Introduction
Personal effectiveness is an integral part of self-assessment to achieve personal goals. It includes some ideas from the power of positivity and psychology. It makes able an individual to set goals, motivate, and able to work in a diverse culture. It is important for an individual in order to understand their talent and skills or they learn to use these optimistically. In other words, personal effectiveness is the best utilization of a person’s ability, skills, or skills to enhance their personal and professional life (Al-Musawi, 2020). The most important objective of being personally effective is to achieve personal goals and get success. Personal effectiveness plays a vital role in the organization as it enables the employee to perform productively and efficiently. Further, it helps to develop their own skills and ensure their future success. Thus, the personal effectiveness goals are influential people in a positive manner, increase productivity, development in career, able to meet the deadline, develop knowledge and becomes expert in their particular area, etc.
The present report will discuss the personal effectiveness strategies in the regard of Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. Further, the report discusses Sundar Pichai’s positive and negative leadership characteristics and its behaviour pattern which help him to become a personally effective leader. The report describes the importance of possessing skills, and personal development, which made Pichai a global leader. Finally, the report will cover self-assessment and objectives to be achieved, and the required action plan to achieve these needs and goals.
Case Study of Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai Skills and behaviour which made him a personal effective global leader
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google is known for his good leadership skills such as problem-solver, soft-spoken, time-manager, and hard-worker along with an ability to lead and work with a team that has enhanced his skills and enables him to be what he is now (Fuadiet.al. 2019). In the context of Sundar Pichai qualities and skills, the following discussion can be considered:
A good communicator- Pichai has very enhanced communication skills and he is famous to interact according to the audience. He put a lot of effort to improve his communication skills. Being a good communicator, he ensures that their employee in the organization irrespective of hierarchy, understand the set goals properly. Further, he easily connects emotionally with the people and its employees and also values their emotions and feelings.
Flexible– Pichai possessing the skill of resilience which was evident during the launch of Google Chrome as a web browser, and creating it a less conflict market leader. His ten engineers team started testing and facing too much resistance from the Google shareholders. At that time Sundar Pichai faces a lot of criticism for presenting Chrome to the founder of Larry and Sergey. Additionally, Eric Schmidt also creates hindered on this project. However, Google Chrome’s success is the outcome of Sundar’s flexibility and resilience power that he gets success to get acceptance of Larry’s to launch the project.
Collaborative approach- Pichai’s goal is to avoid disputes, and confrontations so, he always tries to implement collaboration among their employees (Lyle, 2020). He creates and adopts the co-operation strategies to become a supportive leader. Moreover, Pichai shows the ability to be subdued and is generally eager to collaborate without hesitation to get into political diplomacy in order to enhance its internal culture.
An Affiliative leader– “People Come First” is the best-suited quote, which describes the affiliative style of leadership. Sundar Pichai phrase- “being a leader, it is important to not just see your growth but concentrate on the growth of others”. Hence, it is clear from this statement that Pichai has the ability to become a global leader and establish intellectual dominance.
Strong negotiation skills- Pichai also holds strong negotiation skills in order to remove any kind of barrier to implement growth strategies. He is getting immense success during negotiations with employees, third-party partners, stakeholders, and other partners. Thus, his negotiation skills help him to become a personally effective leader.
The positive element of SundarPichai’sbehaviour and skills and their impacts.
Sundar Pichai adopts personal effectiveness strategies which lead him to become a successful global leader. He is an affiliative leader and focuses on his objective to getting out the best from others. This led to the growth of others, which result in the overall development of the organization and an individual as well (Zare and Namdarpour, 2020). The positive element and effect of behaviours and skills of Sundar Pichai are given below:
High-level motivation- To become an ambitious leader in order to achieve long-term success: Sundar Pichai set an example that leads not only focusing on individual success but also pay attention to the overall growth and success of other peers. Thus, they hire a competent workforce and motivated them towards work for the organization’s success. The leader’s role is to reduce hindrance and obstacles in the way of success so that they can fulfil their needs. Hence, Sundar Pichai focuses to motivate its employees and include them to participate in the decision-making process. Further, he positively encourages employees and as a result of this action, employees are motivating to share their suggestions and perspective about the strategies and contribute constructively and not hesitate to share any problem. Further,they also provide their valuable feedback and grievance for the improvement of the company.
