LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES AND MANAGEMENT TOOLS

1. Introduction
Managers and leaders of different calibre use different leadership styles. The most
common of these styles include democratic leadership, autocratic leadership, team-leadership,
and laissez-faire leadership. Apart from these main leadership styles, Authentic leadership
style is less spoken of, but it is taking prominence now among leaders and managers of
organizations. Interestingly, it’s a proven fact that the type of leadership style employed by a
leader determine their success and the progress of the organization. This essay, therefore,
seeks to analyse in detail laissez-faire leadership and authentic leadership styles based on
Travis Cordell Kalanick leadership of Uber.

2. Background of Travis Kalanick and Uber

Kalanick can be introduced as a resilient leader having endured through difficult
scenarios following his entrepreneurial dreams. In 1998, he started his entrepreneurial
journey at the University of California, while pursuing his Business Economics and computer
Science studies. He and three more colleagues jointly founded Scour Inc, an online Peer-to-
peer file sharing service. He dropped out of college to work full time on this start-up
business. This business didn’t thrive much since different organizations filed lawsuit against
it on copyright issues and they were forced to file for bankruptcy. This marked the end of
Scour in 2000 but didn’t stop Kalanick resilience on his entrepreneurship vision.

In 2001, working together with his colleague Michael Todd, they jointly founded Red
Swoosh. It was founded on the same platform as Scour Inc, also offering a peer -to-peer file
sharing service. Red Swoosh progress wasn’t as swift as they had anticipated, later selling it
to another company at $19 million.

Travis Kalanick is the outgoing Uber CEO having been forced to resign, because of
sexual harassment allegations made against the organization. He has been actively involved
in the running of Uber at different managerial levels until recently when he resigned as CEO.

After the sale of Swoosh, Kalanick strategy led him to start Uber together with his co-
founder Garrett Camp. Uber is in the transportation industry. It has its headquarters in San
Francisco, California, United states and operates in over 630 cities across the globe. It
develops, operates and markets an online taxi hailing service. Uber drivers can rent or use their own.

Scheiber (2017), reports Uber as

being among the fast-rising companies in the past few
years in the Silicon Valley. Despite the rising competition, Uber has risen to a big company
operating in over 600 cities in the world. Cramer and Krueger (2016), approximates that Uber has
over 1.5million drivers worldwide. The company, according to Forbes, is valued at $70
Billion. All these achievements have happened within the 8 years that the company has
operated since its foundation in 2009.

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Kalanick resignation from Uber followed various sexual harassment allegations
within Uber. Could this be attributed to him as a leadership failure on his part? Probably yes,
because most people believe he was aware of such but did nothing to deal with the issue
before it became fully blown up.

3. Leadership techniques employed by Travis Kalanick

The allegation against the organization may not be Kalanick’s fault, though it may be
argued that his leadership style as the CEO of the company is the root cause. Kalanick build a
company’s corporate culture with 14 values. Among these outrageous values - the ones that
have put the company at its current state include ‘Toe-Stepping’ and ‘Always Be Hustling’.
What this means, is that the company allows individual employees to rise in the leadership
ranks purely through productivity.

The corporate culture built within the company have much contribution to
behavioural change of its employees and explains much of what has allegedly happened
within itself. This is because the culture enables individuals to excuse their misconduct citing
the company’s values. Based on this and earlier business experiences, I would classify
Kalanick’s leadership into two, namely, laissez-faire and authentic leaderships styles.

3.1 Kalanick Laissez-faire style of leadership

This type of leadership is characterized by members making their own decisions with
leaders giving resources and advices. The decisions of members of various departments in a
company are autonomous but the positive results as well as consequences of wrong acts are
attributed to the general leader. In the case of large organizations, the CEO is held
accountable of all achievements and shortcomings of the organization. Kalanick in his tenure
as CEO of Uber is a victim of such circumstances.

At Uber, the earlier mentioned values attributed to Kalanick leadership guide the
members in the running of the organization. Although this leadership style has been criticised
that it leads to low productivity, it can also prove that it is productive when members are self
driven. Mondy and Premeaux (1995) argues that defending this type of leadership style is
difficult as it only works best when subordinates are experts in their field and are highly
motivated in their work.

