considered to be a self-empowered leader because of his loyalty, planning of the design of actions and committing to his organization. There are lots of methods of motivating and leading the workers; below the listing of personal and business traits, which are peculiar to the Warren Buffett and form his style of leadership, will be conducted.
General Personality Traits
The unique combination of various personal traits and features of character allowed Warren Buffett to reach unprecedented heights. A review of these exceptional attributes that were necessary in order to create a flawless attitude towards money-making will be provided below.
Self-confidence. Buffett has a saying about public assessments and that they are not able to replace the actual thoughts of a person. “While a struggle for independent thought is a significant dimension of ordinary life in a shared world where there is a constant pull to adapt, it rockets into a different league entirely when one attempts to do this in an investment environment” (Revealing seven personality traits, 2015, para. 5).
Humility. Being humble means that a person is able to keep the impulses from nourishing into a possible pleasant situation under control. According to Nic Liberman (2014), “ultimately, Warren Buffett is a collector, not a stamp collector or a coin collector, but a collector of money. He seems to love it in much the same way other collectors treasure their objects and, therefore, having a frugal or restrained attitude toward spending it, allows him to accumulate more of it” (p. 24). Nowadays, among the expanding devouring and an ambition to obtain as much as possible, humility appears to be an uncommon integrity.
Core self-evaluations. As Churchill once said, achievements represent the transition from defeat to defeat without losing the devotion. Having the strong feeling of moral sense allows people to make vital agreements and empower the ability to overcome their failures at the same time. We could say that Warren Buffett was able to reconsider the mistakes he made and avoided them in the future.
Assertiveness. Warren Buffett expressed assertiveness from his young age when he was already in charge of two small organizations that he had established himself at the age of 13. The first one was as a paperboy, and the other one involved selling horseracing tip papers. When he moved to another town, he refused to put them to stop. As a result, he finished his higher education at the University of Nebraska at the age of 20 with the income of almost 10 thousand dollars that was coming from his adolescence not so little companies. This indicates the confidence of his business abilities and perseverance in achieving his goals.
Sense of humor. Warren Buffett often uses his extraordinary sense of humor in order to stimulate his employees; moreover, it creates a casual atmosphere, which is necessary for efficient work. Moreover, while conducting his annual reports, Warren Buffett always tries to encounter every lucky chance to add assorted humor-related trends in case anyone needs it.
Task-Related Traits
When it comes to business-related traits, I believe that Warren Buffett have all the necessary qualities that would help to develop a business of unprecedented success. These include a passion for his work; self-awareness; an internal position of control within the organization and courage for finding the undervalued companies and reestablishing them for the public.
Passion for the work and the people. From the years of his youth, Warren Buffett had exhibited extraordinary business passion. In order to confirm these words is has to be said that at the age of 26 he had already established Buffett Partnership Ltd; and nearly ten years later Warren gained the authority over Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett appeared to be one of the world’s most wealthy men and an acknowledged benefactor due to his supervising of the rapidly growing empire with ownership in the fields of media, generated power and cooking industries (Zakaria, 2013). While his was still studying at school, he and his friend developed a scheme for making money. It included buying a secondhand pinball machine for the price of only twenty-five dollars. Later, the two friends had the pinball machine set up in a local beauty parlor; several months passed, and the income from the secondhand pinball machine allowed them to purchase five more instruments. By the time Warrant decided to auction the business ad make almost 1,500 dollars on it, he had installed the pinball machines in three assorted areas. (Warren Buffett biography, 2015).
Emotional intelligence. Warren Buffett has always famously instructs to be hesitant while others are rapacious and to be rapacious while others are hesitant. This statement could indicate not only a reliance on rapport but also good knowledge of psychology and inclination towards emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence as well indicates the capability of a person to feel empathy towards the success or failure of other people. The financing decisions of Buffett almost always addressed the organizations and businesses where its leader was expressing angst and anxiety for failure. Moreover, Warren has always said that every agreement regarding purchasing a company was based on the decision to sell on the other side of an arrangement (Mehta, 2012).
Locus of internal control. Locus of control indicates the range to which a person considers himself to be able to administer the occurrences that are affecting him or her. An individual can have external and internal locus of control. The individuals who depend their accomplishments on the basis of their performance and assume they are in charge of their career have an internal locus of control. On the contrary, the individuals who ascribe their failures or achievements to outside impact possess an external locus of control (Locus of control, 2014). Warren Buffett would never blame his failures on other people, as he believed a person is responsible for his own success.
Self-awareness. Warren Buffett as an efficient leader has several motives business. These are leadership motives, power motives, resilience motives and achievement motives. Warren Buffett has always claimed that only the people who are well aware of the consequences of their actions are able to take a chance and risk everything. On the contrary, the best approach towards business is to evaluate every possible outcome of the arrangement, take it slow, and, therefore, diminish the uncertainties and risks. Moreover, Buffett claims that his motto determines that it takes twenty years to develop a good prominence and only a few moments to destroy it. For this reason, he had always chosen a second path for his business decisions (Wright, 2014).
Courage. Within the development of his business, Warren took a tough decision of adjourning his firm Buffett Partnership and aiming his business and organizational efforts towards Berkshire Hathaway. Warren decided to eliminate the textile manufacturing side of the company; alternatively, he started to enlarge the organization by the means of purchasing property in various fields such as media, security and oil. As a result of his courage, the small textile company turned into a successful organization that accomplished converting small investments into gold (Warren Buffett biography, 2015). After making an incredibly fortunate contribution to Coca-Cola, Warren had been appointed as a manager of a company for almost seventeen years.
References
Liberman, N. (2014). Being Warren Buffet: Life lessons from a cheerful billionaire. London, United Kingdom: Hardie Grant Books.
Locus of control: Definition and examples of internal and external. (2013). Web.
Mehta, R. (2012). The Emotionally Intelligent Investor: How self-awareness, empathy and intuition drive performance. Poitiers, France: LES Publishing.
Revealing seven personality traits that have made Warren Buffett a cheerful billionaire. (2015). Web.
Warren Buffett biography. (2015). Web.
Wright, T. (2014). 7 things Warren Buffett can teach you about leadership. Web.
Zakaria, N. (2013). Creating cross-culturally competent leaders for global teams. Interdisciplinary Research 3(2), 19-33.