Gene One a successful biotech company is planning to increase sales by developing and marketing products that reduce the need for pesticides. The company is focusing on this objective and is in the process of designing an effective IPO. One of the primary concerns is managing change. The company’s goal of introducing breakthrough products call for changes. Leadership plays an important role in achieving success.
Thoughts Regarding the Case
1. The Top Management at Gene One is planning to enter a new arena, but the leadership (the executives and the CEO) are not prepared. There are different issues that have surfaced and the leadership is not able to resolve them. There is also a building tension and conflict between the executives and some of them are not qualified to handle leadership positions.
2. Gene One operates in a highly competitive and fluid industry where creativity, knowledge creation and innovation are important in achieving competitive advantage. The leadership team is made up of different individuals with different skills, knowledge, abilities and experiences. It is important to have a diverse membership in the top management as the company needs people who are creative and talented.
3. The too management needs to change its leadership style in order for the company to succeed. It is evident from the case study that the management employs an authoritative leadership style where in decision making rests only at the top of the organizational hierarchy. This leadership style hinders employee participation and the free flow of creative and innovative ideas.
Analysis of the Remaining Team Member’s Leadership
My analysis of the remaining team members will focus on Charles Jones, who serves as the Marketing Officer for Gene One. Mr. Jones is known for his talent and abilities in marketing. He is considered as a “smart risk taker” and his marketing strategies and advertisement campaigns, so far, have been successful. Because of his works, the company was able to build a reputation as an innovative and technologically advanced organization. Despite Mr. Jones talents and skills, he has a tendency to ignore details as he oftentimes focuses on the big picture. He is also yet to come up with a complete marketing infrastructure of the company.
The Marketing department is very essential in the company’s goal of developing an IPO and propelling growth. In order to maintain its position in the marketplace and to reach its target markets, Mr. Jones, together with his team needs to come up with a string marketing and advertising strategy. Since the company will have new offerings for the market and since its goal is to reach a wider market, Mr. Jones and his team must first focus on gaining competitive advantage over Gene One’s competitors and the company’s positioning strategy.
1. Gaining Competitive Advantage through Product Leadership – Mr. Jones and his team can emphasize the company’s reputation for developing products that are innovative. Product leadership implies being the first to present the latest technology or the bets new product to the marketplace. Product leadership companies have core business processes that nurture ideas, translate them into products, and market them skillfully. They have a structure that acts in an organic way; management systems that reward individuals’ innovative capacity and new product success; and a culture that experiments and thinks “out-of-the-box”.
2. Competition-Based Positioning: Differentiation – Mr. Jones and his team must come up with an effective positioning strategy. One recommended positioning strategy is .point-of-difference’. A starting point in developing a point-of-difference is to identify accepted consumer beliefs. The strongest positions are ones in which a brand has a clear point-of-difference on a benefit that prompts category use. Differentiation is the act of designing a set of meaningful differences to distinguish the company’s offering from competitor’s offerings. The five dimensions of Differentiation are:
- Product – physical products vary in their potential for differentiation.
- Services – when the physical product cannot be differentiated easily, the key to competitive success nay lie in adding valued services and improving quality.
- Personnel – companies can gain a strong competitive advantage through having better-trained people.
- Channel – companies can achieve competitive advantage through the way they design their distribution channels’ coverage, expertise, and performance.
- Image – buyers respond differently to company and brand images. Identity comprises the ways that a company aims to identify or position itself or its products, whereas image is the way the public perceives the company or its products
Recommended Leadership Structure
The leadership structure which is suited for the change process of Gene One is Kotter’s 8 Step Model. The model includes the following steps.
1. Create Urgency – The manager must create a sense of urgency and appeal to employees’ self-interests by clearly explaining that their future well-being is at stake.
2. Form a Powerful Coalition – The transformational leader must turn employee compliance to commitment.
3. Create a Vision for Change – It is important to engage every member of the organization to make the planned change successful. Uniting the entire organization behind a central vision is important to the success of the planned change.
4. Communicate the Vision – The vision should reflect the philosophy and values of the organization and should help it to articulate what it hopes to become. A successful vision aims to guide behavior and to aid an organization to achieve goals. Real Communication requires a dialogue among the different change roles. By listening and responding to concerns, resistance and feedback from all levels, implementers gain a broader understanding of what the change means to different parts of the organization and how it will affect them.
