Leader I Am Selecting Is Howard Schultz

¶ … leader I am selecting is Howard Schultz from Starbucks. Schultz founded the company based on his vision based on the coffeeshops of Europe, which filled a social function as well as serving coffee. He sought to design a shop for Americans that would serve the same dual function. His original name was Il Giornale, but when he had the opportunity to buy Starbucks from its original owners, he did that and merged the two operations.

Schultz graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Communication from Northern Michigan University, and indeed Communication has long been one of his strengths. Schultz has consistently been able to communicate his vision of the company to all employees, not just his senior management team. This vision is his strength, and that can be seen in a couple of ways at Starbucks. The first is that the company has a consistent look and feel to its stores.

The vision of what a Starbucks should be has been translated and interpreted in dozens of countries, by hundreds of franchise owners, and yet remains consistent enough that any customer will immediately recognize it. The other area where Schultz's superior vision comes into play can be seen when he returned to the company. After having built Starbucks into an empire, Schultz left the firm.

In his absence, the company made a number of missteps and seemed to move away from any coherent vision of what it wanted to be, and what the brand stood for. The result was inferior performance, something that was remedied when Schultz came back to the CEO role in 2007. The company's vision immediately became clearer, and performance began to improve once again.

This raises the question of whether Starbucks could be the same without him at some point, but for now it is clear that Schultz is an accomplished leader who has built a small chain in Seattle into an empire. In terms of leadership style, Schultz is effective because he has been able to excel in multiple styles. Arguably, this could be classed as situational leadership. His main strength is his vision, and his ability to communicate that vision.

This vision allows Starbucks to be in a state of constant transformation, reinventing the brand on the fly to take advantage of new opportunities in the market. There is a transactional component as well, because the vision that Schultz has for the company relies heavily on many employees being able to implement that vision with strict controls. Those controls are essential to the success of the company, because they ensure that there is a high level of consistency in the Starbucks experience.

The role that Schultz has always played when CEO of Starbucks is purely a leadership role. He is able to communicate his vision down the chain of command at the company so that lower-level managers are able to implement that vision clearly and consistently, something that did not seem to happen under any of the other CEOs that Starbucks has had. It is that clarity that not only allowed Starbucks to grow rapidly, but that has allowed it to avoid the mistakes that come.