Resilience and flexible leader- As above mentioned, during the launching of Google Chrome as a web browser Pichai face a lot of resistance such as Chrome testing was being conducted by ten engineers and they face hindrance from the company as no one was willing to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Green and Sestir, 2017). Even when Pichai share their idea in front of Google Chrome CEO and founder Sergey and Larry, they were also not interested in this project. But being a resilient person, he somehow won the confidence of Larry in favour of the launch of Chrome. Finally, Google Chrome was introduced in 2008, and they mark significant success and made history around the universe. Now, Chrome possesses around 68 per cent of the market share, whereas Microsoft’s Internet Explorer holds below 7 per cent of the total market share.
Excellent public speaker- Pichai is a well-known speaker and good communicator, as he holds the skills to communicate with people on the type of audience. Moreover, he interacts with people on an emotional level, which develops an emotional connection with others. He respects and values other’s emotions and feelings. Being a leader, he ensures that every employee understands and interprets the goals and objectives of the organization.
The negative element of SundarPichai’sbehaviours and skills and their impacts.
Lack of innovation and not operating in the organization- Google and Alphabet CEO Sergey Brin and Larry Page appoint their successor to Sundar Pichai as the CEO of both companies. However, Pichai not performing well to operate and innovate in both organizations, which proved that Brin and Larry committed a mistake (Hasneezahet.al.2020). Therefore, large-scale organizations often face hurdles and struggle to implement changes, which requires proficient staff with creatives minds and being capable to work in diverse cultures. It helps to analyse the core area innovative products and services are requiring. Hence, the company demands a complex structure of management, and it should be achieved to ensure the overall growth of both companies. The main aim to appoint Pichai as a CEO for the organization’s success, but he kept focused on making his own boat sailor.
Lack of visionary leadership- Sundar Pichai managing the operational department at Google as he lacks the skills of being visionary and innovative. Further, introduce creative strategy in the new products and services rendered by Google, which could be a challenging task for him.
Leadership Theory: Trait Theory
Trait leadership theory is about specific personality characteristics or traits that are common in all leaders. This theory includes some common traits namely, honesty, integrity, influencing leadership skills, intelligence, and job-related knowledge and skills (Cherry, 2019). In this regard, Sundar Pichai adopted a trait leadership strategy and develop common leadership traits, which are evident from the above discussion. Below are given trait theory elements:
Figure 1: Trait theory of leadership
Source (Cherry, 2019)
Drive- Efficient leaders putting a lot of effort into whatever work they do. The common traits such as drive innovative policy, being ambitious, enthusiastic during implement changes. Sundar Pichai is famous to be an ambitious leader and energetic personality.
Leading desire– Sundar Pichai is always eager to taking responsibility and he holds a strong desire to influence their employees and leads them towards the growth and success of the organization.
Self-confidence- Sundar Pichai often shows his self-confidence such as during the launch of Google Chrome where every stakeholder resists this project and he faces a lot of criticism. But his self-confidence and determination make this project successful, and now Chrome holds significant market share and beats Microsoft Explorer.
Intelligence– Pichai has strong numerical skills and excellent numerical recall. Also, he has enhanced coding and product design skills and it displays while gathering, synthesizing, and interpreting the big data (Bashirianet.al.2020). Further, he presents his intelligence while take a significant decision, and resolving employees’ problems.
Work-related knowledge– Pichai acquire vast knowledge about the job, technical issues, market trends, internal, and external environment. Pichai has sound knowledge about the organization’s all activity, structure, stakeholder actions, technical and non-technical matters, and the entire market trends.
Honesty and integrity– Sundar Pichai successfully build and maintain a strong relationship with their employees, peers, managers, clients, and further stakeholders. Thus, it requires a lot of effort and consistent interaction from employees and also doing actions to maintain strong relationships and implement honesty or integrity.
Hence, through Sundar Pichai’s case study, it can be analysed that personal effectiveness strategies enable the person to become a good leader. A leader positively influences and interacts with their followers on a professional and emotional level. Moreover, he focuses on the other’s success, more than his own, which makes him an affiliative leader (Cardador et.al.2017). Further, he proves his skills of being a proficient speaker and good communicator, which is beneficial for the organization to get big clients. Further, better interaction helps the employees to understand and interpret the organizational goals and assigned work. Therefore, it is very important to improve personal effectiveness, as there are huge competitions in the market, and all competitors having experts’ skills, ability, and resources, which make a person stand strong amongst the competitors. Hence, Pichai’s leadership skills such as being flexible, resilient, intelligent, confident make him a personally effective and global leader, which is beneficial for Google and Alphabet’s long-term success or sustainability and his individual growth as well.
