Richard Branson Leadership Style

Richard Branson: Servant Leader
As Robbins and Judge (2017) point out, technical skills are not enough for a leader of an organization to be successful. Interpersonal skills are also necessary—mainly because a leader must be able to develop strong relationships with followers in order to achieve organizational goals. Richard Branson has shown himself to be exceptional at developing relationships with followers, communicating his vision, and serving his workers so that they in turn will serve the vision and achieve the goals that Branson has set out for himself and his teams.
What specifically has Branson achieved? Branson launched the Virgin brand in the late 1960s when he began selling records in the UK from his church basement. He started the record label Virgin Records in 1972, and the airline Virgin Atlantic in 1984. None of it would have been possible without his focus on the need to serve others and to help people get what they could not get otherwise. For example, his record business was a success because he helped consumers purchase the records they wanted at discount prices. His record label was a success because he signed groups that could not find a home at other labels because they were too controversial—groups like the Sex Pistols and the Rolling Stones (Entrepreneur, 2008). His airline grew out of his experience of having a flight cancelled and deciding to charter his own flight home and offering seats to other passengers at a discount rate to cover costs (Zeveloff, 2011).
His business leadership principle is summarized in this quote: “If you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of your customers and your customers will take care of your shareholders” (Entrepreneur, 2008). Branson has always been about serving others: “Customer service is everything in the end,” he states (Gallo, 2013). The idea of servant leadership is inherent in Branson’s approach to leadership. He understands that in order to be a successful leader one must be willing to serve the needs of others. If one is not serving others, there is no point to being in business. Every one of his businesses in the Virgin Group has grown out of an identified need—i.e., a reason to satisfy others.
Branson is able to achieve great things as a leader because he uses the tools of servant leadership to engage others. He uses emotional and social intelligence to understand what consumers want and how he can support his teams and organizations to help get consumers what they desire. The essence of this kind of intelligence is in the ability to read people and movements. Branson has no interest in trying to exploit people are make a dollar in the same manner as myriad other faceless corporations that are all piggy-backing over one another, chasing after the same goal. Branson looks at the businesses caught up in the rat race and gets frustrated with the way they do business. They put profits before people. Branson’s goal is to put people before profits—and in doing that he has been able to achieve immense profits. But the goal was never to make a fortune. The goal, rather, was to serve others by doing for them what no one else would or could (Gallo, 2013).
Thus, whether it was getting consumers discount records, signing castoffs and outcasts to record deals and turning them into stars, or getting travelers to their final destinations when no other carrier could, Branson always took the people-first approach to business. And in developing successful businesses, his people-first approach has included treatment of employees: by keeping his workers happy, he keeps his clients and consumers happy—and that has been the key to his success.
References
Entrepreneur. (2008). Richard Branson: The PT Barnum of British business. Retrieved
from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197616
Gallo, C. (2013). How Southwest and Virgin America Win by Putting People Before
Profit. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2013/09/10/how-southwest-and-virgin-america-win-by-putting-people-before-profit/
Robbins, S. & Judge, T. (2017). Organizational Behavior, 17th Edition. UK: Pearson.
Zeveloff, J. (2011). Richard Branson: How a canceled flight led to the world’s greatest
travel empire. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/richard-branson-entrepreneur-visionary-2011-5/