Running head: THEORIES PRACTICE LEADERSHIP

THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP AND PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT

Cheryl Ann Eld

Western Governors University

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What is going on that a fortune 500 companys stock confidence retreats to a resulting 83%

loss of shareholders? Current plans indicate the leadership will close up shop at 120 locations

soon. Yet positioned as third-largest retailer in the U.S., these major panic indicators are driven

by something being incredibly wrong. Is the leadership to blame? Their current style of

leadership is obviously not working for them.

I have chosen to evaluate a particular store leader within Sears. Sears is a Fortune 500

company. It is publically held or owned by its shareholders. The era I worked for them was

2007-2008. I had retired five years earlier from the military, where I was a logistics officer, and

prior to that had been with Norwest Financial in real estate lending, and after became founder

and CEO of Landmark Mortgage. Since the fall of the real-estate lending industry, I had become

a self-taught web application developer. It was sort of a fluke being hired at Sears. I had just

finished a big real-estate web development project, which had had me held up in Seattle,

Washington, for nearly a year. During that year I visited an eye doctor whose office was on the

2nd floor of the Flagship Store of Sears in Redmond, Washington. While waiting to see my eye

doctor, I noticed out in the Sears hallway a beautifully framed brass message board poster of the

current available job openings Sears had to offer, at this store location. Upon every visit to my

eye care professional, I examined this board whereby noting one particular job opening

continued to never be filled. I wondered if the management and leadership experience that I

had under-my-belt could help such a company as Sears. So before I left Seattle, Washington, I

sent them a resume over the Internet, after filling out their job application forms on their web

site. Sears Human-Resource department responded back with an immediate scheduling of an

interview, and I agreed to this job interview. Even though, I was practically on an airplane, going
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home to Boise, Idaho, I went ahead and met with the management of the Redmond, Washington

Sears store.

During the interview Sears managers determined I could fill the vacant position, Sears

called, Soft-Lines Lead. I canceled my plans to head back to Idaho, and redirected my energy

towards manning this new position I had acquired, at the Flagship Store of Sears Holding

Company, Redmond, Washington.

Two-years prior to my taking this position, in 2005, Sears joined forces with Kmart, as both

were struggling from declining profits. As they combined into one entity, they became named,

Sears Holding Company. The new Sears Holding Company had identified strategic goals to be -

worked on after their merger with Kmart, these goals were: improve their store culture, improve

their competitive edge, and their synergy. Their strategic plan included: 1.) Benefit by Kmarts

merchandising experience in the consumables/traffic-builders arena, and apparel marketing. 2.)

Physical size of store expansions of Kmart single-level stores into 80k square-feet for more store

capacity, renaming them to that of Sears. 3.) Increase capacity of stores to carry the Sears

brands: Craftsman, Kenmore, and Die Hard. 4.) More-liquid organizational assets through sale

of some of Sears stores and real estate in the Sears (pre-merger) portfolio. 5.) Brands of

apparel diversified to meet the needs of their multi-cultural market (identified as Latino and

African-American) by shifting labels and prices to better suit their desires. 6. Non-mall locations

for greater customer traffic and customer convenience accessing the new (post-merger) stores.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths: Strengths, according Merriam-Websters dictionary this means, qualities or states of

being strong. I can say that Sears was competitively priced and exerted their energy well in
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enticing display-work to draw the customer in and staying on top of seasonality and catchy

themes and merchandising to the up and coming season in a very timely fashion, and endured a

depth of offering from medium-low price points on up to a Macys level quality merchandise for

prices below what Macys typically would charge . So they catered to the elite, on down to the

mid-to-low income earners. Competing with Bell-Red Square Mall, which housed a store for

about every significant fashion label well known to privileged kids and highly-paid parents, plus

of course Macys was an important draw to this mall as well. It wasnt uncommon to shop at this

mall and witness a celebrity family busy with their shopping in this famous designer-labels mall

outside of Seattle Washington.

