Leadership Skills of Tim Cook

RUNNING HEAD: LEADERSHIP
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Leadership

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Introduction
Leadership is considered as the potential or ability of an individual to influence others
to achieve the goals. Leaders are the ones who develop visions and motivate members of the
organization to achieve those visions (Northouse, 2018). In this essay, in order to understand
the concept of leadership a leader is chosen, which is Tim Cook, current CEO of Apple. In
the below sections leadership traits of Tim cook are explained and impact of a leader’s
accomplishments and life on the society and how his traits and activities influence others are
also described. At last, considering the leadership style of a leader, one trait is identified that
is the best and can be admired in the future.
Tim Cook
Leadership Traits
Tim Cook is an American business executive and is the CEO of Apple since 2011.
Tim cook kept running Apple after the death of Steve Jobs that was unimaginable to think of
Apple without Jobs. But the leadership style of Cook helps to run the company in a
successful way. Tim cook possesses many traits of leaders that help him to take Apple to
next level such as the ability to take risks, the leader's life is not as easy because leaders have
to make difficult decisions by considering the lives of others. Tim cook knows the
importance of taking the risk and take risks in order to succeed that leads him to a successful
leader. He believes that the confidence in taking a calculative risk is necessary in order to
have the support of people (Kahney,2019).
Cook has the ability to trust others and delegate responsibilities to them in order to
gain the support of others. Tim Cook always trusts others and listens to their voices as he

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believes that the support of the people around them is important. He feels fortunate to have
experienced people around who help him to share the workload and he allows them to take
lead and contribute more in the business with innovative ideas. The main aspect of being a
successful leader is understanding that everything cannot be handled by an individual and
delegating workload will help to become a successful leader.
Tim Cook focuses on promoting diversity as Apple is an organization that is based on
innovation and requires high skills and a different mindset. The CEO understands this and
promotes diversity and Cook tries to bring the best of the abilities of different individuals in
Apple. Strong leaders are those who accept their mistake when they are wrong, Cook has a
trait of admitting his mistakes and ability to take responsibility for decisions that go wrong in
an organization. Another trait that is reflected in Tim Cook is believing in “what you are
doing and take actions that reflect”, Cook as a great leader always trust its decisions and his
actions always reflect. For instance; when the stock prices of Apple were tanking, Cook
decided to forfeit his one-third of stock compensation worth $130 million to stabilize the
stock performance in the market (Dhiman, 2018). Hence, Cook always chose to lead by
example and reflects all this in its decision and actions.
Leader’s Influence
The influence of Tim Cook's leadership style seen in society and employees of
Apple. The company under the leadership of Cook offers innovative products and remain at
the top in market capitalization. Further, Tim cook is a social person that contributes more to
the development of society. The way Cook shows respect and dignity towards its employees
changed mindset of many business executives and in order to bring awareness about this
aspect, Tim Cook took a seminar on how to interact with people and show dignity and respect
to them that changes a lot many things at the corporate level and personal level (Kao,2018).

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On the other side, Tim Cook's biggest contribution to mankind as he has plans to
bring innovation that contributes to healthcare such as augmented reality, consumer health
tech products, and driverless cars. The leadership style of Tim Cook is contributing to society
and influencing others in a positive manner as his traits like being humble, creativeness, and
respecting society and people show in his actions. Employees of Apple are satisfied and top-
level executives of the company are supporting Tim Cook because of its leadership traits and
influence on the consumer electronics industry and on the lives of people (Heracleous &
Papachroni, 2016).
Quotes by Tim Cook
“It’s about finding your values, and committing to them. It’s about finding your North Star.
It’s about making choices. Some are easy. Some are hard. And some will make you question
everything”. Tim Cook.
“The philosophy has always been to be the best not the first.” Tim Cook.
Traits that I admire
The main trait of a successful leader is to take risks as the one who has the ability
to take risks and believe in themself will be successful. As in business risk and return work
together as higher risk, higher return. Risk-taking is considered an essential part of leadership
and is important for the effectiveness of leaders (Eisner, 2016). If leaders don’t take the risk
there will be no followers or people who get motivated and influenced by leader actions. So,
in order to be a successful leader, it is essential that a leader should have the ability to take
the risk and to take responsibility for its actions.
Tim Cook is a remarkable leader with strong leadership traits and from that one of
the important traits is risk-taking. I admire this trait of Cook and would like to implement in

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my life as the ability to take risks leads to big results and extraordinary achievements in life.
In order to develop my ability to taking the risk, I will adopt an experimental model in which
I will try things that fear me as fear of failure is the biggest barrier in the ability to take a risk.
I will evaluate my progress on a monthly basis and encourage myself to acknowledge failure
quickly and courageously.
Conclusion
It is concluded from the analysis of leadership traits of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple that
he is a successful leader because of his traits such as the ability to take risks, innovativeness,
humble behavior, respecting others, and delegating power to others. Further, Tim Cook
contributed to healthcare and for the development of society to a greater extent. At last, I
admire his risk-taking trait the most and will inculcate this practice in my behavior.

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References
Dhiman, S. (2018). Self-leadership: Journey from position-power to self-power. In Engaged
Leadership (pp. 21-49). Springer, Cham.
Eisner, S. (2016). The" In-Factor": Signature Traits Of Innovation's Leaders. Journal of
Applied Business Research, 32(1), 185.
Heracleous, L., & Papachroni, A. (2016). Strategic Leadership and Innovation at Apple Inc.
SAGE Publications Ltd.
Kahney, L. (2019). Tim Cook: The Genius who Took Apple to the Next Level. Penguin UK.
Kao, R. (2018). Disruptive Leadership: Apple and the Technology of Caring Deeply--Nine
Keys to Organizational Excellence and Global Impact. Productivity Press.
Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage publications.