Jeff Bezos's Leadership Style:
Jeff Bezos employs a transformational leadership style in his company that he has maintained to
this day. Transformational leadership is a leading style in which followers are encouraged to
think beyond their self-interest to achieve a broader purpose. This style identifies the followers’
needs, clears the connection of fulfillment of those needs to selected outcomes, identifies the
value of the outcomes, and results in building motivation among followers to produce desired
aims. Organizations are increasingly using transformational leadership to promote higher levels
of development, which might provide a competitive edge. A softer leadership style and the
qualities that come with it must be deployed in order for this approach to happen. The most
significant part of leadership is the aptitude to invest in others, as indicated in the definition.
Leadership is characterized by the capacity to anticipate, visualize, sustain flexibility, and
empower others to build strategic change as required. To be a "soft leader," you must converse
with prominence on soft skills; make judgments by integrating your intellect, heart, and
instinctive; and take steps while keeping the ground realities and aims in mind without
abandoning task orientation.
Along with identifying the attributes that a leader must possess, it is also vital to analyze some of
the most severe challenges leaders must face and triumph over. There is no such thing as an
obstacle-free route in this world. It's critical to comprehend both the context and the content of
leadership. The world is changing at breakneck speed, and many businesses expand and fail with
it if they do not learn to adapt to rapidly shifting market environments. Firms must primarily
adjust to keep up with the trend of continual change to survive and flourish in a demanding new
market. Transformation comprises a change in how business is managed, how employees add
value to the company, and how the organization realizes and manages its most significant assets,
which are progressively focused on intellectual assets and information. Jeff Bezos is creating art
out of these notions; transformational leaders are real and trustworthy leaders who put on a
fundamental set of principles to bring ethical, attitudinal, and procedural changes to their
followers, influencing their creativity and performance skills.
Leadership Principles:
It's worth noting that Jeff Bezos' emphasis on enabling and inspiring his employees to keep
pushing themselves to grow is aligned with the core of the transformational leadership style,
which makes it simpler to observe and comprehend the title role it played in Amazon's success.
Even now, the business employs this leadership approach to maintain its expansion. Jeff Bezos
demonstrates that he follows the seven transformational leadership principles described below;
Simplification: Jeff Bezos not only demonstrates but also implements a clear transformational
vision; along with his team and business, they understand where they're going from their
inception, aligned with their mission to become the most customer-centric business on the earth.
Motivation: "Work hard. Have fun. Make history," their well-known internal slogan reflects their
goal of bringing individuals on board and winning their loyalty and dedication. According to his
coworkers, one of his skills was the ability to excite and push his followers without becoming
connected to them personally.
Facilitation: The discovery-driven leader perceive the world as a learning source and transfers
this to his team, providing them with requirements like access to information sources.
Innovation: Fostering enthusiasm for invention is one of Amazon's four key values for how they
run their business. As a result, Jeff Bezos aims to promote a culture of creation and innovation
for his followers.
Mobilization: a transformational leader's responsibility is to elevate other leaders and followers;
when faced with chaos. He began to depend on a young executive named Jeff Wilke in the
distribution centers, whose intellectual and often impatient managerial style resembled his own.
He also follows the renowned Carnegie's philosophy of forming the proper team to get the task
done, investing and providing competent team participants.
Preparation: Jeff Bezos is a lifelong learner who implants this mindset in his followers,
encouraging them to be boundless learners.
Determination: It is critical to have persistence to the point where you are willing to overcome
significant obstacles for attaining your objective. As the business expands, the employees are
expected to give more effort resulting in high productivity. Then, it will be clear to your
followers that their efforts will be paid off as well.
The transformational leadership approach is one of the most adaptable approaches to the fast-
moving business world, allowing for easier and faster growth in an ever-shifting industry. This
approach enables businesspersons to adjust to the market and better meet the requirements of
consumers while maintaining a positive work environment (Toma & Catana, 2020).
