Organisational Leadership

INDIVIDUAL ASSESSMENT ESSAY – SIR RICHARD BRANSON

'Doing good can help improve your prospects, your profits, and your business; and it can change the world. We must change the way we do business' - Richard Branson

This essay focuses and outlines the leadership style of Sir Richard Branson who is a business magnate, philanthropist and an investor based in London, United Kingdom. He is known for his go-getter spirit with an attitude to stand tall despite multiple failures.

The above fact very well transcribes the number of companies (approximately 400) instilled today under the umbrella of “Virgin Group”. Sir Richard Branson started his venture through record business and gradually built the empire with its headquarter in London, United Kingdom, 71,000 employees on-board and revenue recorded of ‎£19.5 billion till last year and is still on pathway.  The Virgin Group pre dominantly caters to Travel, Media & Entertainment, Hospitality, Health and Wellness, Finance and Communications and many commercial streams in form of investments.

Being a visionary, he firmly believed that “There was no point in starting your own business unless you do it out of sense of frustration”. This is probably a reason which has made him comeback with firm belief that he needs to combat failures and draw a strategic graph to reach his desired goals and hence I feel that he is a leader of today and tomorrow.

The main outline of this essay is to understand Sir Branson’s leadership with detailed synthesis of information gathered through various sources:

• Concept of Leadership
• Analysing the leadership style of Sir Richard Branson through application of

2 – 3 leadership theories

• Critical evaluation of his effectiveness as a managerial leader

“Leadership” is a broad term on landscape about managing people and subsequently organization.

While many studies have focused on leadership as a trait, this perspective suggests that certain people in our society have special inborn qualities that make them leaders. However this view restricts leadership to those who are believed to have special characteristics. In contrast, the approach in this text suggests that leadership is a process that can be learned and that is available to everyone.

It’s a phenomenal process whereby an individual influences a group of people towards achieving a common goal which takes place in small group, community or a large group compassing entire organization (Northouse, 2015).  Leadership and management are two coins which act as a driving force for any organization to target right directions and achieve their strategic goals.  Leadership is more about vision for future, setting the context within to determine challenges and opportunities and developing far sighted strategies for producing the changes required to conceptualize the vision (Daft, 2015). Moreover, leadership is a combination of complex moral relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion and shared vision (Ciulla, 2014).

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