A major strength would be the location of this Sears store. It sitting on the same 5-lane street

as the well-loved company, Microsoft, along with the Microsoft Corporate-Campus of many,

many buildings, meant that there was incredible amount of foot-traffic busily lining the

sidewalks of this 148th street that this Flagship Sears store sat on. Thus, also located amongst

major apartment complexes, housing 100% Microsoft employees, who most-always, came from

out-of-country, and didnt drive, but rather walked or took the Seattle metro bus system, until

they got established. The sidewalks of 148th street were always bustling abundantly with

families walking to the nearest available shopping and strolling their babies, all-the-while

remaining very near to Microsoft, their income source. The magnitude of foreign influx due to

Microsofts hiring preferences impacted this Sears store quite heavily. Unlike the mall which

required battling very busy downtown streets and located much further away from Microsoft,

and battling towers of hundreds of tightly parked cars in mall parking garages, this huge flagship

Sears department store was at the junctions of Kirkland, Redmond, and Belleview. All cities and

neighborhoods directly surrounding Microsoft filled with potential Sears customers. Flagship
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sized stores of Sears enjoy 3-city blocks of space for parking and 3-floors of elevator assisted

shopping in a massive 2-city block length building. While size mattered, I would definitely

would say given all this, one level parking right outside the Sears store, and ample foot traffic of

the locals close by in this multi-family housing complex covered location, next to the largest and

highest paying tech company in the world, I would say: that this was a Capitol Location to

any appliance, home-fashions, tools, and full-family apparel needs merchandiser/retail store.

Weaknesses: Weakness is a state of being as well, but here I am looking for faults and defects,

according to Merriam-Websters dictionary. In my opinion, from a managers and junior-leaders

viewpoint this Sears store suffered mostly from the following defects/faults:

Lack of empathy for, and to ignore, the huge market of foreign nationality along with their

particular customs and traditions. These customs and traditions being ignored made employment

with and for this store disconcerting and nearly unbearable. Making me very uncomfortable with

policy and lack of planning or strategy to address the issues involved in serving this segment of

customer population adequately and profitably by Sears.

When I consider the topic of leadership and development of junior leaders, some practices do

pre-empt and define a destiny of success, over that of high-turnover disasters. When authors

consider these successful discoveries of leadership as best practices, are they? If used

consistently, successfully, and routinely, then theyve become principals utilized under my

leadership style. One of those unforgettable and researched suggestions written about in the

journal, Training says author Robin Connolly, is: becoming part of the goals and ambitions of

the company has proven to be beneficial to both employee and company, and looking back - that

was what I wanted as a junior executive (basically) for Sears, yet unengaged, feeling extraneous
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as an asset to the company (feeling my replacement was eminent the day I started) and this

feeling permeated the employees of this store that I worked in. Here is my story.

Three leadership practices: The general manager I will refer to her as MD throughout this

writing. She reminded me of the first Mrs. Bush -First Lady, the wife of President George Bush.

MD did lead the store and all its departments with her authoritarian-democratic style. MD

always the soul key speaker at meetings handing down decisions she made solely on her own.

She always read the previous nights sales figures to everyone at the morning staff meetings. If a

departments sales figures were in the red, the tone of her voice changed to threatening

grumbling tone in which to influence the lead (manager) of that department to get busy and do

something different to turn that around.

MD did the planning and handed down the decisions to lead her store. She reiterated her

vision of a department while ripping down its isles straightening messy racks and chaotic shelves

of my 2nd floor departments like a white-tornado, giving me direction as she straightened along

the way, she verbalized how the isle should look day-to-day verses for a store inspection soon to

materialize. As well, MD while busily straightening would grumble that the department was way

under the average in profitability and to see to it to turn that around.

