Diamond Wipes International - Essay Example

? Diamond Wipes International Case Study mentor’s Introduction Eve Yen founded Diamond Wipes International in the mid-nineties. Given Yen’s background as an expatriate who just moved to the United States, the success of Diamond Wipes International is little short of amazing. The company has an annual revenue of around fifteen million dollars and employs over 100 people now. Yen had no former experience as a business owner or as a manager but she managed to pursue her enterprise to come to the top. Diamond Wipes International was featured in Fortune Small Business as well as other prestigious business avenues. The journey has not always been smooth for Eve Yen given she had little management and business experience when she started out (Longnecker, Petty and Palich). This case study will look into various choices made by Eve Yen in context of her company’s management and business choices to decipher their success. Recommendations will be provided for areas where improvements could be done. What leadership style did Eve Yen use with her employees? Describe her actions that support your choice. Eve Yen can be seen largely as a democratic and an affiliative leader in most of her actions. Eve’s respect for other people’s opinions especially her employees opinions before making large decisions reflects that she acts as a democratic leader. In addition, Eve’s close relationship to her employees and her sensitivity towards her employees shows that she is an affiliative leader (Longnecker, Petty and Palich). What aspects of Eve’s leadership approach directly or indirectly affected the problems that developed? Clearly explain the connections between Eve’s behaviors and the resulting problems. A business leader must wear many hats at the same time in terms of being a leader. Among other leadership styles, the leader must be authoritative where required. This does not mean that the leader must be authoritative at all times but it does indicate that the leader must act authoritatively where he feels it is required. The lack of management experience meant that Eve Yen acted too personally with her employees in terms of leadership style. This meant that employees saw her as a weak character whose instructions and set objectives could be ignored (Lerner). In addition, Eve’s lack of character judgment meant that she hired the wrong people for the right positions. As a consequence of this bad decision making, the company lost money as the newly hired people failed to perform their duties as per the settled objectives and provided instructions. Another major shortcoming on the part of Eve Yen as a leader was her lack of consideration for short term and long term objectives. A good leader must have the ability to stand above everyone else and see beyond the horizon. Only this can allow a business leader to guide his team in the right direction. However, Even Yen failed to look beyond everyone else and faced numerous challenges as her organization was expanding. Being a leader, Eve Yen should have speculated what was required to expand especially for a rapidly expanding company like Diamond Wipes International. Explain why entrepreneurs in general have difficulty being effective organizational managers. How does Eve Yen reflect these characteristics? As mentioned before, an entrepreneur must wear many different hats at the same time in order to be an effective leader. Most entrepreneurs wear one leadership style that suits them and then try to make employees attune themselves to that leadership style. However, individuals working for an organization differ in their thinking and approach to work. The business leader must be ready to deal with differentiated individuals by being a wholesome leader for all employees. In order to deal with this dilemma, the business leader has to be prepared to work as a dynamic leader who keeps shifting his leadership style as the situation requires of him. Ineffective organizational managers are unable to shift into new gears when the situation demands it. Such managers will either shift into the situation late or will never shift their leadership style to deal with the situation. It is unrealistic to expect one leadership style to provide solutions for all kinds of situations faced by a business manager. The lack of flexibility in leadership styles makes most organizational managers ineffective (Low). Even Yen is a democratic and affiliative leader in large part but she must also behave as a coaching leader and as an authoritative leader when the situation demands it. The lack of firmness on Eve’s part as well as a lack of grooming employees to take them forward can be seen as inherent ineffective management issues in Eve’s personality. Eve said, “By 2006 I had started to worry.” (about expansion). What planning should she have been doing in the 11 years since she started her company? Be specific in the actions that were needed. Eve’s planning fell short of the business demands of a rapidly expanding organization. The first thing that Eve should have done in regards to planning was to incorporate planning as a core business activity. This would have allowed Eve to sort out long term and short term objectives so that expansion based activities could be dealt with. In the current scenario, Eve treated all business operations on the same priority levels and placed greater emphasis on short term objectives such as fulfilling current consumer demand. This approach sustained business but misplaced the emphasis required for long term objectives such as expansion. The incorporation of differentiated objectives into business activities would have allowed Eve to sort out this dilemma (Trevino, Brown and Hartman). In addition, Eve should have hired the services of a professional with a strong reputation to ease out the expansion pang. Hiring a professional with a strong reputation benefits any expanding business two fold – the costs of transition are low and the transitional process leaves little human resource damage in its wake. Eve’s move to hire new people and then fire them can be seen as little else than escalation in costs and damage to the overall human resources process. Eve hired three office assistants and a general manager she had to fire. Explain steps she could have taken that may have improved the quality of the people she brought into her company. Any business is essentially the sum total of its employees. In order to hire the best people around, Eve like other companies should have used the services of a professional hiring team. Finding the right people for the right job is hard but not impossible. In Eve’s case, the rapid expansion forced her to hire new people who she deemed as solutions in themselves. However, a lack of training and a lack of interest in the company’s overall objectives meant that the assistants and general manager were fired by Eve later. This also meant that other employees started feeling insecure about their positions given the rapid hire and fire strategy (Ulrich). A professional service used to hire new employees would have meant that the extraneous money spent on pays would have been diverted to the hiring process. In this sense, hiring a professional service would not represent new costs to be dealt with. In addition, the chances of employees sticking around after being hired by a professional hiring service would have been greater. It must be taken into account that a person such as Eve carrying out recruitment on their own cannot match the results delivered by a professional service. The large amount of contacts as well as a large application database would mean that a professional hiring service would have provided better quality people for Eve’s business. Eve experienced a number of problems in her production process. Recommend ways she could have developed a more effective production process. The evolution of the production process at Diamond Wipes International was largely a coincidental process rather than a structured process. Once the company began to expand, Eve should have diverted her attention to the production process in order to streamline the overall process to boost customer satisfaction levels. In order to do this, Eve could have used a number of different production management techniques such as time motion studies, inventory maintenance philosophies and the like. However, carrying out these activities on her own or with her staff would not have provided the results afforded by a professional service. In order to garner their skills, the staff and Eve could have planned out the entire production process which could later be vetted by a professional service. Works Cited Lerner, R. M. Concepts and theories of human development. Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ, 2002. Print. Longnecker, J. G., et al. Small Business Management . Mason, OH: Cengage, 2010. Print. Low, Albert. Conflict and Creativity at Work: Human Roots of Corporate Life. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2008. Print. Trevino, L. K., M. Brown and L. P. Hartman. “A qualitative investigation of perceived executive ethical leadership: Perceptions from inside and outside the executive suite.” Human Relations 55 (2003): 5-37. Print. Ulrich, D. Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996. Print. Read More