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M.

Farhan Thaib Rianto


1606899182
CTR Report
Week 13 – Strategic Risk

Uber: Kalanick’s Tumultuous Era

This case is mainly talking about Travis Kalanick, the former co-founder and CEO of Uber. It
tells about his journey before he co-founded Uber, he joined start-up techs like Scour and
Red Swoosh and how his personality has affected many people who worked with him.
Kalanick is defined by his employees as someone who is multi-talented, intelligent,
persistent, and super ambitious. But at the same time, he is also a person who does not care
about anybody who works with him. His pomposity, winner-take-all attitude has left him a
negative impression among other employees who work for him. This brash and energetic
attitude has also heavily influenced the Uber’s organizational culture when Kalanick was still
the CEO. This is reflected by one of unethical practice by Uber to compete against its rival
Lyft by purchasing analytical data about Lyft’s customers and used the information to
evaluate Lyft’s financial health. In addition, various controversial practices and allegation of
sexual harassment eventually leads to his resignation from Uber in 2017.

After discussing the case thoroughly, one important question asked during the discussions:
how a leader, especially in the top positions such as CEO, are supposed to manage
employee better? This is a very interesting question because as seen in the case, Kalanick’s
employee seems to dislike him and often gave negative response and questioning his
capability of being a leader. Kalanick might be intelligent and creative, but he thinks that his
employees’ skills are as the same level as him. Top managers need to know that creating a
cohesive work environment is not only merely to be decisive when the crucial decision
needs to be made, but also, they must understand how to properly communicate their
needs and help them overcoming challenges and difficulties in their work.

First and foremost, to manage employees effectively and efficiently a leader should set a
good example among their employees. In Kalanick’s case, his leadership style had a great
impact on unethical behavior that Uber’s employees often showed in the work
environment. In addition, Uber’s executives had an overall disdain for laws and regulation,
an active anti-union stance, and a boy’s club atmosphere that devalued female employees
and was often rampant with sexual harassment. These kinds of disgraceful behavior that the
top managers show is what ultimately makes employees to behave the same way as they
are. If the executives expect the employees to behave professionally, it is very important
that they do so themselves.

Secondly, what top managers and executives can do to manage employees effectively is to
create a positive workplace environment. It is very important to create an environment in
which employees experience positive morale and become motivated to work hard. When
employees have a good positive work environment, they tend to work more diligently and
creatively to achieve the goals of the organization. It is clearly shown in the case that
Kalanick seemed to have trouble creating a good working environment because of his
ambitious and egoistic attitude. He is very self-centered that he did not care about his
employees and thus, employees dislike his behavior and this situation creates a negative
working environment.

Thirdly, another important factor for effectively managing the employees is to recognize
their hard work, appreciate their effort and reward their performance. rewarding the
employees who’s done a fantastic performance could be one of the ways to encourage and
motivate employees. Executives can reward the employees by giving them a merit-based
compensation system that correlate annual increase to performance evaluation, or by giving
them bonuses for accomplishments if they achieve certain goals that the executives set.
One of Kalanick’s trait that can be seen in the case is he seemed to always undermine their
employees’ capability and hard work, whereas he should be praising their work more.

Fourthly, to effectively manage employees, it would not be possible if the leader does not
communicate clearly and openly. Effective communication is probably one of the most
fundamental things for successfully developing organization internally. Without effective
communication, workplace coordination fails to cut the ice and professional relationships
are unable to develop into long-term trust. In addition, a leader should enhance their
management skills by making effort to communicate with the employees on a regular basis.
According to Gallup’s State of the American Manager report, employees who have regular
one-on-one meetings with their managers are three times more likely to be engaged to
work. Moreover, lack of communication would render goals ambiguous and unfulfilled, thus
creating a negative performance

Lastly, providing a balanced feedback could be one of the ways to improve the
effectiveness when it comes to managing the employees. employees ought to know if the
work that they have done is already up to managers’ expectation or it might need some
correction. Managers should not just critic the employees work without giving it a further
explanation of what went wrong. Providing frequent opportunities for two-way feedback
will help employees stay on track. In addition, it is important for the managers to not only
delivers a constructive feedback, but also recognize the employees when they are exceeding
the expectation. Moreover, when the managers are expected to give the negative feedback
to the employees, they should be empathetic as possible and work with employees to arrive
at solutions

In conclusion, these five ways above would greatly improve the effectiveness and the
efficiency when it comes to better managing the employees. Kalanick’s lack of
understanding and his disrespectful behavior towards his employees is what eventually
drives him out of CEO position. A leader should possess a good interpersonal skill to avoid
having backlashes with the employees. In addition, Kalanick’s case also shows that for a
leader having these kinds of bad personalities, it could cause much trouble and could create
a bad reputation for the company, especially Uber since they are a well-recognized
company. If the methods mentioned above do not work, the company could take a drastic
measure by having the majority shareholders to remove the problematic leader from the
company.
References

Deering, Post author By Sophie, et al. “8 Tips for Managing Your Team Effectively.”
Undercover Recruiter, 4 July 2018, theundercoverrecruiter.com/manage-team-
effectively/.

“5 Tips for Managing Employees More Efficiently.” Pingboard, 7 Aug. 2019,


pingboard.com/blog/5-tips-for-managing-employees-more-efficiently/.

Zhou, Michael. “7 Skills for Effective Employee Management.” Invoicebus Blog, Invoicebus,
13 Nov. 2018, invoicebus.com/blog/effective-employee-management/.

Gold, Ben. “Council Post: How To Manage Employees More Effectively.” Forbes, Forbes
Magazine, 20 Nov. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2018/11/20/how-
to-manage-employees-more-effectively/#578f74e5a3f7.

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