Discussion
Discuss about the Leadership Style of Susan Wojcicki.
Born and brought up in California, Susan Wojcicki is one of the greatest business leaders of Silicon Valley. She had been with the Google since 1999 and she took over YouTube as a head since 2014. She had started her career in the marketing field in Intel and soon became the local start up in the employees of Google. After joining Google as the first ever marketing manager, Wojcicki led the early development of various key customer products like Google books and Google images. With working the path up in the organization, Wojcicki became the senior vice president of advertizing and commerce that showed her leadership quality in the analytic initiative and advertizing such as Google Analytics and AdWords. Along with these products Wojcicki also initiated other consumer useful products such as AdSense (Wojcicki et al., 2014). Today, the internet estimates her to be accountable for around 96% of income of Google. Wocicki has also been the primary driving force behind the buy of YouTube by Google in 2006, and she joined YouTube as the CEO in 2014. There is no doubt that she has continued to push the organization for new innovative ideas and became one of the greatest leaders in transporting the online video contents. This essay will focus on the innovative and pioneering ideas by Wojcicki and how she contributes in the success of her company, Google, with her original leadership style.
Wojcicki was the 16th employee of Google and the company actually worked in her garage for the first few months in the beginning. The first ever decision Wojcicki made for the company was to leave the garage behind and move the business to the Mountain View. Susan Wojcicki is mostly known in her genre of expertise because of her innovative concepts for Google. This refers to the philosophy of innovation leadership which is a combination of diverse leadership styles in order to influence the employees to generate the creative services and products for the consumer market. Primarily, the innovative leader takes the most important role in practicing the innovation leadership. As the effective approach to the development of the organization, innovation leadership supports the mission and vision of the organization; here her innovations made Google more consumers friendly and an inseparable part of the lives of consumers (Touveneau et al., 2013). For organizations like Google, it is quite significant to have innovative ideas in order to ensure that they stay competitive and continued their journey of success. This theory of innovation leadership was developed by DR, David Gliddon by his competency model of innovation.
Innovative Concepts by Susan Wojcicki
In her years in the company, Wojcicki has worked as the driving force in most of the signature initiatives of Google, such as AdSense which is responsible in placing the advertisements on the other blogs and websites. Also most of the doodles which distinguish the home page of Google were developed by Wojcicki. The understanding of innovation leadership includes three various dynamic stages such as generation of the idea, evaluation and implementation. The innovation here also involves two different types of innovation such as value added innovation which refers to the modification and improvement of the existing ideas; and the exploratory innovation which refers to the generation of new ideas in the organization. Exploratory innovation refers to generating novel strategies and ideas using the open behaviors that most often done by the transformational leaders (Clarke, 2013). The foundation of this concept of innovation is generally characterized by the searching of new ideas, experiment and taking the risk. The leader should be focused on the generation of new ideas which is directly contrasted to the exploitative innovation that focuses on enriching the existing ideas. The major innovation by Wojcicki, AdSense, soon became the second largest source of revenue of the company. The revolutionary idea allows the blogs and other websites to make money by displaying the advertisements by Google on their page. Not only Adsense, Wojcicki also generated the ideas like DoubleClick, Google analytics which contributed a large amount to the success of Google. Her style of innovative leadership has also been every much effective to have a friendly work atmosphere in the organization. Several studies show that the innovative organizational culture works as the mediator of the strong relationship between organizational innovation and employee performance and the transformational leadership. The encouragement of creativity has been very much obvious in this leadership style which helps the employees to work in a stress free environment and also involves the encouragement of generation of new ideas from all the management level and taking risks in implementing them (Nahavandi, 2016). As a leader Wotcicki also believes that the employees should be imaginative and innovative enough to bring new concepts to reality. In her leadership she allows the employees to have the blue sky thinking through providing free times. They have a specific time in the work schedule while their engineers can do whatever they wish for. This feature have shown to have conceived several pioneering ideas during that period.
Innovation Leadership Theory
From her own words about the leadership styles and organizational atmosphere, Wojcicki ensures that she hears ideas from all the levels of employees, also includes the partners of the company and the advertisers. She makes sure that she is also the part of hallway conversations of the Googlers, not merely someone who takes the final decision. The Google Art Project that bought several of museums art works online, and the successful features of AdWords such as Automated Rules are the instances of ideas that have started at the free times of the employees. As the leader and an important part of the management Wojcicki ensures that the employees get sufficient chances of recreation so that they can generate more innovative ideas which are eventually productive for the company. This style of leadership triggers the democratic leadership style that considers the sharing of decision making abilities of the team members by the promotion of several interests of the employees and practicing the social equality. The limitation of democratic participation tends to be restricted by the needs of the organization and the skills and attitudes of the employees. The democratic style includes the idea that everyone in the team should play a significant part in the decisions and innovations done in the team (Pacleb & Bocarnea, 2015). However, this style of leadership requires a strong control and guidance by a leader, which is clearly shown in the leadership style of Susan Wojcicki. She has nurtured a culture that allows innovative ideas from every stage of the management. She has incorporated the attitude of committing to the innovation and the risk factor has been the ultimate constant.