As far as controlling, I think MD was a little to heavily a control-freak and would have better

served the store had she been more coordinative and created more opportunity for the department

managers to congregate and coordinate resources to solve problems and make some of the

decisions and decide what goals to work on and set some priority manpower to flaming issues

most disturbing to the staff or customers. The understaffed sales floor was so vast we would

have many customers following us around waiting their turn to be helped, enormous piles of
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returns and fitting room clean outs to return to the floor and backroom warehousing messes

disasters in mess and overwhelming in size, all of which definitely had to wear on the employees

nerves, it wore me down seeing this chaos day-to-day, for sure. Overly bombarded and knowing

there was no one to call for help, we were running so lean on staff and without department

clerks, only cash-wrap employees were in abundance, but were not allowed to help in store

department work (policy per their department head). Everybody working in this store

experiencing this same situation I am describing here, drove moral down. Yet, this decision not

to hire any more staff came directly from MD and her reasoning was that she wouldnt hire

clerks for departments experiencing sales figures that were in the red.

So the planning, leading, and controlling, that MD showed me was very short-term natured,

only in what she wanted certain isles of the store to look, and how straightening them the way

she showed me, would get the isles looking right in MDs perception of how she wanted to see

them in the future.

Current leaderships affect on organizational culture. So when and where does a leader affect

organizational culture? I asked myself and as is taught that effective organizations have key

leaders driving productivity with passion for a vision and mission theyve gotten behind and

believe in so strongly that they inspire others by sharing the dream. This dream sharing

engagement and inspiration from key influencers is crucial, I feel, at least. Ive always seen the

deep enthusiasm and belief that Steve Jobs brought to the table with each and every new big

technological product launch. No matter how far fetched it seemed to the average person the

passion in Steve Jobs hand gestures as he spoke with his hands often while public speaking, and

his deep beliefs shown in his facial expressions during his public promotional speeches always

inspired and always effectively influenced, me anyway! I am a huge Apple fan still today,
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especially today, as owner of an Apple iPad, MacBook Air - Apple laptop computer (I am

publishing this paper on now), and the new iPhone 6 Gold Edition, and mainly because Steve

Jobs engaged his customer (his audience) like we were family, takes care of his customer (after

purchase) like we are family, and shared his vision and passionate beliefs in the mission hed

developed for his company in-house and publically. He put it out there. Put him self out

there, and in so doing engaged his employees along with his target market and potential

market. Disappointedly, Sears leaders harbored unshared secrets, allowed employee privacy

security breaches, manifested inept store security, had no solution development program of any

kind in effect, nor staff collaboration in problem solving of any effective nature either. Only

Future talked of was only that of the likelihood of them going out of business and a why even

try short-timer attitude that permeated this stores culture. This emanated from a blanket-

attitude of negativity and employees left non-engaged by management, and uninspired without

any growth opportunities simply fueled negative feelings.

I noticed when researching the history of Sears, there had been a 30-year stint of time when

the chief executive officer position of the company was held by a man who had served as a

general officer in the military, and I wonder if the unity of command still practiced at Sears

today, such that, the subordinates getting orders from primarily only one superior was a system

developed and held on to by this organization from his previous long-time reign over the

company. As well, what I saw as a lack of team work, could of as well been a division of work

in that specialization plus unity of direction where similar functional activities in the organization

were grouped together under one manager and only that manager was to direct that segment of

staff, whereby three cashiers could stand together chatting and playing on their cell phones and

when asked to dust off nearby display racks by the floor-manager their refusal to do this type
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of core team effort was perfectly fine by the company. Seems this military like infrastructure

management style Sears remains loyal to had to of come from someone or somewhere. Highly

old-fashioned yet practiced flawlessly by this command structure Sears follows. This

impersonal rational separate entity rule governing style management is whats referred to as

a bureaucracy (Daft, 2014).

So yes, this felt much like the classical perspective of managerial thinking going on and in

much of a bureaucratic organizational way. I could see this dysfunction especially when MD

would use those morning sales figures as sanctioning devices to rationalize why department were

getting starved for clerks to work in them. Falling under the bureaucratic organizations approach

where resources get used to realize an individuals desires, over that of the goals of the actual

organization (Daft, 2014).