The skills and self-driven capabilities of Uber employees have enabled the company
to rise high among other organizations in the Silicon Valley. This attests to the capabilities of
this leadership style which can be very effective especially when there are bright people like
Kalanick in the advisory side of leadership.

However, this laissez-faire leadership style has a lot of flaws that can lead to the
downfall of an organization when it is not utilized as described above. This could be the
reason why many talk and write about the rise and fall of Uber and its CEO Travis Kalanick.
The strengths and capabilities of employees and strong-will were overtaken by the flaws of
the style of leadership.

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Finally, this leadership style comes with many shortfalls. The company will
experience presence of unsatisfied minorities within the organization, cases of intolerance
between group members, attempts to over-reach beyond their jurisdiction so to be recognised
and a lack of team spirit. This is evident when the crisis at Uber is closely examined given the
permissiveness arising from the corporate values of the organization. The allegations of
sexual harassment reported are direct evidence of the failure of the style of leadership
overruling the effectiveness that has been registered over last few years of the company’s
existence.

However, the contingency leadership theory argues that there is no definite leadership
style as each situation demands different reaction. This implies that while certain people may
perform better in certain places and under certain circumstances, their performance may dip
significantly when taken out of their element (Avolio, 2007). Consequently, while the laissez-faire
leadership style was good at the beginning of Uber, its effectiveness seems to be waning as
the company becomes more established.

3.2 Authentic leadership

Authentic leadership encompasses the leadership style where a leader incorporates
leadership with his/her personality and core values. Authentic leadership has been in use for a
long time but has not been documented widely compared to other leadership styles. In terms
of its definition, it has been defined in different perspectives by different scholars. However,
what is important are characteristic of such leadership as highlighted by Shamir and Eilam
(2005:399), that the self-concept is the most important component of such leader, that their
goals are self-concordant and that self-expressiveness defines their behaviour. Such leaders
are able to improve their own performance as well as team performance.

Travis Kalanick’s authentic leadership style is very evident in his Uber’s CEO
position as well as previous positions in his work experience. One of the most important
ability of leader using this style is the ability to build own legitimacy by establishing honest
working relationship with others. This value has enabled Kalanick to co-found Red Swoosh,
Scour Inc. and Uber with others with same interests.

Moreover, authentic leadership qualities have enabled Kalanick to continuously

venture into new business enterprises. Because of his self-concept, self-concordant and self-
expressiveness behaviour, (Shamir and Elam, 2005) Kalanick dropped out of college to set up
his starter business and he has been building his entrepreneurship vision throughout his life
despite difficulties and challenges. This led him being included in the list of top rich
entrepreneurs in the US. His performance in the companies and his entrepreneurial journey
confirms the viability of his authentic leadership style.

4. Leadership and management strategic tools

Leadership and management are terms which are closely related and sometimes can
be used interchangeably. In this context, we are looking at strategic tools that are used by
managers in the process of running their organizations. Management tools are theorized

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frameworks which enable organizations to plan, think and act in a strategic way. Therefore,
they are guidelines upon which enable managers to put their leadership styles into practice for
the sole purpose of making their organization to prosper, get optimum profits and compete
favourably in the dynamic product and service market (Ogbari, et al, 2016).

Some of management and strategic tools include Competitor analysis, market

research, cost-benefit analysis, scenario planning, SWOT analysis, among many others. This
paper analyses market research and cost benefit analysis based on how Kalanick, the
outgoing CEO of Uber, employed in his leadership of the company and his previous
enterprises.

4.1 Market place research

This involves doing in-depth research to get adequate information about a certain
market. This information gathering may include the possible customers of the product or
service you are selling, the stability of the market at that particular market, numbers and
potentials of competitor businesses, etc. This market place research tool is vital for any
business because it enables the manager to customize the business strategies, creation of
visions and missions, setting up of goals, among other preliminary action that may determine
the performance of the business.

Detailed analysis of Kalanick’s start-up business, reveals how he uses this technique.
The history of the founding of Uber shows how he and his co-founder Gurrette Camp
initiated the foundation of Uber. Camp is said to have spent $800 to hire a vehicle for travel.
On their quest to find ways of decreasing the cost spend in car hiring they ended up with the
idea that gave birth to Uber. The process must have involved some research and critical
thinking that found a gap in the traditional taxi market. They found out that it was cheaper
and affordable to share the cost of travel with other people than taking a taxi alone from the
streets. This shows how market place research leads to bright entrepreneurship ideas and can
be effectively employed even in expansion of existing businesses.