5. Remove Obstacles – The manager must review the company’s structure, job descriptions, and performance and compensation systems to ensure that they are aligned with the vision.
6. Create Short-Term Wins – Communicate the short-term results of the change initiative to motivate everyone in the organization.
7. Build on the Change – Assess the change initiatives – the strengths and weaknesses based on the short terms results. Set goals to continue the success of the short-term change initiative.
8. Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture – Throughout the pursuit of change, managers and leaders should make it a top priority to prove their commitment to the transformation process, to reward risk taking and to incorporate new behaviors into the day-to-day operations of the organization. By reinforcing the new culture, they affirm its importance and hasten its acceptance.
Kotter’s model is about transformational leadership. The focus of transformational leadership are the people and their relationships. Transformational leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.
The Roles of the Leader in Initiating and Leading Change
The success of an organizational change rests in the hands of the leader. People in the organization look up to the change leader and expects him to plan, to communicate, to implement and to guide in order for the change initiative to be successful. There are different roles and responsibilities that the leader must take (Gilley 2005).
Visionary
Leaders create and share visions. They make their visions the visions of the people that they lead. One responsibility of a leader is the challenge the status quo. Leaders look of opportunities and for challenges. They actively search for ways to change. The status quo represents complacency, mediocrity, and eventual decline – conditions that are unacceptable to most leaders. Leaders as visionaries imagine the future. Leaders have the ability to craft a mental picture of a state that does not exist yet. A vision of change portrays a vivid picture of the future. Leaders also develop a stewardship philosophy within the organization. True leaders put the welfare of their organizations and their members above their own. Lastly, as visionaries, leaders align the change with organizational vision, mission, strategy, and individual goals. Organizational vision should drive mission, which should drive strategy, which should drive division and individual goals. Thus, the appropriate change initiatives support goals, strategy, mission and vision (Gilley 2005). Leadership during change also entails that the leader identify innovative and creative ideas from the people in the organization. An effective leaders always finds a way to change how things are done or develop the organization’s products and services (Adair 2004).
Inspirer
One of the most commonly cited traits of leaders is their ability to inspire others. Change leaders motivate and energize their constituents by meeting their needs – making the change personally beneficial in some meaningful way. Leaders sell change. Actively selling change involves identifying specific benefits valuable to each employee while concurrently minimizing potential losses or risks. Leaders also involve others in the change process. Involving employees at all levels of the organization proves powerfully motivating. Joint diagnosis of problems, potential solutions, and opportunities enables individuals to feel ownership of the change along with feeling like worthy contributors to an important effort. Successful leaders live and model the change – they not only talk about the change, they can enact it. They are the first to modify their behaviors, practice new ways, and advocate the benefits of change (Gilley 2005).
Supporter
Enabling change involves communicating often, providing adequate resources and training, anticipating a learning curve, allowing for mistakes, rewarding individual and group change efforts, continually monitoring the process and its progress, making adjustments to the change effort as necessary, and celebrating milestones. Change leaders create a culture of change. Organizational culture reflects the shared beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors acquired over time by members of the firm. Involving others – treating them like partners – conveys the sense that ‘our success depends on this change’. Change leaders understand that individuals support what they help create. Since change involves engaging in something new, encouraging entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation proves logical. In the supporter role, change leaders perfect the art of communication by interacting with employees at all levels and meeting their information and feedback needs (Williams 2005).
Problem Solver
Effective change leaders analyze the situation and identify the problems. They also create creative solutions for those problems. Change leaders rely on their own investigation as well as their network of connected organizational members for data, insights, and feedback regarding the state of the environment surrounding the change (Williams 2005).
Change Manager
Change management, by virtue of its complex nature, must be carefully monitored, lest the initiative get out of control. The traditional definition of management is planning, directing, organizing and controlling (Gilley 2005).
The company is now in the process of creating an IPO, a big leap for the company that if done successfully will propel its growth and increase its earnings. However, the top management needs to commit itself to the change process. The change process requires restructuring of the company’s strategies, processes, operation, leadership, and employment practices. There are different areas that the company needs to focus on.
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