Another classical perspective indicator was the morning meetings MD brought all her leads

in every morning an hour before the store opening time to deliberate over, which was the

previous nights closing sales figures, highlighted department by department specifically, and

accounted for as being X-amount in the black or X-amount in the red. Without proof of an

attempt at scientific management the reason for this was pure justified sanction deployment a

resenting for all departments always operating in the red . The shear fact she based her staffing

decisions on and decided to sanction her department leads upon, were all based upon the

disclosure of these sales figures morning after morning. Reading off the previous nights

departmental sales figures, made them the basis for all of MDs leadership decisions, negative

Theory X attitude and behavior towards her staff. MD focused on the profitability of the

individual departments as if it were the individual worker being focused on. Impersonal as it

was it got more personal as sanctions were spoken of such as pay reductions and job
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replacements for the lead supervisors of departments seemingly less capable of keeping up with

profiting departments all very Theory X management practices assuming that us employees are

lazy and dont really desire to do the job at hand. Neglecting requests for staffing these

departments with live bodies to thwart shoplifting problems only increased the losses in those

departments lacking in profit capability. Sanctions furthering the problem rather than

collaborative planning for logical resolve. This administrative leadership approach invoking

more stress for managers and leads of those departments trying to better manage the on-going

negative reports lends reason to disbelieve in the classical perspective styles of leadership being

maladaptive and truly lacking an innovative spirit, whereby also ignoring and shutting the door

of opportunity for the many generation-Y workers manning the cash-wrap stations whose

feedback goes unsaid/unheard. That cultural parallel and future leader development and career

development from within the company continuously remains untapped, and unnoticed by

management for the positive potential is would have on culture and community. Always ignored

young brilliance co-relationally key to a better understood culture attempting to become

customers of this store, and significant to this geographical community of Seattle, signifies the

Sears way via this classical perspective of managerial philosophy in effect at this store, truly

failing the masses.

Opportunity. The employee base, being multi-cultural, and of the Generation-Y variety,

permits the pool of people to draw off of to advance careers through the ranks and the

promotional spirit of hiring from within and taking care of their own, as an opportunity to change

negative short-timer attitude permeating this Stores employee vibe and existing culture remains

open for exploration.

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Threat. Constant hiring from outside the company and not promoting from within lowered

moral and was evident to customers. Not staying on top of pay raises commensurate with

elongated expectations and compounding duties. As employees were transferred into the

Redmond store from other smaller town stores, their rents jumped from $600 per month to

$1,600 per month, as the Seattle cost of living being much higher than other parts of the state of

Washington and movement accordingly in pay was ignored. Job safety, employee pay privacy

(neglected security of employee information), job safety (security deficient areas of store), all

affect the lives of, the morale of and safety of all who work in such environments. Competive

struggles and physical outbreaks due to information breaches caused a lot of damaged relations

and irreversible hostilities among department managers sharing a store as their employer

resulting in an anti-team environment totally ineffective at considering solutions involving any

collaboration between managers.

Two Organizational Strenghts. Sears began as a catalog company based on mail-order

business and decades old brands that still have loyal following out there can still come into a

Sears store and with the help of a department lead, order those decades old brands via an

internet catalog Sears has in effect in this current day and age. As another strength Sears

embassidors brands such as Craftsman, Kenmore, yet is host to popular brands such as Levi and

Lands End. Thus, their brand continuity and be counted on and brand quality assured. Which I

feel is a definite feather in their cap.

Two weaknesses of this organization: A lack of cultural understanding. The consumers culture

is not sought out in terms of understanding of what there needs are and this poses a missed

opportunity to serve this culture better and draw in more of their business. This lack of

addressing impacts department leads and makes their jobs harder to almost impossible. Here a
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perfectly overlooked opportunity for the humanistic perspective on management which if

deployed could carry this store a long way in reaching its potential and becoming more

successful. The culture in question has raised kids in this vicinity who now work for the

company and could bilingually provide feedback and innovate solution and challenge the status-

quo in light of better performing and better need serving retailing, but this employee pool of the

company the Generation-Y young people - is ignored as outside solution is continuously

reached for by this store via its top leaderships decision to do so.

