Leadership Qualities of Satya Nadella

Running Head: LEADERSHIP QUALITIES OF SATYA NADELLA
LEADERSHIP QUALITIES OF SATYA NADELLA
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

LEADERSHIP QUALITIES OF SATYA NADELLA
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Introduction:
The main aim of this study is to briefly describe the leadership aspects of Satya
Nadella. Therefore, the study will be focussed on his background as a Chief Executive
Officer of Microsoft, starting from his education, work history, industry involvement as a
leader. In order to describe all his leadership aspects, the study will put forward with an
approach to leadership backed up with two examples of his leadership strategies taken in the
past, the key challenges he faced during his involvement in the industry and how he solved
those problems as well as how that problems could have been solved in a different way.
Lastly, the discussion will be concluding with a reflection regarding the research, about what
I learnt about leadership from his strategies.
Background of Work:
Satya Nadella now serves the position of Chief Executive Officer in Microsoft from
February, 2014 (Microsoft.com 2019). In the year 2014, Microsoft was experiencing
disastrous feedback from its business segment regarding the launch of Microsoft Windows 8.
After he succeeded the role of CEO, in 2016 Microsoft again found its way back to the
position in the market of software and services. That proves the change of leadership is
necessary and can be very effective for the development of an organization.
Nadella, before becoming the CEO of Microsoft started his organizational journey
working with Sun Microsystems as a technology staff member in the year 1992. Later, he
joined Microsoft and led many projects related to cloud computing, and helped to develop
one of the biggest cloud computing & storage infrastructure in the world. Then, he served the
position of senior vice-president of Research & Development and later as vice-president of
Microsoft Business Division.

LEADERSHIP QUALITIES OF SATYA NADELLA
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Nadella did his schooling in Hyderabad Public School, Bachelor’s degree in Electrical
Engineering in Manipal Institute of Technology. Later, he went United States for studying
Master’s in Computer Science in the University of Wisconsim-Milwaukee, also he did MBA
from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Nadella after appearing as the new CEO Of Microsoft Corporation made some very
serious changes in the strategies. He made a point on making technologies and the services to
make priority the cloud and mobile first (Westerman, Soule and Eswaran 2019). Microsoft’s
stock prices in the market were tripled in just four years, by some of his bold decisions like
moving the company from making phone hardware and developing operating systems,
centring Microsoft’s business around subscription based products to make a sustainable
recurring revenue.
Approach to Leadership:
Satya Nadella believes in Positive Leadership style. Therefore, he wants to make the
workplace of his organization more enthusiastic by developing the growth mind-set and the
empathy (Patel 2017). The leadership style of him is to influence the employees of the
organization, and to make a robust workplace culture to make the employees under the
umbrella of the organization by motivating each other in achieving the same goal.
Nadella appeared as the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, when Microsoft was facing falling
market shares in its stock market. Whereas, Google and Apple was unveiling new
technologies related to mobiles which was affecting the shares of computing technologies
(Burnett et al. 2017). Microsoft was not losing money by any means, but company was facing
challenges in driving market shares and retaining the brand value built in past three decades.
In his ideology, he believes in changing with time and needs of the consumers. His mind-set
is to build a framework that relies on Positive Leadership (Ibarra, Rattan and Johnston 2018).