Essay on Leadership Qualities of Bill Gates

Introduction

The leader is one of the main key players and holds very important roles in every country or organization to accomplish its goals, mission and vision. Despite the leader holding the power to influence his follower but also have huge responsibility to take up the risk of the nation or organization encountering a challenging situation. According to Kelly (2004), “leadership is the ability to provide direction towards preferred future aspirations and aligns the followers towards goal achievement” Moreover, leadership is termed as “a dynamic interactive process that involves various dimensions, including planning, organizing, directing and controlling. The activities of an organized group can be influenced by a process in which the efforts to achieve the goals and tasks are managed by leadership” (Roussel, Russell & Swansburg, 2006).

The report begins with a brief outline of the chosen leader. Then primarily will focus on a critical analysis of the leader’s development, capabilities, achievements, and communication with key stockholders and also find out of strengths and weaknesses of the leader. Lastly, possible recommendations will be made to the leader to improve his/her leadership.

There are many great leaders who inspired many people around the globe. However, the leader that I came to know when I am young was Bill Gates who is the founder of Microsoft and also became the world's richest man who appears regularly in Forbes. He is one of the great business leaders that inspired many people and also admired business leaders, personally to me. Therefore, this report brings every aspect of being as a leader.

Background

The world's well-known entrepreneur William Henry Gates well known as Bill Gates was born on 28 October 1955, in Seattle, Washington (Becraft, 2014). He dropped out of Harvard because he is afraid to miss out the opportunity to bring the personal computer revolution (Business Inside, 2015). Now He is the principal founder of Microsoft; he is also known as the most influential and richest person in the world. A recent estimate of his wealth is US$ 105.4 billion as of August 2019, which is equivalent to some of the combined GDP of African economies (Forbes, 2019). Moreover, he is the Co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Foundation, Chairman of Branded Entertainment Network, Chairman of TerraPower, CEO of Cascade Investment and technology advisor at Microsoft. In recent years he has retired from working full-time at Microsoft and had instead concentrated on working with his charitable foundation” the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Analysis

Failure is the one that a business should encounter to start the business and to achieve its goals. Bill Gates mainly struggled with self-confidence and feared that his business may fail or go bankrupt in the 1980s before Microsoft has become successful as his core plan is to become a professor in mathematics during his high school (CNBC, 2018). Moreover, he was aware that success cannot be accomplished overnight and requires a lot of hard work. However, while growing up, he was captivated by computers and spent most of his time learning how to program (Paver, 2012). Thereafter, following his passion, he spent coding and writing computer programs from his garage.

According to Day (2010), Gates understood that a leader should not be consistent and must be vigorous in thinking in the business let him endures to put his long hour's hard work in order to recognize the target audience and developed the products that would bring more success to their business even after his setting up Microsoft and tasting was successful at the initial stage. Moreover, he thinks the position of leadership is already maintained; they had to keep persistent in improving to stay ahead of the competition. Therefore, they not only focus on the software packages but also further brought Microsoft Office, web browsers, and other enterprise solutions to their product lines.

Bill Gates Leadership

Bill Gates mainly followed the understanding so-called product line, and accordingly, he brought new product ideas and hence created a successful company.

Apart from being a great leader he also put more effort in philanthropy and humanitarianism, along with his wife Melinda Gates they have initiated and pledged to spend and use the majority of their finances for philanthropic and other charitable causes all over the world. For example, according to Serfontein (2012), they have contributed in tackling global issues such as malaria, cancer, and AIDS. Moreover, they have a goal to eradicate malaria and a well-defined strategy and strategize that which makes him a great leader.

Leadership qualities of Bill Gates

There are various leadership qualities that Bill Gates follows:

The most important quality that the leader must have focus as it remains utmost to keep focused on the goal. A good leader always insists his followers to focus on a specific goal. Likewise, Bill Gates remained focused on the software industry. Although he would have been successful in other industries rather than software but he thinks that is not his goal, however, he continued to software and programming as he knew that it is very fundamental to stick onto one core competence (Serfontein, 2012). As a result, he came up with Microsoft products.

The second significant quality that must have by the leader is clear thinking. According to Hedayati (2014), Bill Gates dreamt big and wants to pursue his goal or vision with strong determination. He always wanted to compete with other big companies and never moves away from his thought. Therefore, he gives clear thought to moving on with his Microsoft software business.

The next is passion, as being a leader because of his passion for learning software and computers has brought him well-known to the world. For example, even today we can see that he is pursuing his passion on creating quality products even after thirty years running of his business which is the utmost strength that he possesses in working towards his company (Cris, 2015). Therefore, he has created singly handily worldwide operating software that none of the other companies could have done.

