Naomi Simson's Leadership: Skills, Challenges, and Approaches

This essay evaluates the leadership skills and techniques of Naomi Simson, a renowned Australian business leader and founder of Red Balloon. It provides a brief background of Simson, highlighting her achievements as an entrepreneur, blogger, and author. The essay discusses the critical challenges ...Read More

Running head: LEADERSHIP IN BUSINESS
LEADERSHIP IN BUSINESS
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All successful organizations as well as business enterprises need effective leaders in order
to enhance their business growth. The leadership of efficient and proficient leaders is paramount
in providing immense efficacy upon the goal of the organization’s success. The act of leaders
have been regarded as invaluable in the process of formulating and communicating new and
unique strategic directions along with developing discourse and encouraging employees in order
to increase the rate motivation within the employees to enhance the commitment to
organizational goals. Leadership is further regarded as an essential factor that enhances the rate
of effective team association, thus lack of efficient leadership would result to the inefficiency of
other business resources (Yukl 2013). The essay will explicitly evaluate the leadership skills and
techniques of one of the renowned Australian business leaders, Naomi Simson. In addition to this
the paper will provide a brief of the leader’s background along with the critical challenges she
has encountered while leading her organization and the approaches which has been followed to
mitigate such challenges.
Naomi Simson, born in the year 1964 is recognized as a prominent entrepreneur and
blogger in Australia and has gained significant degree of acknowledgment for her role as a
founding director of Red Balloon (Naomi Simson 2018). In addition to this, as a writer Simson
has gained immense recognition through three of her renowned books namely, Live What You
Love, I Want What She's Having and Ready to Soar. Furthermore, she has attained a position
among the top 30 tech influencers on Twitter by the famous American financial and business
news website, The Business Insider (Naomi Simson 2018). With her immense knowledge and
experience in the domain of marketing, Simson had intrinsic association with some of the
renowned organizations such as IBM, KPMG, Apple Computer Australia and Ansett Australia.
However, in 2001 Simson established Red Balloon which is an online experience gift retailer

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organization based in Australia and has been regarded as one of the pioneers in the domain of
experimental gifting in countries such as Australia and New Zealand (Redballoon.com.au 2018).
It has been noted that Simson was the CEO of Red Balloon until she resigned from her role in
operations. The organization has witnessed certain significant transitions in the following years
whereby it was introduced as an unaccompanied small business reward platform in 2016
(Redballoon.com.au 2018). Furthermore, the then CEO of Red Balloon, Simson formed Big Red
Group, which eventually has been recognized as a parent company for Red Balloon. Being a
renowned blogger, speaker, director and owner of her own website ‘NaomiSimson.com’, Simson
has been ranked 2nd in the list of Top 15 Business Blogs by SmartCompany.com in 2016. With
her immense knowledge and skills on various arenas, Simson got associated with the council of
Voiceless as a philanthropist in order to develop the expansiveness of her ideas and principles
regarding the need for greater degree of animal protection (Naomi Simson 2018).
Owing to the fact, that Simson has acquired awareness in various domains, she identified
the need for finding and retaining the customers as well as establishing a successful thriving
organization in the globalized era further gaining competitive advantages in the market
(Frankenberger, Weiblen and Gassmann 2013). The effective leadership of Simson lied on the
competence to cope with the rapid transitions in the business which is imperative in order to
survive in the market. As per her opinion, the modern consumer base demand for an immediate
access towards every service through advanced technologies (Naomi Simson 2018). As
customers anticipate a mobile-centric approach, promptness and efficacy are considered to be
essential factors towards the mobile customer experience (Yukl 2013). Thus, Simson has been
fundamentally following a customer-centric leadership whereby changing individualistic
perspective and focus to perceive the world from the standpoint of the consumer base is highly

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decisive (Naomi Simson 2018). The former CEO of Red Balloon has developed strategy which
required to involve certain amendments in the behavioural patterns of the consumers and further
takes consistent leadership techniques in developing well-established teams (Frankenberger,
Weiblen and Gassmann 2013). However, Simson stated that the journey to accomplish customer
centricity as a complex and challenging endeavour in establishing a strong foundation for the
future whereby insurers will concentrate on the new and unique set of standards to redefine
associations (Rashid et al. 2013). Modern organizations have been keeping in consideration the
vitality of customer centric leadership which provides the most effective approach to cultivate
intimate and profitable discussion with the customer base of the organizations. Thus such
associations have posed challenges to the competitors to develop insights of the industry.
Customer-centric leadership techniques are regarded as an essential factor for global
business enterprises in order to excel in the marketplace. Organizations in the globalized era
have been undergoing certain critical transitions which are reinforcing a dramatic transformation
in the business model, whereby insurers need to concentrate on the areas of sales growth and
further add value to the end customer (Harvard Business Review 2018). The implementation of
customer-centric leadership will facilitate greater degree of transparency in the sales process as
well as in product design. At this juncture, the significance of customer relationship must be
noted which further facilitates customer-segmentation model which aids in the identification of
the ones in the customer base who possess the highest tendency to purchase thus enhancing
customer contentment in comparison to conventional imprecise ‘product-push’ cross-sell efforts
(Cummings and Worley 2014). Effective customer-centric leadership approaches aim to enhance
the persistency level by eradicating the avenues of reasons concerning the lack of inclination of
customers towards a specific brand. Successful leaders implement predictive models in their

