Process Essay: The Leadership Journey

“The Leadership Journey” The Leadership Journey is about a man who took over as chief executive of Blue Cross of California in 1986. It is about his journey of how he transformed the company from being the worst performing Blue Cross plans across the country to being a successful company. In this article it talks about how he used multiple leadership styles to build this company to be as successful as it today bringing $16 billion dollars of revenue and being consistently profitable since 1989. He talks about how the autocratic leader is the managerial equivalent of an emergency room surgeon, forced to do whatever it takes to save the patient’s life and that is what he exactly did for the company Blue Cross of California, he save the company from being the worst to being the best. In order for the chief executive to rebuild this company from being the worst performing to a …show more content…
At the time of taking over the company using the autocratic leadership style was the right choice due to the crisis the company was in. Now that the company was sustained and ready to create new ideas to create revenue, the chief executive had to adopt a new leadership style. At this point and time of his career, he felt that taking a new direction from using the autocratic leadership style to adopting the participative leadership style. The participative leadership style is discussed in chapter seven in the text book, Supervision Managing for Results tenth edition, by John W. Newstrom and is defined as the act of fully involving employees in decision making processes so that their ideas are used and they are fully committed to the solution’s success. This was a tough change of pace for the chief executive with having to let go of having hands on everything and empower his people to make wise management