Meg Whitman's consensus-building leadership style at eBay and Hewlett-Packard

Meg Whitman is the current Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hewlett-Packard, the technology company that specializes in business and consumer electronic devices and services. She worked at a number of Fortune 500 companies and eventually found herself at the head of an Internet startup, eBay. Her leadership there allowed the company to grow rapidly and become one of the most important sites of the early Internet era. eBay remains important to this day, testament to what Whitman and her team built. In 2012, she was brought into Hewlett-Packard. The company was in a bad operational and financial situation at the time and Whitman was assigned to revitalize the tech giant (Anders, 2013). This paper will discuss Whitman's leadership style, in particular drawing on her experiences at eBay and at HP.

Whitman's Leadership Style

Whitman is a consensus-builder who prefers to empower her teams. In particular, she focuses on nurturing innovation and working with the people in the company (Sanderson, 2012). This leadership style is combined with an emphasis on hiring that allows the company to have the right people on board, who are capable of achieving that company's mission. Once the right people are in place, they also need to be empowered, and that is something that comes from management. Whitman is known not to appreciate the autocratic leadership style (Anders, 2013).

Another aspect of Whitman's leadership style is that she seeks to be visionary. This was the case when she built eBay. The company was originally a small online transaction facilitator with a niche market. What Whitman recognized was that the company's capabilities exceeded -- by a considerable margin -- the company's target market. She expanded that target market and built the capabilities of eBay to meet the expanded vision that she had for the company.

She has now used the same approach at Hewlett-Packard. She began with a vision for where its industries were going in the coming years, and sought to rebuild the company as an organization that could meet those challenges and take advantage of those opportunities. The result was a series of rapid changes in the company, both in terms of its businesses and in the ways in which it does business (IDG, 2013). This style of building consensus is also something that was necessary at HP after a succession of self-interested and ultimately ineffective CEOs (McGregor, 2011).

Organizational Values

Whitman likes to build her companies in her own image. This means that the company begins with a broad-based vision of the world. HP has long been able to continuously reinvent itself, something that is necessary considering that the technology industry exists in a state of rapid, constant change. Whitman has sought with HP to position the company as visionary and build it around those visions. She excels at selling her visions to employees, and it was excellence in this area that contributed significantly to her hiring.

Another crucial organizational value that Whitman instills in her companies is that of integrity and honesty. Whitman is forthright, even where bad news is concerned. This blunt honesty allows her to get to the truth about key matters. This approach has helped her since taking over leadership of HP, winning contracts from Microsoft, for example, where the company had been unable to do so in the past (Anders, 2013). This was because she solicited and received honest feedback from Microsoft's CEO about why HP had not received previous contracts.

Ethical Behavior

When the CEO places a substantial emphasis on ethical behavior, that filters down throughout the organization. This is an area where Whitman can help HP. While the company does not have any major ethical issues, Whitman's approach where integrity is never compromised and honesty is critical will help HP be more direct in facing its challenges. This in turn will deliver better outcomes for the company. Further, Whitman's emphasis on integrity will allow those within the organization to continue to have a culture where ethical behavior is to a high standard. Whitman is not the sort of CEO to allow unethical behavior, even if that behavior is temporarily profitable.

Quality

The quality that contributes the most to Whitman's success thus far has been her ability to build teams and get the most out of them. In her career, Whitman has enjoyed the most success during her 15-year run with eBay. She grew the company, and to do this not only did she need vision (and a rapidly growing industry) but she also needed to be able to put teams together that were good enough. Her ability to build these teams and give them the tools that they needed to succeed is precisely why eBay became the company it did. Now, her role with HP is similar. She needs to rebuild the organization around the business as it currently exists today.

Influencers

Communication and collaboration influence group dynamics. Whitman seeks to be a facilitator. She encourages participation and honest communication, both of which will allow the managers of the organization to work with each other towards a common goal. In a sense, Whitman's approach is to cut out the politics that often define and influence how organizations communicate.

Whitman does maintain strong central control, however. While she allows for others within the organization to make strong contributions to decisions and to the daily work within the organization, these functions are essentially disconnected from actual political power. Whitman delegates political power evenly, but mainly to avoid having an organization that is too decentralized to succeed. Politics, again, is something Whitman seeks to reduce in terms of influence on the organization.

The organizational dynamics under Whitman must also be free-flowing. Whitman works in rapidly-changing industries where companies need to be able to respond quickly to change in order to thrive. Thus, she needs to have some decentralized decision-making, but within a context that prevents managers from accumulating too much power. In essence, if she is allowing them to make decisions and run divisions, they are well aware that this power comes by her decree.

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