Leadership Assignment: Analysis of Leadership Behavior of Phillip Green
Question
Task: Write a 2500-word report on leadership assignment analyzing the leadership behavior of Phillip Green in detail manner.
Answer
Introduction
A leader in business is defined as a person that has the responsibility to develop plan for the organization to guide and manage team members in a group. Leadership is defined as a role that focus at inspiring, influencing and guiding other that participate in the organization (Skinner & Spurgeon, 2005). A good and strong leader focus on effective communication and use motivation techniques to encourage their followers to facilitate action towards common goals (Allen, Shankman & Miguel, 2012). The report analyzes a business leader, Phillip Green and his behavior in various situations. The report identifies whether the behavior of Phillip Green in different incident was effective or ineffective as a leader. Further, the report recommends the way Phillip Green can improve his leadership style.
Overview of the Leader
Phillip Green also known as Sir Phillip Nigel Ross Green is a British businessman and recognized chairman of the retail company called Arcadia Group. He was also owner of his high street clothing retail stores such as Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge from 2002 to 2020. His work in business helped him gained the name of one of the most known British entrepreneurs that has implemented a role of the leader for years (Trapp, 2021). He was able to be a part of the celebrity gossip pages as the business pages with his activity and the acquisition that was faced by him as a leader. His retail empire has helped him gain more than 4.8 billion Euro and this was the major reason behind his success and recognition (Blackhurst, 2021). However, he was also recognized in news as infamous entrepreneur by others due to his poor role as a leader. He was also accused of being liable for BHS’s 571 million Euro pension fund deficit and this has made his failed as a leader (BBC, 2021). His leadership behavior and attitude were majorly criticized as he had put lives of more than thousands of employees at stake with his decision and the BHS accusation.
Analysis of Leadership Behavior of Phillip Green
Leadership is a critical and much complex aspect when it come to analysis because the behavior of a leader varies from one to another and thus there is no one behavior of leadership that should be implemented (Skinner & Spurgeon, 2005). However, leaders of today are expected to have strong emotional intelligence and display emotions such as empathy, compassion and courage to nurture loyalty. The leadership behavior of Phillip Green is quite different than the one expected today because he had a money-making mentality in all his operations and behaviors.
Decision Making Capability
When making decision for new changes and products, Phillips always kept close focus on success and targeted in making maximum money from his fashion brands (Nickerson, 2021). Such kind of behavior was maintained by Phillip to gain the title of ‘king of the high-street’ and money and profit was his major aim. Such kind of behavior in decision making can be linked with authoritarian leadership style that focus on individual control on decision and rarely accept or consider suggestions and preferences of its fellow members. Such type of leadership behavior of Phillip Green is inappropriate in the decision-making situation (Linkedin, 2021). This is because failing to involve group members in decision making usually lead to ineffective decisions and moments of insecurities within the leadership. Moreover, lack of emotional intelligence in leadership was also an inappropriate behavior because it leads to far reaching consequences such as lowering motivation among employees. In the situation of making decision for new product development in the fashion brands, lack of emotional leadership may lead to poor decision that fails to connect with the customers and the employees. This in turn demonstrated lack of communication with the key stakeholders such as customers, investors and employees.
Poor Communication with Employees in BHS Case
Further, the leadership behavior of Phillip Green was closely connected to fraud and money laundering. Phillip Green was accused of fraud charges and money laundering cases related to his BHS business. Phillip had to sell off his bankrupt business due to several reasons such as poor business ethics, unwillingness to innovate and others. However, BHS was liable of 571 million Euro pension fund deficits to his employees and in such a situation Phillip Green behaved unethically as a leader (Linkedin, 2021). Instead of paying the employees with the deficit fund and communicating with them, Phillip took the decision of selling the company. Moreover, investigation showed that most of the company funds were shifted to his wife’s account and this made the pension fund to swung from healthy surplus to a deficit. Such kind of behavior was inappropriate in this situation because the employees well deserved the money for their hard work and such action was not valued as a leader (Noonan, 2021). This is because such leadership style of Phillip can be connected to bullying, vanity, green and stubbornness that created an environment of wide employee disengagement.He was also accused by his internal stakeholders like the employees of sexual harassmentand racial abuse of his staff. Such type of self-serving leadershipwith lack of emotional intelligence and communicationis inappropriate because such type of leader only focuses at self-promotion and benefitting oneself at the expense of the team (Aravena, 2019). Such leadership style that Phillip demonstrated is destructive for the team and the organization because it demotivates the employees to perform and make the organization lose its reputation.
