Leadership Styles According To Bill Gates

Leadership styles according to Bill Gates

Short biography

Bill Gates was born in 1955. He loved computers and he started programming Mainframe computers when he was 13 years old.

He developed his own version of Basic programming language while attending Harvard University. He began Microsoft as a society with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Microsoft became a company incorporated in 1981.

Gates imagined the scale of the use of personal computers worldwide. He expected the computer power to become cheap. As a result, he also expected most people to pay a computer. He was finally right and built a software industry to support this growth. His efforts turned out that he was one of the richest people on the planet.

Leadership style

Bill Gates is highly appreciated in the business world, which is often among the 10 main of the most admired business leaders. Until the moment of his retirement from Microsoft in 2008, Gates was known as a very demanding and slightly abrasive boss who encourages creativity and innovation and recognizes individual and team achievements.

Bill Gates’ leadership style is authoritarian (autocratic), however, most leaders, including Gates, exhibit more than one leadership style. Different leadership styles can be adopted according to the situation, however, most leaders have one or two dominant styles that are noticed most of the time.

It is unlikely that Gates had had as much success as he if he had only adopted an authoritarian style.

The authoritarian style tends not to lead to innovation, since its controlling aspect hinders the follower’s ability to be creative.

This leadership style is very effective to use in emergency situations or where quick decisions are required. Much of Bill Gates’s success can be attributed to his rapid decision -making process.

He has become a famous leader not only for his leadership qualities and skills, but also for his leadership styles. Bill Gates apart from following the autocratic leadership since he is competent and knowledgeable to decide on each and everything. He also follows a transformative leadership style while trying to attract employee ’emotions through motivation and support. He also has visionary leadership and strategic leadership style.

Leadership qualities and skills

Here are some of his leadership qualities and skills:

1. Work tirelessly: the most powerful leadership quality of Gates is that he is very active. He spent many years working on his garage, developing coding and programming, and learning how to create a solution with global scope. He worked endless hours. Even after Microsoft and that began to succeed, Bill worked long hours to understand the public and develop the products that respond to their commercial, educational and consumer needs.
2. Looking forward: whatever happens, Bill continues looking forward. Despite his phenomenal success, he had a fight with antitrust litigation alleging that Microsoft was a monopoly. He always prefers to focus on the future instead of getting distracted by current challenges.
3. Grow and learn: your other powerful leadership quality is that the more it grows, the more you will learn. After being as one of the billionaires for several consecutive years, it would be easy for Gates to feel proud or think that he knows everything, but it is not so. He is well known for his wisdom when looking for the advice of other successful people. Bill Gates who, despite having abandoned school, did not mean to ignore what a good education can provide. Learning is a life process under your leadership style. There is always something new to learn every day if you are willing to look for it in your life. Even after he helped found Microsoft and made him a software empire, Gates was working on his skills to speak in public, his communication skills and the ways in which he could improve social interactions with others.
4. Have a vision: Another quality and leadership skill of Bill Gates is that he is a leader with a great vision. His vision was to seek the creation of a graphical interface that became Microsoft software. Looking back on his interviews about the development of Microsoft, Gates says he always wanted to have more than one product. Gates also adopts a practical approach to establish objectives. He has a great image that takes into account. Instead of creating an inaccessible vision, Gates uses a steps -based approach to move towards his vision. It’s like trying to climb a ladder. With this leadership style, you are taking a step at the same time instead of trying to jump from the bottom up.
5. It remains focused: the reason for being a successful leader is that he is always focused on a thing that is software instead of focusing on multiple things. Throughout his life, he was caught in him and worked hard to dominate the market with him. Knowing something is very different from having wisdom. Gates focuses on the only thing he knows better, which is the software, and then does the best that can become. He worked hard to dominate his industry, turned the execution into a priority and clung to the skills he considered stronger. He can still see this approach through the work he does with his charitable foundation.
6. Think big: Gates is a visionary leader and loves to think big. He encourages him to dream big, not for himself, but also for his company and organization.
7. He cares about people: despite being the most important billionaire in the world, Bill is a philanthropist and a humanitarian who always cares about the least privileged parties in the world. He is the 1% one that gave most of his wealth for food causes.
8. Stimulates intellect and creativity: without those two, Microsoft would not be so successful. Bill Gates stimulates his employees to be creative and intellectuals and direct this great company. Instead of staying in a comfort zone, Gates encouraged himself and his people to embrace creativity. His leadership style works to empower people because individual perspectives create new opportunities to explore ideas.
9. He cares about the environment: Gates recently announced that he would lead a fund of more than one billion to combat climate change investing in new ways of producing clean energy. He also announced that he will lead a group of investors whose combined wealth totalizes 170 billion.