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According to (Serfontein, 2012), He is also driven to learn new things from everyone thinking that he wants to improve his knowledge and skills that he has. Moreover, Microsoft spends more than five billion of dollars a year on research to produce efficient products (Wilson, 2008). Therefore, he is good at continuous learning in his career and also put his resources on researching in his company.

Bill Gates was never discouraged by his failure where he believes that whatever odds things happen in his business he understood that he should not be disappointed. For example, he has battled the court case for twenty-seven years against him but that challenge did not distract him from following and working his dream, nevertheless, he is successful in making great products (Rampton, 2016). At the end of the day, he was the winner and that’s what makes him a great leader.

Leadership style

Bill Gates has a transformational leadership style and is also a visionary leader who he brought lot of changes that made and transform at Microsoft in the computing industry. The trait theory could use to explain well about leadership style of Gates. The trait approach explained that certain person is born with special traits that make them great leader (Cherry, 2019). For example, some of the traits that Gates has are intelligence, skillfulness, competitiveness, determination, high integrity and sociability.

He is also a Task-oriented leader who he always expects good performance and results from his employees because he believes and considers that the work is more important to achieve the goals of the company rather than giving importance in building the relationship with the employees (leadership and management, 2012).

Bill Gates also demonstrated as Autocratic leadership. Management is centrally monitored and handled by him as he really knows about his work and thus he is the one who take a decision on every major decision in the company. However, initially, he is quite reluctant to delegate work. But later he came to know that delegation is very important and he performed as a skilled managers to a team and thus he delegates his work reff.

Due to his more technical competence than interpersonal skills and with his experiences he has adopted the traits of a transformational leader where he motivates and supports his employees. Moreover, he also influences the employees by rewarding the power and deciding the increments and promotions in the organization. However, in order to monitor the employee activities that perform in the organization, he has established a system that systematically controls through appraisals (Corbridge, 2010).

Bill Gates has never threatened and pressured his employees for his personal gains despite being an autocratic leader; rather he enjoys a high level of Expert Power because of his extensive skill and subject knowledge. He also enjoys a high degree of Referent Power which is a measure of a leader’s personal relationships with other influential and significant leaders (Hanson, 2015). Therefore, employees stay longer tenure at Microsoft Company than most of other companies.

By looking at his leadership style, there are also positives from the particular point of his leadership style that he paid paramount attention to details of the job, which has benefited to build of high effectiveness and efficiency. Because of his delegation and rigorous hiring process in his organization he has made potential to create strong and good future leaders. Moreover, because of his high-level expertise and knowledge, he is able to gain the loyalty and trust of the employees (Murphy, 2018).

Weakness/ criticism

A Bill gate has great leadership qualities, style, and skills. However, many critics have criticized his popularity as a philanthropist and his leadership in his organization. According to Boje and Smith (2010), Gates has been rich twenty years or so before, but he has started to take part or engaged in philanthropy to a later degree where critics said that he could have started it earlier, but he said that giving away money requires much time to think as making money.

Although Bill Gates exhibited with his fascinating traits and transformational leader he failed to keep relationships because he is always much more focused or concentrated on work and less focused on employee welfare, this is another important aspect that a leader should have and there he could have improved in the related field (Babbitt, 2014). Also, due to his aggressive philosophy, when he is out of the life of Microsoft, he had been faced with several legal charges and Microsoft lost numerous cases. Another major criticism that had is Microsoft was not an innovative company because people argued that Bill Gates only updated existing products and had never invented new products (Williams, 2010). And also he was criticized that never allowing building competition but rather focusing on winning where he would buy the competing company at the beginning or would buy all together to ease the competition. This tolerates the operating industry to come up with innovative products. Therefore, he should focus on winning as well as in coming up with innovative products.

Conclusion

The report discusses the leadership analysis of Bill Gates's leadership, the qualities and attributes of leadership, his leadership style, and several weaknesses or criticism with the recommendation from the critics. One of the great leaders is considered when a leader has multiple followers because it is difficult to judge the leader without the followers. In that regard, he is an effective leader as almost to the whole world not only follows him but also consider as one of the greatest business leaders. He is also one of the most influential transformational leaders of the twenty-first century because of his exemplary skills and mindset that he possesses. He is known to be a charismatic and visionary leader as he exactly knew what he wanted to achieve and put his full efforts towards his passion. Therefore, it helps him to be one of the top richest men of the world over thirteen continuous years. He has achieved a high degree of success with his business venture. Currently, he is engaging his mind to philanthropy where he dedicated a lot of his profit or money towards helping the African, Asian and other nation’s economies and now he is reaching hundreds and millions of people through his generosity and that will bring him the success in philanthropy apart from the great leadership qualities he has. When he was seventeen Bill Gates quoted “wanting to rule the world”. Today, I can truly say that Bill Gates is the one person one who has ruled the world.