Achievements as Retail Entrepreneur
Since his commencement as a retail entrepreneur, Philip has always focused on adding new development and expansion of ideas in his business. In his initial years, Philip focused on new purchases and worked hard towards expanding product offerings and introducing flagship ideas. Such as kind of behavior can be linked with transformational leadership style that allowed the leader to work towards bringing new innovation (BBC, 2021). A transformational leadership style was appropriate for him at that moment because such behavior helped him to build a global name for Arcadia Group. Moreover, a transformational leadership behavior also allowed Philip Green to expand his Arcadia outlets and opened new academy for fashion retail (Jovanovica&Ciricb, 2016). It was his continuous innovative decisions that allowed Philip Green to build his name in the fashion retail industry.
Lack of Development Ability
Even though Philip Green was known for his innovation in his initial years of being an entrepreneur, yet he lost BHS because of his lack of innovation development and ignoring the growth of online shopping. Unwillingness to innovate and keeping pace with fast fashion trends, Green failed as a leader (BBC, 2021). In the situation of rising globalization,it was ineffective behavior by Philip Green to stop innovating and developing ideas because with rapid development of new high-street legend it was important for business entrepreneurs to innovate and form new decisions. Innovative leaders are important to solve challenges that is growing everyday with globalization (Trapp, 2021).
However, Philip failed to become a creative leader and this led to his failure as a leader. Poor ethics and brand focus were the major reason for the failure of Philip Green as a leader and an entrepreneur.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Leader
Strengths
From the overview of the development, capabilities, achievements and accusation faced by Philip Green over time helped in analyzing his strengths and weaknesses as a leader. From the analysis it is seen that the strengths of Philip Green as a leader is his ability to innovate and implement transformational leadership over time as an entrepreneur. According to Jovanovica, &Ciricb (2016), transformational leadership aims at motivating higher-order needs and bring major changes and innovation in the organization. Thus, with such leadership behavior, he has been able to tap the retail industry and become a successful entrepreneur within a short period of time. However, the strengths of Philip Green are limited in comparison to the weaknesses. There are number of weaknesses to the leadership ability of Philip Green and this has led to his downfall.
Weaknesses
In recognition of his weaknesses as a leader it is seen that Philip implemented authoritative leadership in which he focuses at taking decisions without consulting the group or team members much. Such kind of leadership has made it difficult for Philip Green to encourage contribution from the employees and creates discouragement among the employees to work effectively. This led Philip to fail as a leader. Moreover, poor ethics, lack of emotional intelligence and self-serving leadership style further adds to the weaknesses of Philip’s behavior as a leader. Philip shows poor emotional concerns in his decisions towards his employees or creating solution to a problem. His major focus is self-serving himself and earning profit from the business. Such behavior of Philip was also involved in sexual harassment and bullying incidents in the organization. Such leadership behavior has led to the downfall of his retail empire and made his infamous among other business entrepreneurs. This is because according to Aravena (2019).poor emotional intelligence on the part of leadership creates stress among the employees and fails to built positive relationship with the team. Further, workplace bullying from leaders often increases the extent of workplace burnout among the employees and high employee turnover. Such type of impact due to behavior of Philip Green has led to his downfall and weaknesses in his leadership ability.
Recommendations for the Leader
From the analysis a clear insight has been achieved on the weaknesses of Philip Green as a leader where he has failed to lead his organization and team ethically and with strong emotional intelligence. Thus, certain recommendations are needed to help Philip Green to improve their leadership behavior and learn from his failures.
