MGT3LWM: Leadership Analysis of Bill Gates, Challenges and Suggestions

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of Bill Gates' leadership style, focusing on his transformational approach and its impact. It begins with an overview of Gates' background, highlighting his role as the founder of Microsoft and his subsequent philanthropic endeavors. The essay then delves into his leadership style, emphasizing his ability to inspire and motivate employees, and provides evidence supporting the classification of his leadership as transformational. Furthermore, it identifies and discusses two significant challenges Gates has faced throughout his career, such as building the right team and hiring the right talent. The essay also offers suggestions for improving his leadership, addressing criticisms related to his communication style and conflict avoidance. Finally, the essay concludes with a summary of the key findings and reflects on the lessons learned about leadership from studying Bill Gates, emphasizing his expertise and visionary qualities, while acknowledging his weaknesses. This essay aims to provide insights into the complexities of leadership through the example of Bill Gates.

Running Head: LEADERSHIP
Leadership
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Overview of the leader’s background..............................................................................................2
Explanation of the leadership style..................................................................................................3
Two challenges Bill Gates has faced...............................................................................................4
Suggestions for improvement..........................................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................5
Reference.........................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Leadership is the process through which a business representative can guide, direct and
influence the behaviour along with the work of other people to accomplish specific goals in a
particular situation. It is also the ability of the managers to encourage the subordinates in
working with diverse situation with proper zeal. It can be also said that it is the potential for
influencing the behaviour of other people. It further denotes that there are few qualities, which
must be present in the maturity, intelligence and personality of a leader. The present essay will
select Bill Gates as the leadership persona and provide an overview of the leader’ background. It
will further explain the leadership style of the leader having described two of the leadership
challenges they have faced (Banks et al. 2016). The essay will also provide suggestions to
improve the leadership of the leader. Lastly, the essay will conclude with giving an outline of
what I have learned about leadership from studying about this leader. This leader will be
selected, as he is the topmost billionaire in the world and there is no question on the knowledge
of Bill Gates. He is the CEO of one of the biggest technology brand in the world and there is no
doubt on his leadership skills. He operates with a transformational leadership and inspires others
to work. However, he has faced questions on his style of communication and reputation which is
results-driven. It is also said that he avoids conflicts instead of facing them. This essay will
throw more light on this leader’s leadership style.
Overview of the leader’s background
Bill Gates both an entrepreneur who partnered with Paul Allen for building and founding
the greatest software business of the world, Microsoft through various technological innovation,
aggressive business strategy and tactics. In the entire process, Bill Gates has become one of the
richest men in the whole world. In the year 2014, Gates has announced that he stepped down as
the chairman of Microsoft for focusing on charitable work in his foundation. Later in his life,
after leaving Microsoft, Bill Gates pursued a range of philanthropic endeavours such as donating
a large amount of money to different charitable organizations and the scientific research
programs through Bill & Mahindra Gates Foundation. This is found to be the largest private
charity of the world.

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Explanation of the leadership style
Bill Gates is an extremely interesting study as far as the leadership styles are concerned.
He can be said as the antithesis of what everyone expects from a leader. He pursued a dream
dropping out school and undertook risks founded on the personal knowledge he had and
creativity instead of following the teachings of others. He always exercised transformational
leadership styles. This is because he followed a powerful vision and passion for work he did
always (Dong et al. 2017).His emotions helped him a lot to energize people who followed him.
The transformational leadership style naturally came to him. He also could adopt others styles of
leadership when needed but in most of the times, he adopted this leadership style.
The transformational leadership is a particular leadership style through which the leaders
encourage, motivate and inspire the employee for innovating and creating change. This
leadership style helps in shaping the future success of the organization (Dong et al. 2017). It can
be done through setting up an example of corporate culture, independence of workplace and
employee ownership too. The transformational leaders motivate the workforce without the help
of micromanaging (Crossan, Seijts and Gandz 2015). They believe on the trained employees for
taking authority over decisions in the assigned jobs. It is a specific management style which is
designed for giving the employees more room for becoming creative, look to the future and find
solutions of old problem. The employees also become inspired to adopt the transformational
leadership through training and monitoring too. In this type of leadership, the development of
trust from other followers is extremely important. This leads to respect, as there is proper
evidence of the ideas that are implemented will work actually. There are various reasons behind
categorising the leadership theory of Bill Gates under the transformational leadership:
Focus
Knowledge is quite different from wisdom. Bill Gates is focused on his knowledge on
software and develops the best out of it. He worked so hard for establishing in this industry, kept
execution at the top of all the priorities having stuck with all the skills which are strongest as per
his views.
Big picture

