The Leadership in Hard Times paper

BUS 621

Leadership &Teamwork

Ashford University

A problematic leadership situation at Nokia which affected it drastically making it a go down from being one of the top players in the business world of cell phones

Between 1995 and 2000, Nokia was booming in business. Their phones were selling rapidly. The revenue was upwards of 300%. Nokia’s success was due to its leadership’s brave decisions and innovations. At this point, the pressure on Nokia’s managers was so much that they focused more on the production of mobiles rather than on innovation. The core business was more into the company’s growth rather than improvising. Nokia also launched Symbian, but it was also a failure after some point of time due to laggy software and complex mechanisms.

Nokia’s leadership was too self-absorbed to change their distribution channels and work on different technologies. As android took over, Nokia’s Symbian software became obsolete, and they began to see it reflected in their sales. The need to reinvent themselves became a necessity if they were to survive as a company. This challenging leadership situation forced them to innovate and change. But ineffective changes led to the company’s downfall. Nokia required talents it did not possess to evolve in the progression of the market and missed the golden chances.

Kouzes and Posner provided a functional leadership model.

The plan is

1-) design a plan based on where the corporation is headed. It is the company’s leaders’ job to develop a short term and long-term way forward that will sustain the company through the lul in sales until a new direction for the company has been established. It can be done through commitment and similar interest by which the company’s employees should be motivated.

2-)A common vision – a shared vision should be definite and without any misunderstanding. The vision is for the long term, where the company is headed and areas it should focus on. A vision is critical as it gives everybody a basic idea about the goals and targets. Companies without vision fail to perform and go down in the long term.

3-) Challenges at every step – the leadership should be challenging and experimenting at every level. The company should be eager to accept a new opportunity and way forward. Improvisation and innovation are critical basics of any good leader.

4-)Giving others the authority to work and take responsibility to work – leadership should strengthen others by delegating authority to them so that they also feel powered and take responsibility to do something. This gives them a spark to improve and be better.

5-)Motivate each and every person, team, and department- DIFFERENT motivation seminars and lectures for individuals, organizations, departments should be organized so that their heart fills with the emotion to do something productive and also not to do something unethical.

In conclusion, the world of smart phones got the better of Nokia. They needed to upgrade themselves like the palm pilot. It too was on the verge of extinction; it too had become comfortable in its market share and was not listen to the consumers that clearly made to chose to get smarter with their devices. Had the

References

Burgelman, R. A. (2018). Yves L. Doz and Keeley Wilson: Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones. Administrative Science Quarterly, 63(4), NP46-NP48. https://doi-org.proxy-library.ashford.edu/10.1177/0001839218791184

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2014). The five practices of exemplary leadership : information teechnology. The Leadership Challenge.

Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (2012). Ways to lead government better: insightful storytellers James Kouzes and Barry Posner asked multiple questions, listened, and illuminated better paths, just as they suggest others do in The Leadership Challenge. The Public Manager, 1.

Thompson, J. (2012). Transformational leadership can improve workforce competencies. Nursing Management – UK, 18(10), 21–24. https://doi-org.proxy-library.ashford.edu/10.7748/nm2012.03.18.10.21.c8958