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Part
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Personal Leadership Impact Case Studies - Part 1
Two examples of companies that used self-leadership to drive change and results are Zappos and Nurse Next Door.
SELF LEADERSHIP IN NURSE NEXT DOOR IMPROVED THE COMPANY'S PERFORMANCE AND CREATED BETTER TEAM MEMBERS
- Nurse Next Door's CEO, Cathy Thorpe, realized that the company was not seeing the desired results after two years at the helm.
- She found that the middle management team in the organization was inefficient because processes were often taking too long to resolve.
- After reading an article on LinkedIn, she realized that there were basic adult skills that were missing from her staff members in the organization: staff members were arriving late and unprepared for meetings, and they were used to taking orders from managers above them and were complacent and not proactive in their work.
- Together with her team, they realized that middle management could not teach people good work ethic or personally motivate their staff, and she realized that everyone in the staff had to take personal accountability.
- Together with her team, she supplied several copies of the article, “10 Things That Require Zero Talent,”. The article taught valuable self-leadership skills.
- Staff members were encouraged to develop and grow their personal and professional goals, as well as being proactive and identify any inefficient processes that they came across in their work.
- She created a flat organizational structure by eliminating a lot of the middle management.
- They embarked on attracting, hiring, and keeping self-motivated staff members and supporting them to ensure they achieve success.
- The work environment was largely autonomous, and they eliminated annual performance reviews and instead gave feedback and guidance.
- The results were increased productivity, increased job satisfaction as staff members took ownership of their work, a larger team of leaders, and improved business performance.
- The improved performance was due to the fact that team members were now driving innovation.
THE SUCCESS OF ZAPPOS THROUGH SELF-LEADERSHIP
- Zappos originally started by only selling shoes.
- Zappos has achieved tremendous success and this has been attributed to the company's CEO Tony Hseih, who came into the company and decided that the company needed to sell more than just goods; they had to sell an experience.
- To survive, the company also had to change their business model, and they started retailing men and women's clothing and accessories.
- He decided to change the company's values to achieve the desired success, and he attributes the success to focusing more on self-improvement and self-leadership.
- He states that through his own personal development, he encourages his employees to better and efficiently overcome obstacles.
- In Zappos' company culture book, an employee states values that have helped him embrace personal leadership in the organization.
- He states that the company is full of employees who have "fear of stagnation, genuine desire to watch others succeed, thrill of the unknown, restless quest for truth" among other attributes.
- The CEO is known to tell employees to do what "they think right for their client" and hence giving rise to self-motivated employees that are continuously looking for ways to contribute, innovate, and to make an impact.
- Through these values, the company went from not making any profit to making over a billion dollars annually.
- The company was later acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2000, and it is still a vital part of Amazon.