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He always had a practical approach of setting clear goals. He also has the big picture
which he keeps in his mind (Day, Gu and Sammons 2016). He utilizes a step-based approach for
making progression towards the vision he had instead of establishing an unapproachable vision.
Creativity
He never stayed in the zone of comfort and encouraged both himself and the people for
embracing innovation and creativity. The leadership style he has functions for empowering
people having individual perspectives and creates new scopes (Fejerskov 2015). Many people
followed him as he led them transform into powerful leaders in future too.
Caring
Gates has been considered as one of the richest people in the entire world. It should also
be noted that he is the most prolific contributors for the philanthropic reasons in the world. He
has been donating most of his wealth to his foundation (Harman 2016). This caring attitude
inspires his followers and makes him a transformational leader.
Passionate
Bill Gates has out a lot of love into whatever he does. Similar to other transformational
leaders, Gates believes that when something goes wrong, one should try out the best of the
ability.
Two challenges Bill Gates has faced
It is true that no one of perfect in the whole world. Every leader makes mistakes and each
leader has some of the specific weaknesses. These weaknesses have become the reason for the
some challenges he has faced throughput his leadership career. The first challenge he faced is the
challenge of building the right team (Menzel 2015). A team develops with right people and
selection of the right people is extremely crucial and difficult. Without the right people, one
cannot expand the breadth of creativity to fulfil the vision. In order to overcome this challenge,
Gates adopted different approaches and different background which inform how people think
about the solutions (Crossan, Seijts and Gandz 2015). He also tried to maintain the
representations of genders in team, ethnicities and attributes too.

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The second challenge he faced as a leader is in hiring the right talent for the job. In order
to overcome his challenge, Bill Gate focused on hiring for the cognitive diversity and values fit.
He also embraced a homogenous workforce. He looked for the people who have sense of
purpose and values that aligned with that of himself. He focused on hiring someone to could help
in manifesting the vision (Yoffie and Cusumano 2015). Gates identified his weaknesses for
prioritizing and improving the areas. He found the self-awareness to be the key component of
the emotional intelligence.
Suggestions for improvement
Although Bill Gates is considered as one of the most inspiring leaders, there are people
who criticise him for his arrogance and conflict avoiding nature. It is true that becoming a leader
as Bill Gates is not quite easy and there are various risks. There has to be the will to take risks
and have the personal wish to transform the workplace into an innovative safe-have giving
priority to forward progress. It can be suggested to him that he should look into his arrogance
and control thrusting his perceptions on others. This attitude might restrict the scope for
innovation. It might happen especially when there are other ideas to consider.
Another suggestion can be to push people a bit less on fulfilling the goals which is a
characteristic of the transformational leaders. When people are extremely forced, it is obvious
that they would push back. Bill Gates should confront the conflicting situations instead of
avoiding them. This is because the unwillingness to confront the issue can lead to negative
energy and cover the team with its influence. After studying this leader, I have learnt that he is an
expert on is craft that is one of the best traits a leader should have. He also has the experience
and credibility in the management and the business world. He is further a visionary person with
charismatic traits which are evident in this works. However, like every leader, he also has some
weaknesses such as his dominance, his communication style, the result –driven reputation and
the conflict avoiding nature.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that leadership denotes that there are few qualities, which
must be present in the maturity, intelligence and personality of a leader. The present essay has
selected Bill Gates as the leadership persona and provided an overview of the leader’

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background. It has further explained the leadership style of the leader having described two of
the leadership challenges they have faced. It has lastly suggested some aspects for improvement
to the leader too.

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Reference
Banks, G.C., McCauley, K.D., Gardner, W.L. and Guler, C.E., 2016. A meta-analytic review of
authentic and transformational leadership: A test for redundancy. The Leadership
Quarterly, 27(4), pp.634-652.
Crossan, M., Seijts, G. and Gandz, J., 2015. Developing leadership character. Routledge.
Day, C., Gu, Q. and Sammons, P., 2016. The impact of leadership on student outcomes: How
successful school leaders use transformational and instructional strategies to make a
difference. Educational Administration Quarterly, 52(2), pp.221-258.
Dong, Y., Bartol, K.M., Zhang, Z.X. and Li, C., 2017. Enhancing employee creativity via
individual skill development and team knowledge sharing: Influences of dual‐focused
transformational leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(3), pp.439-458.
Fejerskov, A.M., 2015. From unconventional to ordinary? The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and the homogenizing effects of international development cooperation. Journal of
International Development, 27(7), pp.1098-1112.
Halsall, R., 2016. The role of CEO (auto-) biographies in the dissemination of neo-ascetic
leadership styles. Leadership, 12(5), pp.515-537.
Harman, S., 2016. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and legitimacy in global health
governance. Global Governance, 22, p.349.
Hoch, J.E., Bommer, W.H., Dulebohn, J.H. and Wu, D., 2018. Do ethical, authentic, and servant
leadership explain variance above and beyond transformational leadership? A meta-
analysis. Journal of Management, 44(2), pp.501-529.
Menzel, D.C., 2015. Leadership in Public Administration: Creative and/or Ethical?. Public
Integrity, 17(4), pp.315-318.
Yoffie, D.B. and Cusumano, M.A., 2015. Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill
Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs. Harper Business.