BRW Fast 100 Leadership (Essay Sample)

BRW FAST 100 LEADERSHIP
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Outware is a custom mobile software design and applications development company. The company. Outware thrives by conversion of good ideas into great mobile experiences and establishment of robust partnerships with their customer base. Their cutting edge’s creation is through nurturing of the team’s creative and technical skills. It is a vision of the company to become the difference through the creation of mobile experiences that are intuitive, engaging and appealing to their customers. Melbourne IT Limited are the majority shareholder with 50.2 percent stake as from June 2015. They also plan to acquire the remaining 49.8 percent in due course. Their key selling point has been product quality. Product design at Outware has the latest software engineering technology to assure premier quality at all production stages. Being a company set up by a group of developers, Outware have a focus on treating each of their projects as a software engineering exercise. This project view is in a bid to provide their clients with top of the range services and application support platforms CITATION out15 \l 2057 (outware.com.au, 2015).
On the other hand, Aussie Commerce is a leading e-commerce group in Australia. The organization employs over 250 workers and has a subscriber base of over 6million members. The group is an umbrella that houses other companies such as Cudo, brands exclusive, the home, luxury escapes and deals.com among many others. The company also owns Dailydo, which runs in New Zealand. Aussie Commerce has on several occasions received recognition as one of the fastest-growing businesses in the country. Through their combined brands, Aussie Commerce has managed to enter many product markets ranging from consumer services offered on deals.com to holiday destinations offered on luxury escapes. The organization’s founders are by Adam Schwab, Jeremy Same, and Joshua David Borenstein. All the founding members came from different service sectors and brought their diverse experiences to form one concrete organization CITATION aus15 \l 2057 (aussiecommerce.com.au, 2015).
Among the development team at Outware, leaders undergo a "self-selection" process under which the leaders are set themselves aside from the other members. For one to get any consideration for leadership posts, they ought to show outright prowess in their customer interaction skills. These abilities are in full manifestation in the types of relationships they establish with the clients as well as the response obtained from their consumers. Further, leaders are also selected on the basis of their communication skills. The element of communication is given focus to ensure that those selected are good ambassadors of the brand and can clearly communicate and take charge of their leadership units. A participative model of leadership has been in enactment at Outware. The aim of this approach was to get each team member to play an active role in the affairs of the company. Eytan Lenko, a director at Outware, stated that his progress as a leader’s measurement is in the quality of conversations he has with other workers. According to Lenko, the interactions should develop from operational to strategic with the development of the team as well as the growth their ability to operate autonomously.
The two organizations follow different organizational structures and thus have quite different approaches to leadership. Outware being a singular structure is organized on a functional basis. Under this formation, the junior leadership posts are filled with respect to the tasks carried out by the business unit. The organization thus has departments such as human resources and accounting that explicitly deal with their functional specifications. Aussie commerce to the constant is a large multinational company that is also made up of several independent companies. The diversity of the entity has forced it to adopt a matrix organizational formation. The matrix structure is a hybrid of the functional and divisional organization structures. Here, leaders are appointed to head their specific areas and placed on the same hierarchical level. Under this leadership set up, Aussie commerce is in a position to reap from both functional and divisional leadership structures. All managers of the independent franchises report to the three directors.
What is at Outware is hands-on leadership where the directors are in constant contact with their employees rather than being invisible investors. This form of leadership gives the directors a deeper understanding of their company, employees, customers and their product market. With the aid of this information, it is simpler for the three directors to formulate, execute and follow up strategies at the company. Further, as opposed to Aussie commerce that is an e-commerce business, Outware deal with real products. This business makes it essential for the leaders to constantly remain aware of the company dynamics for better decision making. The technical capacities for the three Outware directors also play an important part in their leadership of the enterprise. The leaders are in a position to make both and technical decisions for the company with authority and competence. The robust size of the Aussie commerce business makes it impossible for the directors to be in direct control of the activities of their various organizational franchises. This robustness makes it necessary to appoint the managers for each independent unit and monitor the performance through the aid of the manager. The appointed managers possess the technical and business skills and knowledge requisite for leading in their precise fields. These skills and knowledge ensure that they are in a position to make the right decisions for the company and also give the accurate reports and situation analysis to the directors for better decision making.
Organic leader development is a concept in full implementation at Outware. This idea means that the leaders are selected and developed from within the organization. As the director Lenko stated, the employees undergo a process of self-selection within their clusters. The leaders set themselves aside from the rest either through work ethic or customer relations. After the identification of potential leaders, the company engages in giving them the requisite exposures and skills for leadership positions within their firm. Internal development of leaders ensures there is the engagement of the employees in a continuous learning process for both personal and organizational growth. Further development enables the employees to get a career sense of direction and even exploit the existing career advancement opportunities. The internal development also ensures there is sufficient supply of skills and talent to lead at the top levels of the organization without alienating the employees or causing the "outsider syndrome" within the firm. Succession planning is also made easier through organic development.
Organic development is the opposite of strategic hiring which is practice at Aussie Commerce. The leaders at Aussie have engaged in a business process termed as a strategic acquisition. This method of acquisition of entities that cover one’s current market, experience or competition deficiencies. Through buying of other companies, Aussie can venture into new fields inside and beyond Australia. However, it is not sufficient to just acquire other businesses; it is also prudent to select the best fit leaders to take charge of the new acquisition. The strategic acquisition allows Aussie to hire managers and employees that cover any possible talent, skill or experience deficiencies in their organization. On this basis, leaders are selected solely on grounds of their know-how, skills and expertise in the particular business area. Strategic hiring, however, lacks a long-term angle as it does not have proper succession plans CITATION Ada14 \l 2057 (Schwab, 2014). Further, under strategic recruitment, the organization undertakes marginal internal skill and talent development as the approach takes a more immediate look at the firm, the market, and the present challenges.
Adam Schwab, a director at Aussie Commerce, defined some of their basic leadership techniques in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. The director stated some important points on their leadership scheme.While leadership requires delegation, for Aussie, they see leading by example as an essential factor for successful leadership. Since the leaders set the company culture, it is important that they stay in the frontline of operation CITATION Ste141 \l 2057 (Pell, 2014). In this case, the director states there is no job they find too small for them. From talking to customers to investor meetings and even media interviews. Whenever they acquire a company with top officials not performing to the expected standards, they take it upon themselves to make the adjustment by prompt replacement of the manager. Another approach in use by the company is hiring people "smarter" than the leaders. These people work to reduce the workload of the head and also to enable them to concentrate on more pressing company matters. With a competent team, the leaders do not have to get concerned about micromanaging the entities as they trust their best-skilled employees to carry out these duties.
At Aussie commerce, the company culture forms an important part of their leadership philosophy. The most valuable asset for Aussie Commerce remains their human resources. The company has adopted an internally lean management system that places distinctive focus on their employees. In their culture, the business only incurs costs if they are beneficial to their customers, employees or to the entity itself. In fact, at the company, ju...