Firstly, it is recommended that a leader should have strong emotional intelligence towards its subordinates and handle situations with keeping emotions as an important aspect. This makes it important for Philip Green to adopt to emotional leadership styles while managing his organization and businesses such as affiliative or democratic leadership style that considers the emotions of others when making decisions. Such decisions would help Philip to protect his company and his reputation in the market, which he lost due to the BHS case. Allen, Shankman & Miguel (2012) states that an emotionally intelligent leader is able to better manager themselves and their team by demonstrating behavior like empathy and care. This will allow him to eliminate his self-serving and unethical behavior towards the employees and only think about his own profit and benefits.
Secondly, it is recommended that Philip Green should hold on to his transformational leadership style even after he has established his fashion retail business and continue taking new innovation and change over time. This will help him keep pace with the ongoing change in the market due to globalization and the growing competition in the industry.
Lastly, it is recommended that Philip Green should show positive leadership traits in his behavior when handling his team such as honesty, integrity, strong communicator and delegating capability (Skinner & Spurgeon, 2005). This is because he lacks such positive traits in his behavior as a leader and honesty and good communication will enable him to develop a positive image among his employees that he has lost. He will be able to develop himself as a true leader and regain back his name of ‘king of the high-street’, which he has lost in recent years.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that Philip Green came into the market and grew his name as a top British fashion retailer and a business entrepreneur in his recent years, however, he failed to hold his position as a leader. This is because of his negative leadership behavior towards his employees such as lack of emotional consideration, authoritative leadership and poor communication. He was also accused of bullying and sexual harassment from his staffs at various circumstances. Philip Green came to be known as a self-serving and greedy leader, as he only considered his own profit and benefit. However, he had strong innovative capabilities and took various innovation over time in his initial years. This made Philip to Arcade empire and acquire BHS and built his name in the fashion retail industry. However, he was not able to continue his innovative capability for long and failed to keep pace with the growing globalization and competition. Thus, it is important for Philip Green and any leader to acquire emotional leadership style and strengthen his transformational leadership style to hold his position as top business entrepreneur of UK.
References
Allen, S. J., Shankman, M. L., & Miguel, R. F. (2012). Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: An Integrative, Process-Oriented Theory of Student Leadership. Journal of Leadership Education, 11(1).
Aravena, F. (2019). Destructive leadership behavior: An exploratory study in Chile. Leadership and policy in schools, 18(1), 83-96.
BBC. (2021). Sir Philip Green: From 'king of the High Street' to 'unacceptable face of capitalism'. BBC News. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36139828.
Blackhurst, C. (2021). When Management Today met Philip Green. Managementtoday.co.uk. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/when-management-today-met-philip-green/article/520101.
Jovanovica, D., &Ciricb, M. (2016).Benefits of transformational leadership in the context of education. The European Proceedings of Social &Behavioural Sciences EpSBS, 497-503.
Linkedin. (2021). Why Philip Green failed as a leader. Linkedin.com. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-philip-green-failed-leader-susy-roberts.
Nickerson, J. (2021). Sir Philip Green leadership failure and personal greed led to collapse of BHS, MPs say - CityAM. CityAM.Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.cityam.com/sir-philip-green-leadership-failure-and-personal-greed-led/.
Noonan, A. (2021). Why ethics and brand focus could have saved Philip Green from himself. Realbusiness.co.uk. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://realbusiness.co.uk/why-ethics-and-brand-focus-could-have-saved-philip-green-from-himself/.
Skinner, C., & Spurgeon, P. (2005). Valuing empathy and emotional intelligence in health leadership: a study of empathy, leadership behaviour and outcome effectiveness. Health Services Management Research, 18(1), 1-12.
Trapp, R. (2021). Arcadia’s Fall Is Further Evidence Of A Change At The Top Of Business. Forbes. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2020/11/30/arcadias-fall-is-further-evidence-of-a-change-at-the-top-of-business/?sh=648aeb274a49.
