Strategic Leadership: Facebook's Challenges and Agility Analysis

This essay provides a reflective analysis of strategic leadership, focusing on the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. It examines the strategic challenges faced by the company, including technological advancements, market competition, and human resource management, and evaluates the agility of Facebook's leadership in adapting to these challenges. The essay discusses the evolution of Facebook, its ability to overcome obstacles, and its adaptation to market changes. It also delves into the concept of leadership agility, emphasizing the importance of adapting to new trends and maximizing employee potential. The analysis includes a discussion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the need for improved leadership agility, particularly in stakeholder and context setting. The essay concludes with a development plan to enhance leadership agility, including practical details about specific development activities and methods for tracking progress.

Running head: STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP
Strategic Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

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Identification of leadership case study and discussion of its strategic challenges for remaining
‘fit for future purpose’
This essay is a reflective document on the leadership, the strategic challenges it faces in
modern times, the evaluation of its agility, development plan for increasing the leadership agility
and the processes that should be implemented to track the improvements in the leadership. The
case study of leadership of Mark Zuckerberg in his organization Facebook will be discussed and
evaluated in this essay to have a better understanding of the concept of leadership and its aspects
like agility for remaining ‘fit for future purpose’.
Facebook is one of the most successful companies in the new millennium. The vision of a
university student has become a social media company with net worth of more than $15 billion
and almost 2.23 billion active users worldwide. As stated by Lunenburg (2012), Mark
Zuckerberg is an exceptional entrepreneur as well as extraordinary leader, who displayed
transformational leadership skills with attributes like encouraging as well as aggressive for
continuous innovation and business growth. The other styles of leadership, such as, democratic,
autocratic and laissez-faire are also reflected in Zuckerberg’s leadership. Within a few years of
the inception of the company, Facebook under the skilled leadership of Facebook has achieved
exceptional success by overcoming all types of challenges that usually affect the strategy of fit
for future purpose.
The strategic leadership challenges include various types of internal and external issues,
such as, technology, market competition, human resources and many more. As highlighted by
Fred Garcia (2012), the most crucial challenges for leadership in the modern world are the
development of managerial effectiveness, motivating the employees, developing the skills of the

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employees, guiding the employees in case of change management operations, and managing the
internal stakeholders. To elaborate these, it is seen that the leaders in any organization must
develop managerial effectiveness or skills, such as, strategic thinking, time management,
decision making, prioritization and delivery on time etc. to produce the job most efficiently.
Motivating the employees is one of the most crucial responsibilities of the leaders. By applying
various motivational techniques and their charismatic personality the leaders need to inspire the
employees to bring out their maximum potential. The skill development of the employees is
another important challenge for the leaders. They must analyze the training needs of the
employees and arrange the developmental programs accordingly (Howell 2012). This is a
difficult task in a large organization like Facebook with a large number of employees. Team
building is another important challenge as that includes the task of understanding the capabilities
of the employees and assign them to different teams, in which their potential can be fully utilized
for the benefit of the organization. Apart from these, the implementation of the change
management initiatives by convincing the employees, and guiding them through the change
management process are also a challenging task for the leaders (Humphrey 2013).
Holt, Marques and Way (2012) pointed out the following challenges for the organizations
in the future. Creation of a shared purpose, measurement of ROI of the soft skills, identification
and communication of success as well as failures with the fellow employees, trust building and
perspective management are some of the crucial challenges to strategic leadership in the modern
world organization. According to the author, currently all the organizations have millennial
workforce, who have strong opinions or views regarding responsibilities. Thus, the motivational
aspects are also different from them. For example, the top talents of the industry can be
motivated to achieve the organizational goals by creating long term values through a common

