Essay on Google Leadership Style

Google is the preferred search engine all over the world, offering immense information to users. The leaders put their business strategy into maintaining the position by employing differentiated approaches in the competitive world. Leading the pioneering journey with enthusiasm and clarity of purpose, Brin and Larry became influencers in the world after establishing 'Google'. Making extraordinary things happen at Google, the leaders engage with the five practices of exemplary leadership, such as modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart (Posner, 2017).

Google was established in 1998, and the founders, Brin and Page, managed the company until it reached 200 employees and profitability by 2001. The leaders have clear guiding principles and clarified values, distinctly voicing support for their values. They are deeply committed to their beliefs and confident in their abilities to create the future by imagining and enabling possibilities. The leaders possess intimate knowledge of people's dreams, hopes, aspirations, visions, and values. They seek opportunities to innovate, grow, and improve, understanding that innovation and change involve experimentation and taking risks. The leaders overcame risks and failures by conducting many experiments. By being open to all ideas and giving everyone a voice in the decision-making process, employees feel strong, capable, and committed. The leaders encourage team members' capacity to deliver on the promises they make and show appreciation for people's contributions to create a culture of celebrating values and victories. Recognizing contributions can be one-to-one or involve many people. The leaders ensure that employees' behaviors align with corporate values (Posner, 2017).

Schmidt joined Google as CEO from 2001 until 2011 and became the Superman CEO after reaching $1 billion in revenue in six years. He remained one of the most influential tech executives in history. To match his successes, Schmidt attributed his persistence and curiosity as excellent predictors of success in a knowledge economy. The famous 20 percent rule allowed employees to invest their time in becoming innovators during Schmidt's tenure. This policy inspired remarkable successes such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, and AdSense through a combination of internal motivation and curiosity. Being an open-minded leader, Schmidt overcame the generation gap to persuade Googley types to take new courses of action.

Overseeing the company's technical and business strategy, Schmidt’s leadership helped Google grow from a startup to a global enterprise. Creating the organization’s goal as 'Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,' he committed to management principles, attention, and trust as the core business touched on establishing long-term relationships with people.

Google has a sophisticated culture in the workplace, combining six major characteristics such as information systems, people, processes, leadership, rewarding systems, and organizational structure culture (Stimpson and Farquharson 2014). Corporate culture requires attention to both production efficiency and relationships among people in the organization (Bhagat et al. 2012). Google’s corporate culture motivates employees to share information to support innovation, which is crucial for maintaining competitiveness against other technology businesses (Smithson, 2018).

Google's corporate structure includes unique leadership positions such as chief culture officer and chief internet evangelist, who sit on the board of directors. They oversee the flow of instructions and communication through an executive management group, as well as several departments such as Engineering, Products, Legal, Finance, and Sales. Each of these departments is divided into smaller units (Thompson, 2019). The real key to innovative thinking begins with an open mind, and the leaders encourage their employees to recognize that diversity of opinion leads to better thinking, discovery, and outcomes. Working to inspire and engage their employees in adapting their vision into reality, the leaders tend to praise success and drive people. With Googlers' innovations awe-inspiring, 10 percent of their time is dedicated to pursuing any new and innovative idea based on their ideas daily.

“Don’t be evil” has been the formal motto in Google’s code of conduct since 2000 and is best expounded in its corporate values, which have greatly shaped the business ethic of the company and significantly driven its success in the industry. The three corporate values have had a profound effect on the company’s actions and have contributed immensely to its performance.

The Oxygen project is a data-driven method to analyze performance reviews, feedback, and nominations for top managers. The survey builds on the eight characteristics of highly effective Google managers. Google took on the Oxygen Project to measure the abilities of its multicultural managers. The leaders have been developing the corporate culture by motivating employees to share information to support innovation. Its cultural strengths are enhanced through institutional measures such as training and informal approaches such as personalized leadership programs and management support. With the organizational culture improving, the leaders keep encouraging employees to be more creative and innovative in their way of working. The leaders emphasize the importance of openness among the employees. Focusing on achieving excellent results from all areas of Google's business, the leaders create a learning culture in human resource management to foster good leadership and push employees to strive for excellent work through connections. Experiential learning is an effective way of improving employees' knowledge, skills, and abilities, with on-the-job learning and training extended to human resource competencies. This hands-on approach greatly supports becoming experienced leaders based on a culture of trust. Creating a warm work environment where employees engage in open discussion and share ideas, the culture helps Google optimize employee morale and satisfaction (Tran, 2017).

Save your time!
We can take care of your essay

• Proper editing and formatting
• Free revision, title page, and bibliography
• Flexible prices and money-back guarantee

Place Order

Google has achieved remarkable feats by transforming conventions in recruitment and management. People operations are core to Google, being the area that connects and facilitates all other departments. Google applies data collection and analysis to both potential and existing employees, making decisions using statistics and algorithms. The capabilities of IT systems support a more sophisticated and analytical approach to HR. During the recruitment process, Google uses an algorithm to make predictions regarding which candidates have the best chances of succeeding in the role.

The leaders maintain a company culture where employees feel valued. Google managers provide employees with a meaningful purpose when working on their assigned projects.

Google has treated its staff with respect and care, attributing first-hand experience to its company culture and several years of training, personalized development programs, and mentoring programs. Employees are offered valuable opportunities to ask senior management any work-related questions they wish during sessions called TGIF (Matsangou, 2015).

As true leaders, they aim to ensure that employees at Google have great opportunities with a meaningful impact. Creating a learning and development environment can enable them to reach their full potential, attracting the world’s finest talent to Google. Employees are given freedom, a healthy work-life balance, incredible perks, and even the chance to have fun at work.

Schmidt, being a true leader, believes everyone, including himself, is dispensable because ultimately Google is bigger than the individuals who make it. Google is the best network-based organization because everyone constantly shares their best ideas in the organization. The working strategy of Google is based on independent thinking, especially in matters of empowering their employees and encouraging them to come up with innovative ideas and implement them. His leadership style revolves around knowing his employees better and creating new ways to reward and promote his high-performing employees. He makes a list of his best employees based on multiple levels of peer reference and interacts with them to encourage them to implement their innovative ideas without unwanted interference from others. To make the employees the owners of their work, Schmidt provides a very broad definition of the company's goal and leaves the implementation entirely to the employees. In defining the goal, care is taken to highlight the benefits to customers and society at large rather than to the company.

Schmidt called for managers to hire a diverse workforce to encourage entrepreneurial thinking (Chartered Management Institute, 2018). Distributed leadership influenced his tenure as CEO, including associated concepts of delegated, democratic, and dispersed leadership.

Google seeks ways to support the community through projects such as building digital learning platforms like philanthropy. Employees are paid for voluntary work, fostering team spirit, a sense of belonging, and a sense of community, which are the most effective perks in terms of employee retention.

In conclusion, according to the evaluation of HPO factors, Google is aligned with five high-performance factors such as management quality, openness and action orientation, long-term orientation, continuous improvement and renewal, and employee quality. According to Fortune magazine, Google has maintained its rank as No. 1 as the best place to work in the US for the eighth time in 11 years by showcasing leaders' enthusiasm and their team's efforts (Hall, 2017).