Another weakness is ignoring the stakeholders needs and thus the stockholders needs.

Continuing the losses with a blind-eye when obviously teams of leads could develop ideas and

or existing researchable solutions could be resurrected but allowing these losses to be acceptable

and considering them to not be damaging to anyone considered a stakeholder is really disservice

to the organization and its investors both.

Evaluation of the chosen leader - identifying three strengths: Utilizing McClellands Theory

of Motivation I see MDs strong suits being achievement motivated, power motivated, and in so

being motivated by power, could control and persuade and influence.

The enormity of a project to turn around a flagship store dictates just how achievement

oriented and big-win seeking MD had to of been to accept the job of leading a store of such large

magnitude into a maximally profitable entity. Such takes a larger than life desire for one to win

and win really big. An achievement of such scope would do unbelievable beneficial things for

ones career and be the talk of the industry. MD must of had the belief of 50 percent or better

chances of success, to sustain her momentum as an achievement oriented leader, which means
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she possessed the confidence in herself as a leader when she took the job and we all can

appreciate a confident leader (Boss, ).

The power such a large store in physical size and importance to stakeholders has to be

absorbed by someone with an extreme appetite for power, who have heavily worked their career

path towards being geared for such endeavors, and really enjoy what power does for them

personally, since it works well for them motivationally. MD commanded a presence that got

peoples attention, had peoples attention entirely when she spoke, and could cause an immediate

reaction from followers influenced by this, jumping quickly to follow her directions. MD had

persuasive power and could sell you on any idea quickly and have a person signing in agreement

without question, while in her presence.

MD had people power over what McClelland opposes that with, which is institutional power.

The difference is ability to control people over ability to organize and facilitate people. MD

utilized the people power type of power, even controlled peoples relationships and always

controlled the power of decision-making. Which for a store so large in size that control even had

to be controlled. Where there seemed none (as in no control going on by appearances sake),

was actually part of MDs control, as well, and was meant to be overwhelming and chaotic and

huge in solution effort and was every bit a part an MD influencing scheme. Intimidation factors

she controlled people with were amazing and unbelievable and actually effective at adjusting

attitude and persuading cooperative performance out of disbelievers and perceived to be slackers.
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Three theory-based practices to maximize the success of this leader: The Leadership

Excellence article by Zenger, J., Sandholtz, K., & Folkman, J. (2013) brought into view a leader

not understanding their own shortcomings stops progress which is why I would recommend use

of a feedback system one that is personally written by employees and store staff where self-

analysis can initiate self-awareness and emotional intelligence could begin to gain footing.

Humility the setting ego aside in order to proceed with whats best for the masses must be best

prescribed perhaps by the masses. We are not going to know what we dont seek to know.

Thus, I recommend feedback utilization (Daft, 2014).

Inability to learn from mistakes (Zenger, et. al., 2013) highlighted as a fatal flaw. Brings in

one element of the classical perspective on management theory I feel Sears could utilize but

does not is that of scientific management. Those morning meetings going over the numbers with

the store GM at the start of every business day could be crunching other numbers in addition to

simply just accounting data. The cashiering system knows whose working the till and clocked in

to work in what departments, etc. So what about some relationship between the number of this

given the number of that, so to establish what were doing right and what were capable of

improving upon. Data use to invoke improvement and not just sanctions. Scientific managerial

decisions are the trend now, but have been around since World War II (Daft, 2014). Mega data

collection going on but not utilized to serve decisive purposes to improve upon anything of

reasonable benefit to the employee or his/her managers jobs nor that of the company or store

leaders and most importantly to benefit the customer. A quantitative utilization of data being

overlooked as a tool of resolve or justified decisions is an overlooked innovative solution or just

another Sears sin-by-omission of supportive decision? As Zengers article says, Playing it safe

can be the riskiest thing a leader can do.

