The most important thing behind his success was being different from others. He did not apply conventional rules on his job. He was known as a ‘high-maintenance co-worker” who demanded excellence from his staff and was also well known with his harsh criticism style. Furthermore, Jobs could even be arrogant, dictatorial, and mean- spirited. However; none of these qualities handicapped his success. Recently, modern management style defends that effective business leaders need to be nice, kind, humble and practice “servant leadership”. Ink that even though there were lots of controversies in his style according to modern management, he became a successful leader in his field. Moreover, after his death, his leadership style was shown as an example to all people who want to be leader. Firstly, he never confused leadership with management. Steve Jobs usually took a hard line with the employees. He thought that he may not be a great manager for this reason he built a stellar team of managers who complemented his style. They all performed well in all conditions.
Steve Jobs new that building a strong management team was crucial to the company’s success and gave lots of importance to team work. Since he knew imperfect characteristics of himself in the matter of management or relationships with staff, he was attentive to his team to complement his qualities. Popularly, we read about management requires to delegate tasks, build consensus and motivate employees with the carrot, not the stick. However, Steve Jobs did the opposite of this. Generally, building consensus is an important part of the management style according to today’s management view.
However, he was not interested in consensus in the work-flow. He always thought that he knew better than employees and he insisted on his ideas. Sometimes, in certain talks, he said that “Customers don’t know what they want” and for this reason he was sure of himself rather than believe in employees or customers in the matter of future decisions. However, he made a point of making collaboration with his staff. Even the employees did not believe that they could achieve, he got people to work together to accomplish.
He did not give importance to the agreement because he had a clear vision about the way. Furthermore, he had not only a clear vision but also foster collaboration that ensures to turn the vision into reality and profitable products and services. This quality of him was also given rise to be remembered as a good leader. Another important thing in his style was focusing on fewer products or services, not focused on profit. Steve Jobs analyzed the situation of the company every week and thought that it was better to work on fewer products and make them the best.
Rather than explore many directions, owing a few things well was a success strategy that Jobs applied. This characteristic of Steve Jobs caused not only getting company’s success but also bringing Apple brand into prominence. If necessary to mention about his leadership style, being patient is a major part of his style and success. Steve Jobs did not care other people’ thoughts and the process to accomplish his goals. He was very patient and he did not give importance to the success period because he had long-term vision and he knew that certain success periods could take seven to ten years.
Another key point of his success is giving importance to simplicity. Jobs thought that revealed itself in both the user interface and in the integrated end-to-end process. Simplicity of the company’s products makes people’ lives easier while they need to technology. For example; he eliminated on/off button on the pod to simplify the device. Innovation was another leadership strategy of Steve Jobs that helped him to succeed his goals. He always wanted to make innovations about the company’s products. For example; Jobs recognized that people were burning
CDC on their personal computers from content on-line for this reason the Mac could manage videos and photos but it could not record CDC. This feature was also made the brand so successful in the sector. He studied on several designs of the products. He usually mentioned to rethink designs for this reason The phone went through several phases before the team came up with a design that was both aesthetically pleasing and functional. After several meetings with expert engineers at the company, designers developed new versions where the front of the phone was mainly lass, which improved the signal quality.
I think that this was also related to innovation strategy of Jobs’ leadership. In conclusion, there were lots of characteristics that Steve Jobs had in the matter of leadership and management. However; I mentioned about important qualities that caused to build an effective brand and make him successful leader. He reached his goals as a manager and leader despite of imperfect qualities because he was aware Of them and he tried to complement his missing characteristics with other strong features.