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passion, purpose, and shared ideas and thus, the challenge for the leaders lies in communicating
with the millennials in a manner that would also suit theirs (Meola 2016). Secondly, the return of
investment on the leadership developmental programs is calculated through the business
performance and employee retention rate. However, soft skills of the leaders are also important
and which cannot be measured through numbers. According to Rao (2013), the soft skills of the
leaders are beneficial for creating an agile organization, nurture and develop an innovative
company, with positive and supportive work culture. Thus, measuring the soft skills of the
leaders is significant and also a challenge for the organizations in an ever-changing and
unpredictable work scenario. Thirdly, lack of internal or organizational communication is a big
challenge for the leaders, especially in the large organization. To establish a successful and
efficient operation process, every employee should have an idea about what is going on within or
outside the organization. However, in majority of the cases, the communication does not happen,
resulting in grudging employees, who lack job satisfaction and motivation. Communication helps
in creating a bond among the employees and organization, and establishing effective
communication system is a challenge for the leaders (Hackman and Johnson 2013). Moreover,
leaders face the challenge of building trust among the employees about any new venture and
thereby performing perspective management efficiently (Van Wart 2013).
It can be said from the above discussion, that Mark Zuckerberg also faced similar
challenges in the initial days of the organization, when he needed to convince the other
employees about his vision, innovative ideas, ventures and perspectives. To remain fit for the
future, it is highly important for any organization to adapt to the changes and new trends in the
market. Facebook also adapted to the market demands under the foresightedness of Mark

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Zuckerberg, which helped it to win the market by pushing out the other social media platform
(Bowerman and Van Wart 2014).
Evaluation of the agility of Facebook’s current leadership
Agility of leadership refers to the ability of the leaders to adapt to the new changes or
trends in the industry or market and bring out the full potential of the employees to achieve the
organizational goals even in times of changes (Kumar 2015). As highlighted by Carson and
Springer (2012), there is increasing rates of volatility, complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity in
the modern business world, combined with technological advancements, which challenge the
efficiency of the leaders. Continuous digital revolution, expansion of global markets, or
increasing risks of personal and data security, the modern day organizations need continuous
innovations. Thus, it is highly important for a leader to accept any situation in the business and
make changes in the work process or the product or services to address the changes. Hence,
agility is a skill that a successful and wise leader must have. Blanco-Gracia (2018) put forward a
similar view. According to him, the leaders must have the capability of sensing and responding
to the changes in the business environment with planning and the actions, which are focused,
flexible and fast. In other words, the next generation leaders must be agile to handle any kind of
business situation and soar through it to achieve the organizational goals.
Mark Zuckerberg displayed extreme level of agility in his leadership over the years. His
agility towards accepting the market changes and demands have enabled Facebook to become
one of the largest companies in the world, while his competitors did not sustain due to lack of
agility. As highlighted by Allio (2015), Facebook entered the market of social media quite late
and hence, did not have the first mover advantage. All the other platforms, such as, Orkut,

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MySpace, Friendster, all started with a good response and once they captured a good market
share, they were sold to other companies and eventually all shut down due to reasons like
technical difficulties, social collisions, change of business perspectives, rapture of trust between
the users and the site, lack of farsightedness by the leaders, and mostly lack of innovation.
However, Zuckerberg enjoyed the rising market and an advantage of the availability of
broadband and internet participation by a rapidly diverse audience belonging to all age groups,
income groups, with varies tastes and preferences. Along with that, he also showed the steps
such as, controlled growth, and avoided the temptation of selling off the growing company
(Arrfou and Al-Edeinat 2016). The agility of Zuckerberg also allowed many other skilled
engineers to join the company and contribute in its growth through innovative features that
delighted the users and kept them attracted towards the site. Overtime, Facebook also acquired
Instagram and WhatsApp, another two most popular mobile apps used by billions of users
worldwide. This move was meant to increase the market share of Facebook by acquiring the
already established market of these apps. Since, Facebook was already a market leader and a
trusted company, the acquisition of these two platforms did not affect their market share like it
did for other competitors of Facebook.
Kreutzer, Neugebauer and Pattloch (2017) highlighted that Zuckerberg always have had a
participatory approach in managing his employees. The employees are always encouraged for
giving suggestions and feedbacks and debates regarding any new ideas. This approach has
resulted in understanding the market demand in a more effective manner and building
interpersonal relationships successfully within the organizations. Being an agile leader,
Zuckerberg often took new ideas and developed features for Facebook, which is highly
appreciated by the users. He is known for adapting quickly to the critical business situations and