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process of supervision which can target customers based on the probability of lapse and value of
retention. As a result, leaders like Naomi Simson indentified the necessity of utmost precision as
well as transparency by safeguarding the needs and demands of their customers. Insurers who
have been recognized to adhere to the principles of customer-centric leadership approach
perceives such an effective transition towards new regulatory and globalized environment as
effortless and which facilitates the company to be competitively advantageous (Cummings and
Worley 2014). Furthermore, global organizations have identified the understanding of the scale
of complexities and threats as fundamental factors to their journey, thus it is immensely vital for
contemporary business enterprises to be realistic about customer anticipations leading to
effective customer centricity which may regarded as unattainable (Goleman, Boyatzis and
McKee 2013). However, it is significant to note that customer-centric leadership culture at all
levels of the organization enhances the level of customers’ insights which is regarded as an
essential component for the organization’s strategic purpose whereby employees develop
distinctive accountabilities for customers; areas of concern and further determine the issues
through effective decision-making purposes (Yukl 2013).
Development of a culture reflecting customer centricity is reliant on every member of the
organization by embracing the conceptualization that every action possesses the competence to
influence customer experience (Hunter et al. 2013). However, modern theorists have observed
few challenges which leaders like Simson encounter while employing customer-centric
leadership techniques. Firstly, leaders encounter lack of organization-centric induction initiatives
which fail to be followed with a retention and evaluation strategy (Goleman, Boyatzis and
McKee 2013). As successful culture transition is dependent on most effective approach whereby
leaders pay adherence to the transition along with its associated behaviours, it becomes

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immensely crucial for these leaders to instil similar knowledge, proficiencies and behavioural
patterns in the other employees which can further facilitate to effective customer centricity.
Thus, in order to mitigate such complexities, leaders must evaluate the proposed goals and
strategies of every service employee and further aim to standardize customary processes in order
to make enhance the customer-centricity of the organization and create effortless service
operations to the customers (Yukl 2013). Furthermore, rather than focusing on micro-regulation,
customer-centric leaders must shed light on the empowerment of the employee base and offer
adequate avenues to them to find resolutions for the individualistic areas of concern (Hunter et
al. 2013). As these leaders reveal immense efficacy in purposefully leading their businesses, they
must develop a proper understanding of the customer experiences and demands and further align
every single employee of the organization to their customer-centric standards and ideas.
The intrinsic evaluation on customer-centric leadership has aided me to gain insights of
the essential facets and centrality associated with this leadership technique. By assessing Naomi
Simson’s role in Red Balloon, I obtained the understanding that such a leadership approach not
only fosters the system of common values and behaviours but further casts light on employee
activity for an effective enhancement of customer experience. In the process of attaining
knowledge about the leadership approaches I had to gather in-depth ideas of companies and
noticed significant areas of gap pertaining between the employee base and its leaders. Thus it can
be noted that organizations comprising proficient, passionate individuals and focus on
continuous organizational advancement tend to incline towards leadership approaches
concerning customer-centricity. Thus, individuals who appear to be completely competent must
develop customer centric leadership abilities in order to enable sustainable business
development. Therefore, from the above discussion it can be stated that in this globalized era,

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modern business enterprises must encourage the integrated association of customers and
employees and further promote leadership abilities like Naomi Simson to effectively initiate
sustainable business expansion.

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References
Cummings, T.G. and Worley, C.G., 2014. Organization development and change. Cengage
learning.
Frankenberger, K., Weiblen, T. and Gassmann, O., 2013. Network configuration, customer
centricity, and performance of open business models: A solution provider perspective. Industrial
Marketing Management, 42(5), pp.671-682.
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R.E. and McKee, A., 2013. Primal leadership: Unleashing the power of
emotional intelligence. Harvard Business Press.
Harvard Business Review., 2018. Customer-Focused Leadership. [online] Harvard Business
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Hunter, E.M., Neubert, M.J., Perry, S.J., Witt, L.A., Penney, L.M. and Weinberger, E., 2013.
Servant leaders inspire servant followers: Antecedents and outcomes for employees and the
organization. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(2), pp.316-331.
Latham, J.R., 2013. A framework for leading the transformation to performance excellence part
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https://naomisimson.com/ [Accessed 21 Jun. 2018].

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Rashid, M., Abdeljawad, I., Manisah Ngalim, S. and Kabir Hassan, M., 2013. Customer-centric
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Redballoon.com.au., 2018. Naomi Simson - RedBalloon Founder. [online] Redballoon.com.au.
Available at: https://www.redballoon.com.au/naomi-simson [Accessed 21 Jun. 2018].
Redballoon.com.au., 2018. Our Founders. [online] Redballoon.com.au. Available at:
https://www.redballoon.com.au/our-founders [Accessed 21 Jun. 2018].
Yukl, G.A., 2013. Leadership in organizations. Pearson Education India.