Leadership Approach – Find a current business event from the Wall Street Journal that represents a leadership challenge. Now, imagine you have been asked to step into the leadership role to manage the challenge.
Discuss the steps you would take in the first 90 days of your leadership. Explain your approach by applying learning from the lectures, videos, and readings this week, as well as any relevant concepts from earlier in the course.
PART A – PLEASE RESPOND TO CLASSMATE DISCUSSION WHETHER YOU AGREE OR NOT & A DETAILED WHY: The article I read is about John Legere leaving Tmobile after the merger. Here we are faced with a change in leadership. I think this will be one of the most impactful first 90 days of leadership of the upcoming year. If I were Mike Sievert and taking over this role managing the combination of Sprint of Tmobile and the merger, I would be terrified. Mike has been the lead for the direction of Tmobile for a long time now (Ives, 1). Now he will take over and be responsible for driving the merger of Tmobile and Sprint employees and assets for the future of Tmobile. This is a great chance to ensure a successful merge and has one of the largest opportunities for failure as well. He will need to focus on branding a simple mission statement and company goal to be shared with all the existing and newly acquired employees.
Jack’s most vital principle of leadership is the mission statement (Welch, 2). Mike will need to ensure the goal is achievable with clearly defined behaviors that will inspire cooperation, success and belonging in all the staff, both Sprint and Tmobile. After crafting that, he will need to find a way to upgrade his teams to inspire them all to work as one unit and build out their customer base and 5G network while integrating the existing 4G and lower networks into one. I am excited to see if he does well or if he falls into one of the seven biggest traps during the first 90 days. If I were Mike, I would ensure all our newly acquired Sprint personal were adjusting to the Tmobile culture first and focus on consistently upgrading my leadership team. I would trust my leadership team and run monthly evaluations with very open candor. I would create very specific performance evaluations with my leadership and apply it across the board for all sectors both existing Tmobile and newly acquired sprint employees. Then those who were not conforming to the new mission state for the company would be managed out. From there, we would focus on how to achieve my goals for the company and take a page from Amazon and instill a highly driven and extremely dedicated staff continuously managing out the bad apples and upgrading the winners. We would need to celebrate the wins and those who are celebrating the new vision of the company. By the end of the first 90 days, we would have our first wave of layoffs completed and our first wave of promotions for our new upgrading leadership team.
PART B – PLEASE RESPOND TO CLASSMATE DISCUSSION WHETHER YOU AGREE OR NOT & A DETAILED WHY: The article that I selected for this discussion examines Targets CEO Brian Cornell and the difficult challenges he faced within the business. Since taking on the role of CEO Cornell has faced a massive data breach, criticism due to a policy which allowed transgender shoppers to use the restrooms of their choice and an exit from Canada. In addition to those challenges Cornell also had to remain competitive against major retailers such as Amazon and Walmart. The company has overcome the challenges that were in place and managed to gain sales for several quarters.
If I were to step into Mr. Cornell’s shoes to deal with those challenges, there are several things that I would do within my 1^st 90 days. I would start with my leadership team to find out how the group worked together and to also address any disfunctions within the group if needed. After learning about the team, I would impose mandatory team building and/or outings to ensure that the issues were address and to also keep the team working together. I would also work with the leadership team to create ideas on how to address our major issues such as competitors, backlash, and data security. Energy is contagious and challenges can often inflict stress on many people. I would make it a priority to exude positive energy to everyone around. I would also make sure that trust is established by being honest and transparent. I would make myself available to my team to ensure that they are supported in what they do. I also think that it is important to keep all employees within the company aware of what is going on (to a certain extent) so I would host monthly meetings and send out week company updates to all staff.
Since the company is facing major competitors such as Amazon and Walmart, I would encourage innovation and give employees the chance to have a voice no matter what level they are at within the business. I think that the best feedback would come from the store employees since they are working with customers one on one and have a better idea about the customers needs, wants, and concerns.