Reflective Statement
Self-assessed development requirement for personal effectiveness
Personal effectiveness and development needs are referring to the skill and abilities that make a person be successful and develop them in their personal and professional life. Personal effectiveness skills and qualities enhance and improve the personal development process. Thus, improving personal development abilities increase the person’s capability to perform the task and achieve desired goals and long-term success (Lai, 2016). To deeply understand the personal development need, below are given SWOT analysis on a personal level:
SWOT analysis– it is the prominent tool to identify internal strengths and weaknesses and explain opportunities and threats to overcome weaknesses. The component of SWOT analysis is given below:
Figure 2: Personal SWOT analysis
Source (Lai, 2016)
| Strength | · Expertise in marketing, and advertisement of product and services
· Expert in problem-solving skills and be efficient to perform as a problem solver · Ambitious and optimistic · Creative and innovative thinking · Can be able to work with a team, and achieve the collective objective · Can be adjusted and work with diversified culture · Adaptive and quick learner with a difficult situation and perform in any different organizational structure. |
| Weaknesses | · Lack of effective communication and foreign language obstacles
· Lack of financial knowledge and low experience in the finance field · Lack of advanced mathematics skills · Low active in digital marketing trends. |
| Opportunities | · Accept positive and negative feedback about their experience and feelings for my performance and behaviour.
· Gain the knowledge and learn from the external environment · Learn to manage multi-tasking · Attend workshops, and coaching to improve communication skills and technological tactics. · Learn different foreign languages to gain competitive advantages. |
| Threats | · Time-bounding
· Lack of growth opportunities and exposure · Lack of accounting and finance knowledge · Increasing competition |
Analysing my own strength and weakness, while highlight upcoming opportunities and threats, I find that I should try to reduce my weakness to grab opportunities and turn threats into my strengths (Iansiti and Lakhani, 2020). It would help me to improve my skills in all relevant fields. Additionally, it provides me an opportunity to learn experts’ skills, and knowledge, which enables me to achieve immense success in my career and my personal life. Moreover, acquire such skills enable me to achieve my objective to get overall professional development.
The strength is expertise in marketing and promotional activities, whereas the lack of knowledge in finance and mathematic become an obstacle for future development. Moreover, lack of knowledge in a foreign language is the biggest weakness, which leads to huge losses in my career. However, there are a lot of opportunities to learn a new language and reduce my weaknesses, which help me facing threats and weaknesses.
Personal effectiveness and development strategies
It is essential to acquire expert skills and knowledge in order to enhance personal effectiveness and improve self-confidence for future development. Moreover, it helps to have an advantage at the workplace, as well as fulfil personal development goals (Odyssey, 2021). There are many strategies, which assist to enhance personal effectiveness, some are discussed below:
Figure 3: Personal Effectiveness Strategies
Source (Odyssey, 2021)
Overcome to threats– Fear of being losing become a huge barrier for a person to growth and progress in all area of life. Fear and external threats become the reason for my lack of confidence and shy nature, as I am afraid to speak in public and in front of a large audience. Thus, I try to escape from the situation and I tend to be a part of a group to overcome it. To face the threats of taking new challenges could be reduced by getting mentorship from a good teacher, who would support and encourage me to face the threats.
Reading- The reading habit is essential to gain vast knowledge and improve grammar and vocabulary skills. This habit helps me to update myself from different fields like finance, mathematics, etc. It is important to develop a reading habit and gain knowledge.
Try to explore new things– I want to overcome my weaknesses of difficulty to understand a foreign language, hence, I join a language learning course to learn a foreign language (Gloor, 2017). Further, I started to attend webinars, watching Hollywood movies, and business talk show to improve my language skills.
Increase observing power-It is essential to observe people and activities around your home and office. It helps to increase learning power and identify the specific activities and try to replicate them in order to learn something new.
Build public relations- By communication with people irrespective of poor and rich, junior or senior, and from where they belong, will improve the personalities, and train to adopt a different culture. It allows to understand a different way of communication and teach to work with different kinds of people. Hence, build public relations with people, who share common goals will help to achieve them collectively.
Get mentorship- Taking mentor guidance, and support would definitely help to identify the required skills, which need to be acquired. They also guide the development of personal effectiveness strategies. The mentor could be a teacher, elder person from family, senior manager, and professional in a related field. To sum up, the mentor should be an expert to provide guidance and support in every step of life.
Learning from failures- It is the most important way to enhance the core areas and gain relevant skills (Dool, 2021). I would analyse the reason behind the failure in a specific task and decide to improve those areas to reduce the chance of failure in the future.