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responding immediately to those, which reflects his skill of agility. As a leader, Zuckerberg did
not impose his control on the employees and that resulted in a motivated and productive
workforce.
However, Facebook was involved in a controversy of data leaking which has become a
big political scandal in the recent past. A report by The Guardian reveled that a British
organization, Cambridge Analytica harvested personal data of almost 50 million users of
Facebook to allegedly use it for mapping out the voter behavior for the US presidential election
as well as Brexit campaign (Keach 2018). It was a big scandal, for which Zuckerberg faced a
trial. Being an agile leader, Zuckerberg admitted that selling of the information to Cambridge
Analytica was a violation of their privacy regulation and declared that Facebook would make and
implement more improved measures to secure the personal data of the users, indicating an
enhanced security feature to gain back the trust of the users (Isaak and Hanna 2018).
However, it can be said that although, Facebook is a highly successful company under the
leadership of a transformational and democratic leader, yet, the business agility should be
improved further to accelerate the growth of the company in the near future, which is coming
with more technical challenges.
Development plan to increase leadership agility, including practical detail about specific
development activities, and how they might track progress in implementing their improvements
Mark Zuckerberg was criticized for lack of responsible leadership in the context of the
Cambridge Analytica scandal. It has been said that relying only on the legislations to handle the
ethical challenges of the digital platforms is not the best solution and hence, the leadership agility
should be improved. Thus, the development plan for increasing leadership agility includes

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increasing flexibility, speed and strength to handle the current issues in the business. As in case
of Mark Zuckerberg, the stakeholder agility, and context setting agility should be improved.
Stakeholder agility can be enhanced by stepping back from the own views and objectives of the
leader and consider the benefits of the stakeholders (Stary, Schmidt and Fleischmann 2013), as in
case of millions of users of Facebook. Regarding context setting agility, the leader must step
back and re-examine the current priorities for the new changes taking place in the larger
environment (Prange and Heracleous 2018).
Thus, the leadership agility development plan includes the levels of Expert, Achiever and
Catalyst. In the expert level, Zuckerberg must use the functional and technical expertise for
making agendas for the implementation of stakeholder and context setting agility through
organizational improvements, supervising the teams for addressing the key issues and solve
those in the most efficient manner. Next, in the achiever level, Zuckerberg should use managerial
skills for convincing the employees about the changes in the legislation and other policies
regarding the benefit of the stakeholders and the organization, and motivate and orchestrate the
team performance to achieve those specific goals. Lastly, for the catalyst level, Zuckerberg
should play the role of a visionary implementing the transformative change, developing high
performance team as required and collaborating for delivering creative and high leverage
solutions for the challenges that have emerged in terms of data security issues and the scandal,
leading to personal security threats to users and thus, lack of trust from the users. In all these
stages, the skills of flexibility, speed of understanding the situation and taking swift measures
and the strength of assessing the implications must be applied by the Facebook leader. By
adopting the above mentioned steps, Zuckerberg can increase his leadership agility to handle the
criticisms and issues in their data security operations.

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Privacy and security concerns regarding the personal information of the users should be
improved on an immediate basis with a focus on the establishment stakeholder and context
setting agility to gain back the trust of the millions of users. Feedbacks from the employees
should be collected quarterly regarding the agility improvement activities and their objectives
and how far that is achieved. Sessions with the employees should be arranged to get their
suggestions and ideas regarding the data security challenge and those should be debated on
before implementing the best practices for the company as well as for the users of stakeholders.
This will also allow Zuckerberg to assess whether his leadership agility has increased and is
generating benefits for the organization.
Ways to increase my own leadership agility for obtaining the achievements I would like in the
next phase of my career and life
For the next phase in my career and life, I would like to achieve a position in my
organization in which I will be able to motivate the team members to achieve personal upliftment
as well as the organizational goals. Thus, I must develop leadership ability to inspire the
employees, and also to develop the skills of flexibility, strength and speed and implement those
through the levels of expert, achiever and catalyst for the benefit of my personality and for the
organization. I must not only focus on improving my skills as transformational leader, but also
develop agility to understand any challenges and be flexible enough for the benefit of the
organization as well as for the employees. I should take up the following measures to improve
my leadership agility. Firstly, I must regularly update my knowledge on the business and the
operating environment. Secondly, I should apply the techniques that will give a clear idea about
the challenges and consequences. Thirdly, I should understand the attitudes of the team members
and figure out the effective ways to motivate them and lead the change. Fourthly, I should

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enhance my own knowledge about my capabilities and skills and their impact on others and
lastly, I should develop my skills of identifying the changes in the market and analyze them to
formulate a change management plan for the stakeholders and for the organization.

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