Leadership Style Assignment: Sustainable management of SPC Ardmona

Question

Task: Part 1:
Answer following:
a) What leadership style, company’s CEO has adopted/adapted for supporting the employee engagement practices? How it has contributed towards bringing differences to the company’s product and services?

Part 1:
Answer following:
a) What leadership style, company’s CEO has adopted/adapted for supporting the employee engagement practices? How it has contributed towards bringing differences to the company’s product and services?

b) Looking into the planning and strategy process of the company, how does the company interact with its stakeholder and build effective value chain?

c) Comparing with other players in the industry, how effective you found the company to be, in using the digital business space, by involving social media?

Part 2:
This part of the task requires you to write your reflection on SPC Ardmona’s management approach. While doing so you are also advised to comment on their specific practices which have created a difference in Australian society. You should provide a comparative analysis, which will also be discussing the shortfalls, which you think the company should work on to practice better results.

For the purpose of this assignment, you are required to do research through the company's website (https://spc.com.au/our-story/), media report, white papers, and academic resources. In the situation of any doubts or unclear thoughts, you are advised to contact your respective tutor for more clarifications "

'STUDENTS ARE ADVISED FOR THIS TASK IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD NOT CONTACT SPC AUSTRALIA AND IT'S SUPPLY CHAIN'

Answer

Introduction
SPC Ardmona now known as Shepparton Partners Collective is an Australian company selected in this leadership style assignment deals with large packaging of foods. The company has its own and operates a factory for canning in Shepparton. The company had closed one of its processing units in Mooroopna 2011 due to financial problems (Spc.com, 2020). It later sold another factory in Kyabram in 2019 which was owned by Coca Cola Amatil from 2005 to 2019. This leadership style assignmentis based on the sustainable management of the company and the problems that it has faced during its operational years to bring in effectiveness through employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

Part 1
a) Mention the leadership style the company’s CEO has adopted or adapted for supporting the employee engagement practices
The CEO of the company has adopted a transactional leadership style for gaining employee engagement. As a transactional leader, the CEO of SPC Ardmona and its team members had a specific list of activities, tasks, goals and duties to achieve the highest quality of employee engagement. This kind of leadership style noted herein leadership style assignment is favourable when organizational objectives are based on focused performance results (Mascitelli and Chung, 2018). Transactional leadership favours ion employee engagement as it includes the frequent flow of feedback from both the end of the organisation, have clear expectation and opportunities for the employees to correct themselves. The transactional leadership style focuses on the status quo. The advantage of the transactional leadership style helps in achieving a greater level of employee engagement with motivated employees by receiving promotion and bonus.

The concept of transactional leadership illustrated in the leadership style assignment works well in developing the production and manufacturing lines of the business where activities are prescribed to have caused a deviation from the original path. The application of transactional leadership has brought in overall efficiency in SPC Ardmona in terms of increase in sales and overall production efficiency. Transactional leadership has fostered just-in-time production ice within SPC Ardmona where production starts after receiving food processing orders from the customer's end. It has helped the business in reducing the quantity of wastage as in earlier situations(Spc.com, 2020). Transactional leadership allows individuals to think about the expanded opportunities in increasing the sale of the business.

As per the investigation carried on this leadership style assignment, there has been a turnaround in the sales of the company in March 2017, where SPCA has signed a deal with Woolworths for supplying an extra 24000 tonnes of local Australian produce within the next five years. In addition to this, SPCA would supply Woolworths with cans, canned tomato soups and Australian branded fruits(Tomatonews.com ,2019). It is all due to governance and translational leadership that allowed the company to reach such a high sales mark in no time.

A transformational leader exhibits leadership behaviour that has the capacity to create a greater level of employee engagement within the employees. Therefore, the findings obtained in this segment of leadership style assignment signifies that employees develop a skill of organizational commitment and thrust to increase their productivity levels. The CEO of SPC has inculcated five different ways of improving employee engagement into the business (Spc.com, 2020). These include respecting employee’s attention towards feedback and complaints, providing thoughtful feedback to their queries, advocating for the employees to the external business agent, listening and following up and recognizing hard work and inspiring employees to put in greater efforts into the business. The use of transformational leadership affects employee performance by winning employee trust. As mentioned by O'Mahonyet al. (2016) in regards to the case scenario of leadership style assignment thatit is one of the most critical factors in determining employee performance. There is a strong correlation between trust and employee performance within a given level of performance and employee engagement. It includes the components like willingness to be loyal and engage with the company for a long-term.