4.2 Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost benefit analysis helps a manager to assess the potential cost implication of
various course of action and their resulting benefits/profits. Prospects that may result in a
higher net benefit are worth investing in than those that yields less net benefits

Kalanick employed this tool in his initial co-founded Scour Inc. Company. Scour was
facing lawsuit on copyright issues costing $250 billion. Upon analysis of the net worth of the
company, compared with the $250 billion’s lawsuit, Kalanick and his co-founders decided to
file for the company’s bankruptcy and abandon the investment. This is a classic example of
using Cost benefit analysis management tool.

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Conclusion
The kind of leadership style chosen and utilized by a leader determines the future
progress and profitability of his/her organization. The use of different strategic management
tools to guide the management process have different implication on the outcome of the
business ventures of the organization. Therefore, these aspects should be taken into
consideration by any leader.

Uber is undoubtedly one of the companies that have grown to make its influence in the
world significant. This is despite the earlier mentioned flaws in its leadership which have put
the company in a temporary crisis. These flaws are because of leadership elements which
Kalanick didn’t apply in his leadership.

Studying Kalanick’s leadership style points to a style that was more in sync with the
business during its start-up but faced challenges as the business grew. As expounded by the
contingency leadership theory, we can therefore, conclude that the leadership style employed
by a leader could be suitable for a different phase of a business growth and unsuitable during
other phases.

Recommendation
Considering Kalanick’s apparent leadership flaws in driving forward an established
company, I would suggest two of the elements that Kalanick could have used to make Uber
remain in its course of becoming the best in the industry. These also could be used by the
current Uber management to regain Uber reputation among its customers and prospective
employees. The leadership elements I recommend are: Improving the company’s core values
and including moral and ethical values in the company’s core values.

The corporate culture of any organisation is what determines its workplace conditions.
Uber can change its core values which have been described by observers as demanding,
cutthroat and aggressive. These working conditions can be changed to be friendly, motivating
and enjoyable which enable workers to work with ease instead of stressing conditions. These
better conditions are proven to yield better productivity.
There are best core values which are used by many organizations to build their
corporate workplace culture, namely: Fairness, commitment, compassion, respect, equity,
selflessness, hospitality, service to others, etc. Kalanick, being the CEO, could have tailored
Uber’s core values around the above values.
The authentic leadership style used by Kalanick is best used where the individual’s
values include above-board moral and ethical values. Such personal attributes should not only
be demonstrated by leaders at work place, but influence their subordinates too. It is reported
that Kalanick was aware of sexual harassment happening within Uber but didn’t intervene to
change the situation. This was an oversight which at last came to the limelight of the public. I
would recommend that leaders practice high moral and ethical standards as role models to be

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emulated by everyone under them. This should be taken into consideration by the current Uber
leadership as a measure to reinstate its reputation.

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Reference
Shamir, B. and Eilam, G., 2005. “What's your story?” A life-stories approach to authentic
leadership development. The leadership quarterly, 16(3), pp.395-417.

Berisha Qehaja, A., Kutllovci, E. and Shiroka Pula, J., 2017. Strategic Management Tools
and Techniques: A Comparative Analysis of Empirical Studies. Croatian Economic Survey,
19(1), pp.67-99.

Scheiber, N., 2017. How Uber uses psychological tricks to push its drivers' buttons. The New
York Times, 2.

Cramer, J. and Krueger, A.B., 2016. Disruptive change in the taxi business: The case of
Uber. The American Economic Review, 106(5), pp.177-182.

Ogbari, M.E., EGBERIPOU, R., Ajagbe, A.M., Oke, A.O. and Ologbo, A.C., 2016.
Accomplishments of Organisation Mission through Appropriate Implementation of
Strategies. Sci. Int.(Lahore), 28(2), pp.1719-1731.

Avolio, B.J., 2007. Promoting more integrative strategies for leadership theory-
building. American Psychologist, 62(1), p.25.