Intro
In order to examine why Marissa Mayer resigned from Yahoo! in 2014, it is important to note the root cause of her ineffective leadership. During her reign at Yahoo!, Mayer made several poor leadership moves in additional to her poor tone as a leader. To fully analyze her missteps as an effective lesson for future leaders, it is valuable to dissect: problem solving tools, workplace conflict, team building, emotional impact on decision making and emotional intelligence. Recommendations will follow the analysis to suggest what might have been more effective strategy with regard to Mayer’s leadership approach.
Background
In an effort to fully understand a leader and his or her tendencies it is very important to study their background.
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Meyer began her reign at Yahoo! with many internal policy changes; even though she has no real leadership training other than the promotions she experienced during her time at Google. To begin, she would not entertain employee complaints unless she received 50 complaints about the same issue. Mayer brought remotely-working team members back into the office to work and banned telecommuting, altogether. During 2013, she adopted a performance review policy at Yahoo! based on bell-curve and those team members who appeared at the bottom of the curve were let go as opposed to being rehabilitated in some capacity. A very costly move for Yahoo! as replacing and training team members is one of the most timely and expensive aspects a company faces. Bad for morale, the bell-curve can create alienation in team members and eventually caused Mayer lawsuit for such practices as they were claimed to violate the California state labor laws. Offered a $23 million compensation package, Mayer resigned from Yahoo! in June of …show more content…
Evaluating team members through a secret measurement system and then laying them off due to their results, Mayer attempted a cover-up. This system creates great resentment, fear and distrust to any leader and organization that conducts business in such a disrespectful manner.
5.) Slow and painful layoffs. When the layoffs that had already happened became publicized, Mayer committed to her team and the public that they were complete. She then proceeded to let more team members go resulting in her dishonesty and a painful process becoming more agonizing for the Yahoo! staff. As a result, the team at Yahoo! would have no reason to ever trust her word again.
6.) Over-diversifying the organization. Mayer accomplished successes at Google through taking the organization in different directions to strengthen the company. Because these moves were successful at Google does not justify the need to repeat the same at Yahoo!. This attempt was not the right recipe for Yahoo! and just added to Mayer’s inability to make strong strategic decisions.
7.) Using irrelevant time-frames. Due to her lack of leadership skills and vision, Mayer forecasted organizational changes to be visible far out into the future in an effort to buy her time. Effective leaders can establish changes and know they will be meaningful as opposed to making promises and
through a public way online, which seemed very unprofessional. I think the outcome of her getting fired
This quote speaks volumes, because so many leaders want change, but they are not willing to change their minds. They only want to change others to fit their mold, rather than leading by example and engaging the people. Maurer shares four biggest mistakes leaders make when it comes to change: Mistake 1: Assume that understanding equals support and commitment. We recently had a church meeting to articulate changes that will affect the church’s future.
Moreover, the Burke-Litwin model associates leadership with the ability to provide direction. This direction can steam from the need of change and can come from anyone in the organization in order to serve the organizational needs. The model lists “vision change; using one’s intuition, influence, persuasive and presentation skills; and rewarding people with personal praise and providing opportunities to learn new skills (Burke, 2014).”
Change is something that is necessary for the survival of a company, but can sometimes be difficult to instate. That is what is discussed in the book A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter. The central theme of this book is leadership, and how it is required to initiate change.
The leadership styles present in the company is very important factor in order for the change to be successful. Chris Peterson exhibits the transformational leadership quality to tackle her new project. She is able to empower members on her cross functional team to collaborate and create a new product to launch to current and perspective clients. This type of leadership is effective as the group members were able to tackle challenging expectations considering the work environment and lack of support from other departments. DSS’s departments follow the team leadership structure. Each department vision is to work on their sole projects only. The department is committed to its work which tends to hinder other projects because of the lack of free flowing communication. The lack of communication between the teams shows poor leadership quality. The chief operating officer is ultimately the source of the lack of communication and direction. DSS Chief Operating Officer Meg Cooke has a laissez-faire leadership style. She gave Peterson authority to lead a project but provided no guidance or direction. She also was not responsive to the needs of the
Cultivating a taste for failure and chaos Schmidt encourages it: “Please fail very quickly—so that you can try again.. he had praised an executive who made a several-million-dollar blunder: “‘I’m so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.’”