Employee engagement among the employees of SPC has largely contributed to bringing a greater positive difference for the company's product and services by increasing productivity. Studies have suggested that employee engagement increased employee’s productivity in business by 21% (Spc.com, 2020). It is the end goal of SPC to make all its employees skilled, productive with the aim of filling business objectives. A proactive workforce helps increase a productive team within the business. It is believed that an engaged workforce shall work at a faster pace, harder and with much enthusiasm so as to find their work meaningful and justified. A satisfying workplace is expected to continue more than 40% to the production out of the business than an unsatisfied workforce. Employee engagement through transformational leadership is 44% more productive than satisfied employees (Spc.com, 2020).

Employee engagement increases the revenue of the business. With every 5 point increase in employee engagement, it leads to an increase in revenue by 3% (Spc.com, 2020).It is a fact presented in the leadership style assignment that when employees feel engaged towards the business, they put in extra efforts by going an additional mile to secure career-oriented and organisational objectives largely.

b) State the planning and strategy process for the company to interact with its stakeholder and build an effective value chain
Interfering upon the engagement skills and activities of the CEO of SPO, there are six different skills that he used in communicating with his stakeholders effectively. These include scheduling a meeting. Stakeholders meeting is one of the most common and important forms of communication to make them aware of the internal mechanisms of the business. The CEO of the company has used PPT, Prezi and other mind mapping tools in delivering periodic reports about the company to its investors through continuous communication (Rinaudoet al., 2020). The second method is sending out newsletters. It is through the collaborative platform of the company where the CEO has behaved in a proactive manner to include a greater number of stakeholders in communicating about the business and receiving immediate feedback.

A value chain is a series of activities that an organisation undertakes in creating value for itself to its customers. SPC Ardmona uses the concept of value chain developed by Porter that divides the business activities into two distinctive categories as primary and support. The primary activities of SPC Ardmona depicted in the segments of leadership style assignment consist of five components that are its inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing and sales and services. SPC Ardmona has engaged in value chain analysis to interact with the stakeholders independently. Just like in the traditional market, SPC Ardmona is engaged in receiving, inventory holding, and shelving during its operational hours (Spc.com, 2020).

Within the inbound logistics, the SPC Ardmona performs the function of receiving orders for food processing, warehousing of products and management of inventory. In this leadership style assignment, we will get to know that this system allows the company to save its costs in terms of wages and salaries of the employees (Pierce and Cook, 2020). The inbound logistics service helps the business to engage its stakeholders by informing and communicating on a regular basis about the inventory control system that gives a strong message to the stakeholders of SPC Ardmona that they are working together as a team. The primary operations of SPC Ardmona are food processing in Australia.

In other words, it converts the raw materials into marketable products that can be easily sold to the final customers for operational activity. The support activities of SPC Ardmona perform assisting orioles that help the primary function of SPC Ardmona to perform in a better way and efficiently (Spc.com, 2020). The supporting activities of the company outlined within this leadership style assignment are its overhead costs enlisted in the income attempt of the company as procurement, technological development, human resource management and infrastructure.

c)Effectiveness of SPC Ardmona in using digital business pace by involvement of social media It is due to social media advertising that Australia's largest food packing company has been able to increase its sales by more than 50% margin within a year (Tomatonews.com ,2019). The cost of an increase in sales is zero for the company. It is because the idea of using the digital business platform by involving social media did not come from any advertisement agency. Instead, the idea was developed from a food blogging website (Hammadiet al., 2019). The Australian federal government had denied extending financial help to SPC Andoma for an amount of $25 million as a means of an assistance package to improve its sales and income.

However, the readings utilized to develop this leadership style assignment illustrates that social media campaign of the company known as SPC Sunday has helped the shoppers to purchase more products from SPC Ardmona in support of the fruit packing company. Linda Drummond had created the campaign in the name of SPC Sunday campaign with an attempt of removing all the negativity about the company surfaced by the Australian media about the uncertain future of SPC (Spc.com, 2020). The digital campaign of SPC on twitter included a formal request to the users of having Twitter peaches and ice cream night on Sunday the 9th of February.

The food blogger had encouraged the Australian to extend their support to its people by posting images of them enjoying SPC Ardmona’s product. The leadership style assignment examines that the advertisement was aimed towards empowering the existing customers of the company and bringing in prospective consumers. The idea of empowering people turned out to be a greater success and resulted in supporting Australian grown products and food. Support was received by SPC Ardmona from all corners such as politicians and celebrities that began an online campaign with a hashtag. It was later found that the movement had received 10000 tweets in just 3 days. The Sunday page of SPC Ardmona had received likes for 2500 and the campaigns turned out to be the best success with 20 million of positive responses (Spc.com, 2020).