The democratic style of leadership demands the leader to be exactly like this. This style also demands the leader to be honest, inspiring, competent, broad-minded, and courageous and imaginative enough in order to ensure that the ideas are conceived and implemented in a right way. Wojcicki ensures that not only the organization dreams big, but also the beginning should be small. It has been shown in several big organizations an ambitious plan fails miserably due to several complications and discouragements (Rahman, 2016). According to Wojcicki, every plan should have a small beginning, no matter how crazy that seems. She brings an example of the project Google Books that brought millions of books online, however initially the idea seemed absurd to others. The initiator of the concept Larry Page, the founder of Google, worked on the idea and made it possible to bring the books all over the world online. Similarly the project AdSense led by Susan Wojcicki herself, started with an engineer putting advertisements in Gmail. Wojcicki has a leader welcomed the idea while she realized that more sophisticated technologies can be used to make this tiny project a better job and devoted more resources to it. Several researches in the field have indicated that the leadership style is the most effective motivation within the organization. As a leader Wotcicki ensures that she becomes the driving force behind her employees so that they get motivated towards more innovative ideas for the business. It is also a significant characteristic of the democratic leader that he/she encourages the idea of persistent innovation, not the immediate perfection over an idea. When the first version of AdWords was released in the market in 1999, it was not that much successful. However, under the leadership of Wohcicki, he version has been iterated and eventually it has reached the place where it gets the second most revenue earner for Google. It is still improving though, and the company has continued research and development over the past few years. This characteristic of Susan Wojcicki also led to another style of leadership, Transformational.
Democratic Leadership Style
The transformational leadership refers to the idea of having a leader who is not at all limited by the existing perception of the members, rather he/she focuses on working on the upcoming changes and transforms the requirements of the team members and tries to redirect their thinking. The leaders who follow this style of leadership, inspires and challenges their employees for a purpose and also to encourage them for further developments. Transformational leaders create more innovative ideas and try to communicate those ideas within the organization (Buckman et al., 2015). From the time Susan Wojcicki have spent in Google it can be seen that she shares almost everything that is going on in the organization and in the consumer market and the reasons behind her decisions. Google has a policy of sharing the entire Board letter with all their employees and presents the similar slides to the Board of Directors and in the meeting with employees. By sharing of ideas and important information, the leaders encourage the exchange and reinterpretation of the existing ideas and also encourage more creative discussions. This might lead to an innovative and unexpected exchange of ideas from an unexpected source. According to the philosophies of Susan Wojcicki, in order to encourage more innovative outcomes from the employees, she tries to make the employees work in small teams, so that it would be easier for them to communicate with their team mates and other colleagues. For instance it can be said the concept of language translation in Google Talk came from such conversations between two teams who were leading the Google Translate and Google Talk teams. In the transformational leadership, the leader should be an intellectual stimulation to his or her employees so that they get sufficient chance of being imaginative and original ideas come their way (Orphanos & Orr, 2014). It has seen that Wotcicki has never failed to challenge he employees to be creative. The continuous challenge makes the employees perform with a higher degree of perfection and imaginative ideas. The leaders also act as a provider of an appropriate platform to the employees who can apply their unique ideas, passions and different perspectives to create new features. This openness in the leadership style has encouraged the employees to move forward. For example the two most significant projects that are led by Wojcicki AdSense and Google Answers were both unexplored territory in the organization. She made sure that AdSense grow to be the billion dollar business with working on the innovative ideas from all the employees, while the Google Answers failed in the market. However, like an appropriate transformational leader, Wojcicki did a good learning from the failure and tried to make the technologies more advanced by the course of time.
Small Beginnings, Big Dreams
Conclusion
The remarkable humility and warmth of believing an employee gives Wojcicki the extraordinary accomplishments that breaks all the stereotypes associated with the women employees in the world. With her exceptional leadership styles she has made insights on the growth of the business and that candidly reflect on the personal and professional growth of her. Wojcicki, the 30th most powerful woman of the world, still considers the feedback from her employees to be very much crucial in the professional world and believes that especially feedbacks from the seniors should be taken seriously, not because someone is criticizing others’ work, rather it can be helpful for further development.
Reference List and Bibliography
Avolio, B. J., & Yammarino, F. J. (Eds.). (2013). Introduction to, and overview of, transformational and charismatic leadership. In Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead 10th Anniversary Edition (pp. xxvii-xxxiii). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Buckman, B., Crawford, E., LePine, J., & Zhang, Y. (2015). A meta-analytic investigation of job engagement’s role in the transformational leadership–job satisfaction–job performance relationship. In Annual Meeting of the Southern Management Association, SMA 2015.
Clarke, S. (2013). Safety leadership: A meta?analytic review of transformational and transactional leadership styles as antecedents of safety behaviours. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 86(1), 22-4
Du, S., Swaen, V., Lindgreen, A., & Sen, S. (2013). The roles of leadership styles in corporate social responsibility. Journal of business ethics, 114(1), 155-169.
Nahavandi, A. (2016). The Art and Science of Leadership -Global Edition. Pearson.
Orphanos, S., & Orr, M. T. (2014). Learning leadership matters: The influence of innovative school leadership preparation on teachers’ experiences and outcomes. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 42(5), 680-700.
Pacleb, T. G., & Bocarnea, M. C. (2015). The Relationship between Leadership Styles, Leader Communication Style, and Impact on Leader–Member Exchange Relationship within the Banking Sector in the United States. Challenges, Performances and Tendencies in Organisation Management, 275.
Rahman, M. A. (2016). Organization Strategies & Innovative Leadership Management. International Journal of Business and Management, 11(10), 206.
Rao, M. S. (2017). Soft Leadership: An Innovative Leadership Perspective. The Journal of Values-Based Leadership, 10(1), 9.
Touveneau, S., Clack, L., Ginet, C., Stewardson, A., Schindler, M., Bourrier, M., … & Sax, H. (2013). P168: Leadership styles of ward head nurses and implementation success–a qualitative inquiry in the framework of a mixed-method study on hand hygiene promotion through patient involvement. Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control, 2(S1), P168.
Wojcicki, S., Hashim, S., Loiwal, N., & Huang, J. (2014). U.S. Patent No. 8,751,308. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.a
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