Jeff Bezos's Leadership Behavior: Autocratic
It is the type of leadership style where the leader makes all the decisions, and he keeps those with
himself until there comes a need to share them with the followers. Such leaders expect the
followers to go along with their decisions, and eventually, the company will be successful in
attaining its goals.
Jeff Bezos is a firm believer in an autocratic leadership behavioral theory. He demonstrates
certain clear indications of authoritarian leadership, such as routinely overruling many decisions,
even among his team's finest brains. He gets irritated when his staff members don't embrace a
surmounting the world mindset. As he is task-oriented, he wants to take all the possible
necessary steps that will lead to the desired outcome of achieving organizational goals. He has a
strong level of self-assurance, which makes admitting errors tough. This also results in a high
level of self-promotion that one could observe in his product's launch events. Moreover, he
implies a distinctive strategy for his meetings: reading a six-page document beforehand, getting
all the participants on the same track (Is Jeff Bezos's leadership style good or bad, n.d.).
Successful Leading Principles:
While having a creative and innovative mindset, some extraordinary principles have successfully
enhanced his leadership, which are explained as follows.
Accepting Failures:
Despite the pain and despair that failure usually brings, Jeff Bezos has a new perspective on
embracing, regularizing, and welcoming it. Bezos mentioned in a letter to Amazon shareholders
that what makes us distinctive is our attitude towards failure. He further stated that Amazon is
the finest location on earth to fail for having experience, and failure and creativity are
inextricably linked. According to Bezos, a company must accept the whole process of success
and failure since they are inextricably linked. One has to experiment to innovate, and if one gets
to know it'll work ahead of time, then it's not considered an experiment.
Even though he has had a lot of success with his inventive ideas, he has also had many failures
and losses, such as Amazon Fire phone. Furthermore, they often need leaders to take risks.
However, when a company achieves excellent success, it compensates for its previous failures.
And this is the most effective leadership trait of never giving up and losing hope (Quellmalz,
2021).
Prioritizing the customer always:
Since the beginning, Jeff Bezos has known that he wants Amazon to be all about the customers.
Customer centricity is a marketing approach that emphasizes the customer's interactions with the
brand. The purpose is to promote recurring business by building strong consumer loyalty. He and
his staff concentrated on creating customer reviews and ensuring that they received purchase
confirmations throughout Amazon's first year. These features were revolutionary in the e-
commerce world at the time. And for its commitment to its consumers throughout the years,
Amazon has consistently ranked first in customer satisfaction surveys.
As Amazon grows, Bezos emphasizes the importance of customer devotion, which is one of
Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles. Every Amazon endeavor begins with the customers. Before
starting a project, managers must first address the following five questions:
Who is the consumer?
What issue or opportunity does the consumer have?
What is the most significant advantage to the customer?
What methods do you use to determine what your customers require or desire?
How would you describe the customer experience?
Identifying a customer's need, desire, or issue and responding with a service, product, or
experience is what this strategy entails. Customer-centricity is important to Bezos because, in the
end, what is best for the customer results in the best for the company, and strategy has been
implemented from day one (Quellmalz, 2021).
References:
Is Jeff Bezos's leadership style good or bad, it's complicated. (n.d.) Fingerprint for Success.
https://www.fingerprintforsuccess.com/blog/jeff-bezos-leadership-style#
Quellmalz, R. (2021, October 4). An inside look at Jeff Bezos's Billion-Dollar Leadership. Topic
Insights. https://topicinsights.com/leadership-management/jeff-bezos-leadership/
#:~:text=Jeff%20Bezos%20is%20widely%20recognized,the%20vision%20for%20the
%20organization.
Toma, S. G. & Catana, S. A. (2020). A view on transformational leadership: The case of Jeff
Bezos. ResearchGate.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349380465_A_view_on_transformational_lead
ership_The_case_of_Jeff_Bezos