The social media strategy for the company that is differentiated from other existing market competitors was that single-minded strategy by the company. The tagline of the campaign was named as being proud to be a part of Australia, as the land has created, grown and manufactured good agricultural produce for the company to survive in the long-run. An Easy Call to Action was encouraged participation from all sections of the society to implement the tragic growth of the company on Sunday.

Part 2
Reflect of SPC Ardmona management approach
SPC Ardmona is a proud producer and manufacturer of food and vegetables in the Goulburn Valley Region of Victoria, Australia. The selected leadership style for the company presented in the leadership style assignment was a translational leadership style that focuses on employee engagement skills and employee productivity development. After analysing the company’s operations and management style, I would like to opine that SPC Ardmona has entered into a new era of business after the arrival of its new managing director. RegWeine replaced Peter Kelly in 2015 as the new managing director of SPC Ardmona that saved the business from the verge of closure. However, the business is yet to break-even its profitability margin. Weine had previous work experience in Victorian dairy processors known as Bulla Foods and believed that SPC shall soon start to earn a profit during the time of his leadership (Wu, 2018). Considering the studies reviewed to prepare this leadership style assignment I absolutely believe that the strategies and management approach of Wine is in the path of profitability for the company that will mandate the SPC Ardmona to get back its previous status of largest food processor company in Australia. The number one strategy and objective for Weine is to turn the business into a profitable venture (Spc.com, 2020).

The specific practice that was brought in Australia to make a difference in the industry was an online campaign like #MyFamily Can. The campaign illustrated that a family having all major products of SPC are the ones available in Australia. SPC has focused on its valuable real estate farming done by households that have converted 4 million cans into 4 million conversation beginners in all Australian supermarkets. The management of SPC considered locally focusing upon the brand DNA and bringing about its USP in Australian organic produce. This has created a significant difference from the other brands in gaining positive support and favourable discussion at the grassroots level for the business.

I perceive that SPC business shall be reducing its risk probability of failing on its income and profits since the last year. The management approach adopted under the leadership of Kelly was known to be a try everything approaches. Under this approach as discussed in this leadership style assignment, it includes asking the Australian government for technical and financial assistance, challenging out the anti-dumping laws by the developed nations and pleading to the customers to purchase and place bulk orders of food to support domestic agriculture (Burgin, 2016). I am certain that adoption of this approach shall bring in better focus on the core business operations however; it is still at the planning stage for developing the efforts of the predecessor.

According to my view, it would like to mention in this leadership style assignment that the Australian government is reluctant to put forward efforts in supporting the SPC business through regulating the procurement of raw material and enforcement of the anti-dumping legislation into the country. I am certain that Peter is on the right path of success at present and I do not think he has left any stone unturned to bring forth changes into the business. The major shortfall faced by the business of SPC Ardmonais the risk of running out of stock (Hacker et al., 2020). Currently, the company is engaged in producing tomato-based products that are of high demand in the Australian market that it might be very soon it shall run out of stock creating a greater number of panic buyers. The tomato harvest in the country has gone down by 105 and the company predicts it can only process around 40000 tonnes of tomato-based products. Therefore, it can be seen in the leadership style assignment that the company fails in managing its inventory and safety level for the company.

Conclusion
In the current situation as discussed in the above sections of leadership style assignment, business sustainability is essential for long-term growth and prosperity for MNC business. Using sustainable approaches, the company can serve its customers in a better way and build up customer satisfaction through maximised opportunities. It also helps in minimising the impact of dependency on core operations that have on the environment. Therefore, if SPC could have justified its use of the business sustainable principle, then it would have allowed the company to continue its business operations through Australia as well as in the food retailing business worldwide. The benefits of sustainable management discussed in the leadership style assignment could have helped SPC in gaining knowledge about the environmental and social benefits of the business to incorporate within its operational activities. ?

Reference list
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Hammadi, A., Reiners, T., Taylor, R., Earnest, J. and Wood, L., 2019. We have to integrate to engage in change: exploring sustainable project management. In the 26thEurOMA conference.

Mascitelli, B. and Chung, M., 2018. Survival at the Intersection of Government and Business: The Unique Case of the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade). Australian Journal of Public Administration, 77(3), pp.415-426.

O'Mahony, B., Dalrymple, J., Levin, E. and Greenland, S., 2016.The role of information communications technology in sustainable water management practice.International Journal of Sustainable Agricultural Management and Informatics, 2(1), pp.79-92.

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Spc.com, 2020, All About Australia’s favourite Brand, Available from https://spc.com.au/ [Accessed on 2nd June, 2020]

Tomatonews.com ,2019, All About Australia: SPC Ardmona sold to Shepparton Partners Collective, Available fromhttp://www.tomatonews.com/en/australia-spc-ardmona-sold-to-shepparton-partners-collective_2_728.html [Accessed on 2nd June, 2020]

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