The current potential effect of personal development gaps and impact undertaking development areas will have.
Nowadays, I face barriers in my personal development in all the areas of professional and personal life. As my weaknesses and threats become the hurdle in the path of personal effectiveness and growth. Additionally, it resists achieving my career and personal goals. However, by adopting the personal effectiveness strategies mentioned above, I would able to fight from all of my fears and weaknesses. The result is it improve all those areas and boost my overall personality characteristics in the manner of:
Clarity- Personal effectiveness strategies give clarity about my goals and in the decision-making process to all areas of my professional and personal life. It provides me the answer to the question such as- What I want to achieve in the future, why am I learning skills? It gives mental clarity for the future endeavour, which needs to be achieved (Mukherjee, 2020). Now, I can easily differentiate about my preferred area and from where I get distracted and how can I remove it. Finally, it able me to decide important factors of my life and what should I actually hold in my career.
Self-confidence and self-awareness- It is one of the important impacts of personal development that I become self-confident and aware of different aspects. It helps to identify personal skills, and threats, which strengthens my strength and helps me to gain competitive advantages at the workplace. Self-confidence gives a feeling of freedom from fear, and negativity about my skills and confidence.
Achieve vast knowledge- I adopt personal development strategies, which are mentioned above and I realize that I am good at reading, and gaining knowledge. I also start to explore new things like attending the educational webinar, business talk shows, etc, Hence I learned a different type of knowledge and get information about different fields within the industry and the market.
Set goals and improve effectiveness- I identify my strength during enhancing my personal development, which assists me to set goals to achieve in the future and improve effectiveness and efficiency that would yield me the best of the result (Johnson, 2020). However, goal setting and action to achieve them is not as simple as it faces too much resistance and affects by distraction. Thus, personal development strategies will help to prioritize the important factor, and it enhances efficiency and support to set goals and focus to achieve them.
The application of research and concepts from the studies
The implementation of planned strategies guides personal development and improves effectiveness which provided massive benefits to gain competitive advantages in the market. In regards to personal effectiveness in my personal life, I would like to say that I am satisfied and happy as compare to the previous situation, my relationship with family, friends, and society has improved and got intense with time. Moreover, I learned a lot of new things in multiple fields and gained massive knowledge in all these areas where I lacked. Further, my communication skills, foreign language, public-addressing ability, and fear for new changes have improved. I acquire a lot of expert skills and abilities that make me stand strong at my workplace and in society (Trapp, 2017). Finally, personal effectiveness strategies enable me to achieve my objectives in my personal and professional life, by gaining self-confidence and self-awareness quality.
On the other hand, personal development and effectiveness develop leadership quality and skills in me, which helps to remain motivated and encourage people around my workplace to perform their best. It also strong teammates bonding and all employees make collaboration to achieve the collective goals of the company. Now, as a sound communicator, I can easily interpret people about the objective of the organization and provide the appropriate guidance and tools to perform in order to achieve these objectives (Gloor, 2017). Moreover, personal effectiveness inspires me to take responsibility for the employees and my dependents and become answerable for them. Finally, personal development skills made me a satisfied and successful person and enrich my personality for both professional and personal life.
Conclusion
From this report, we sum up those personal effectiveness strategies the core factor that creates a strong personality and makes the person strong to stand in front of competitors at the workplace. An individual who develops skills and knowledge by adopting effective strategies for personality development turns out to be a valuable employee for an organization and an important resource for society. A person can develop skills by adopting effective strategies such as gain knowledge, being a leader at the workplace, self-awareness, self-confidence, being responsible for the job and the employees, problem-solving, and time-management skills. Also, the person can easily remove distraction elements, and focus on the essentials to achieve goals.
In this report, we learn about Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai and its personal effectiveness strategies, which he adopts to become an affiliative and global leader. Sundar Pichai started his career in Google as an operational manager, and now he possesses the rank of CEO in two global-level organizations. It is the result of being personally effective and concentrate on self-development. He has various experts’ skills and leadership qualities that made him an influencing global leader, such as self-confidence, good communicator and public-speaker, excellent knowledge in maths, resilience, risk-taker, etc. These skills are being evident in the various event where he marks significant success. Thus, on concluding the entire report, we understand the importance of personal effectiveness and development in a person’s life and career, with the help of Sundar Pichai’s example.
References
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Online
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Odyssey, D., 2021. Personal Effectiveness.[Online]. [Available Through]: <https://destinysodyssey.com/performance-improvement/skill-enhancement/personal-effectiveness/>