Other leadership qualities and skills are:

• Follow a long -term approach.
• He puts passion in everything he does
• Constantly evolving
• Help others returning
• High in integrity

Transformational leadership attributes

Bill Gates focused on transformational leadership because that style came naturally. He could adapt to other types of leadership when the need arose, but for the most part, his time in Microsoft was dominated by this leadership style.

He loves Microsoft’s products or hates them, you can’t deny the fact that Gates put a lot of love in everything he did for the company. Even if all he had to do was write a thank you note, he was guaranteed a message that came directly from his heart. Like many transformational leaders, the belief of Bill Gates is that if it is worth doing something, then it is worth doing the best that he can.

The qualities of a transformative leader include the following points of emphasis:

• There is the desire to encourage personal creativity in oneself and in the rest of the team.
• Individual support and encouragement are provided instead of focusing this resource on team -based perspectives.
• The motivation is individualized and inspiring, with a clear communication of the leader to promote a specific path to a final result.
• The development of the confidence of the followers, which leads to respect, because there is evidence that the ideas implemented will really work.

It is for these qualities that many of the people who began working for Gates began to emulate their leadership style.

Bill Gates leadership style weaknesses

Nobody is perfect. Each leader makes mistakes from time to time. Leaders have specific weaknesses who must identify to work also. Ignoring the weaknesses of one is a sign that they are not yet ready to assume the responsibility of leadership.

These are the weaknesses that Gates has identified as part of his general leadership perspective.

1. Arrogance: when a person is passionate and knows a topic well, there is a fine line between arrogance and knowledge. Gates communicates opinions or ideas that he feels they are correct. If he feels that his idea is the best solution, then that is the idea that is pursued. If that idea does not work, then your work approach can become a weakness, especially if other ideas are presented to consider.
2. Results oriented: Most transformational leaders seek results on processes. Bill Gates is one of the few exceptions to this rule. Although he often was oriented to the results, adopting an approach sometimes where the ‘end justified the media’, there were times when the logical steps of progression were ignored. He concentrated so much on obtaining the objectives that had been set for him and his team that lost the notion of those steps.
3. Avoid conflicts: Transformational leaders want to bring people to the same page. The objective is that the whole team focuses on achieving a specific goal, mission or vision. When you push people with force, there are times when these people will begin to go back. Gates often avoided the conflict whenever he could, instead of facing the situation in front, because the act of the conflict bothered him. When there is no will to face a problem, it is possible that negative energy exploits and covers a team with its influence.

references

• ‘Bill Gates | DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ’. January 26, 2016.
• ‘Bill Gates Cofounder, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’. Forbes. August, 2017.
• ‘Bill Gates | American Computer Programmer, Businessman, and Philanthropist ’. Britannica Encyclopedia. December 7, 2018.
• “Timeline: Bill Gates: 1973; From Google (Bill Gates Major in Harvard) Result 3 ′. October 5, 2015.
• “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates” Netflix original series, September 2019.
• "Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge" Bennis and Burt (1986).
• "The experience of leadership" third edition. DAFT, 2002