Jeff Bezos is considered one of the most successful business leaders in the world. His company Amazon is the largest online retail store. He is famous for his visionary ideas, high standards and orientation on results. Have you ever wondered how he is leading his companies to success? Let's examine Jeff Bezos' leadership style and its principles. We will also check what leadership traits contributed to his success the most.
Who is Jeff Bezos?
Jeffrey Preston Bezos, popularly known as Jeff Bezos, was born January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is an American entrepreneur. He is the founder and chief chairman of the e-commerce giant, Amazon.com, Inc., initially an online bookstore but now selling a wide variety of products. Under Jeff Bezos' guidance, Amazon became the largest online retailer and a model for other e-commerce stores.
In addition to Amazon, Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, an American daily newspaper published in Washington DC, and Blue Origin, an aerospace company developing rockets for corporate use.
He is currently worth $195.9B according to Forbes and is currently ranked the richest billionaire in the world.
Jeff Bezos is an innovative visionary who is always looking for new ways to creatively provide a better experience for his customers. In this line, he has been able to transform the e-commerce space by using his leadership style to transform his organization, therefore putting his organization at the forefront.
Let's explore the leadership style employed by Jeff Bezos and how it has contributed towards his success.
Jeff Bezos leadership style
Some people argue that Jeff Bezos' leadership style is autocratic due to his high standards, absolute decision-making power, and micromanaging style; but Jeff Bezos has shown that he favors a transformational leadership style over an autocratic leadership style. Jeff Bezos' leadership style principles include motivation, innovation, determination, empowerment, learning, and simplicity.
Leadership traits of Jeff Bezos
Due to his result orientation, Jeff Bezos is constantly in search of innovative ways to improve his organization and satisfy customers. He is known to be a meticulous planner, and to set long-term goals with the aim of creatively creating a better experience for the organization's customers.
A transformational leader is a leader who is driven by a strong passion for innovation and creating change that grows an organization. They are constantly looking to create change in the way their business decision-making is done, how employees' tasks are carried out, and how their organization's assets are handled through innovation. They improve the creativity and performance of employees through innovation and empowerment.
Transformational leaders place a lot of trust in their trained employees to take decisions calculated in their assigned roles, thus, encouraging creativity across the organization's workforce. Figure 1 shows the characteristics of Jeff Bezos' leadership style.
Through Jeff Bezos' transformational leadership style, he was able to create a customer-driven environment at Amazon by splitting his workforce into small teams, making them focus on different tasks and problems, and improving communication across the organization. This also served to create a healthy competitive environment among the employees, motivating them to push beyond their perceived capabilities toward achieving all tasks and challenges assigned to them.
Furthermore, by dividing these tasks amongst multiple teams for execution, Jeff Bezos showed his unwavering trust in them to complete the required tasks, thus empowering the employees to perform at their best whilst realizing the goals of the organization.
Jeff Bezos Leadership Principles
To continually improve his organization, these are Jeff Bezos' leadership principles (see Figure 2 below):
1. Motivation
A key component of Jeff Bezos leadership style is known to possess the ability to drive and motivate his teams to achieve the results required of them. This is shown in Amazon's slogan:
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
Such motivational tactics are used to increase employees' loyalty and drive them to grow the company.
2. Innovation
As shown in one of the four principles guiding Amazon ('Passion for Invention'), Jeff Bezos is always pushing his team towards originality, innovation and constant invention when carrying out tasks. He also sets high standards for himself and asks the same from his employees.
3. Determination
In order to achieve set goals, it is required to remain driven towards the goal no matter the obstacle one may face. This is what Jeff Bezos believes in and what his leadership style preaches. Jeff Bezos possess the die-hard attitude to continually chase goals, motivating his employees to do the same in all their speciality. This is particularly evident in the popular belief that working at Amazon is very demanding.
4. Learning and Curiosity
Jeff Bezos never stops learning and is driven toward discovering new ways to reach his objectives. He instils this same attitude in his employees, always pushing them towards constant learning.
5. Empowerment
One key trait of Jeff Bezos leadership style is empowerment. Jeff Bezos empowers his team members and leaders by providing access to information and resources needed for their growth.
6. Simplicity
Jeff Bezos is known to communicate his ideas simply and clearly to avoid mistakes from employees. Each employee knows their roles and responsibilities in making the organization a customer-based organization.
Jeff Bezos leadership style examples
Now, let's take a look at some examples of Jeff Bezos' leadership style.
1. Long-term planner and big thinker
At the centre of Jeff Bezos' long term plan for Amazon is customer satisfaction. Jeff Bezos is always looking for innovative and new ways to achieve his plans, prompting creative thinking and a constant review of plans.
2. High standards
One of Jeff Bezos key leadership traits is his high standards. He is always asking a lot more than it is initially thought possible from employees, and constantly set high standards for them and himself. This, in turn, motivates his employees to reach these standards and push the organization towards growth.
3. Always learning
Another important Jeff Bezos leadership trait is the hunger he shows towards learning. He is always looking for ways to improve and never stops learning. He is also constantly pushing his employees to further build themselves, which is a key trait of the transformational leadership style.
4. Urgency
Jeff Bezos believes in urgency. Decisions are to be made swiftly in an educated and well-informed manner. He believed the quicker the company grew and made impactful business decisions, the more customers it would capture.
5. Result-Oriented
Jeff Bezos is known to be assertive when it comes to the growth of his organization. He is aggressive in getting the right results and for his teams to master their area of specialization.
On top of these qualities, some other qualities possessed by Jeff Bezos have been praised and attributed to the ethical leadership style. Some of Jeff Bezos' ethical leadership traits are:
Transparency
Integrity
Trust
Collaboration
Despite his high standards, micro-management style and absolute decision-making power, Jeff Bezos has shown to favour the transformational leadership style over an autocratic leadership style. He has been able to implement an environment driven by innovation and customer satisfaction in his organization through his transformational leadership skills and placed himself as one of the world-leading transformational leaders.
Jeff Bezos Leadership Style - Key takeaways
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