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Sears could take many lessons from the humanistic perspective on managing these retail

stores focusing in on the relevance of human behaviors and their causes. Needs identified and

efforts made to help meet them. Greater concern for store problems and seeking to understand

the cause and better yet develop resolve. Looking more closely at the benefit of social

interaction and group process utilization as solution tools. Group and team employee

engagement has been reported as being critical in the success of many companies having

deployed this strategy for employee engagement (Connolly, Pico, Bodine, & Blankenship, 2012).

Above all leader development programs really need to be established and utilized and the

best remedy and ROI is the coaching model. A new use of the coaching approach has arrived

now with companies specialized in providing these personal mentors and safe sounding board

professionals providing an outside looking in expert opinion has show to pay off 6-times its cost

for assistance in developing good managers and leaders from within the company or newly hired

developing leaders, basically, more verification that validation matters. Human relations, human

resources perspective, and behavioral science approaches to management are not done yet

making enormous contributions to the humanization of the workplace. Which above all else has

my vote for candidacy for a sustained successful organization (Nyman & Thach, 2013).

Recommendations for the primary leader. MD conducts her management by transaction and

if she could be less authoritarian-democratic in leadership style and more of a transformational

leader that fostered shared decisions, took supportive measures for the needs of the managers

seriously, and promoted development and collaborative and interactive opportunity this would

improve performance, moral and organizational justice (Bass, 2008).

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Daft mentions in chapter 10: Designing Adaptive Organizations of his 2014 book titled

Management, a new imperative for todays organization - that of managers organizing for

horizontal coordination. MD being more adaptive to situations would position her and the

organization to better meet their goals. For example, by not recognizing the new trend of

management in fast-changing environments to adapt a horizontal coordinating approach over

traditional and less effective vertical organization, departments suffer, customer experience rating

drops, leadership effectiveness dwindles. Where MD didnt want to hire any departmental clerks

for low-profit to no-profit departments of the 2ns Floor of the store, idle cash-wrap employees

not allowed to assist in departmental standard duties based on the decision not to allow such

external activity by cash-wrap employee manager policy for us other managers to keep our hands

off her cash-wrap staff left clusters of idle labor standing inside cash-wrap corrals playing on

their cell phones during their shifts spent on the 2nd floor. Early theorist Charles Darwin (1809 to

1882) postulated long ago that the strong will survive, yet actually meaning per Harvard

researchers Lawrence and Pirson, that the most adaptable will survive. This evolution of

management thinking being so globally applicable for management today seemed a plausible

cause of failure in the case of MDs system of thinking. Adaptive transformation to meet the

organizational needs and goals was overlooked by MD and steamrolled anyhow by the cash-

wrap managers choice to not be a team player, could have been a 2nd floor resolve had MD been

a better coordinator of collaborative interaction and shared decision processes in goal setting

adaptively (Lawrence & Pirson, 2015).

The organization under pays therefore not meeting the lower order needs, Abraham Maslow

points out to us as a common problem of the workforce. As well, job security, social interaction,

self-actualization (growth opportunities) the entire hierarchy of needs were ignored by Sears and
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without genuine self-efficacy theory practices amongst a feeling of lack of being trusted through

the eyes of a Theory X mindset GM running the show authoritatively will only continue to

damage this Stores moral and capabilities. Recommendation, bring in new management which

are stakeholder sensitive leaders with change-sensitive adaptability possessing culturally

innovative interactive skills with talent for executing collaborative departmentally shared

decisions and designing feedback systems and who have horizontal coordinative experience, who

can use their power and influence to change policy and pay levels and meet at least some of the

basic lower-order human needs through their human resource function and overall new

transformational leader style.

References

Bass, B., Bass, R. (2008). THE BASS HANDBOOK OF LEADERSHIP Theory, Research, &
Managerial Applications. 4th Ed. For Press. A division of Sam & Shuster Inc. New York,
NY.

Connolly, R., Pico, M., Henderson, K.,Bodine, T., & Blankenship, S. (2012). Strategies for
success. Training, 49(4), 48-52.

Daft, R.L. (2014). Management. South-Western, Cengage Learning.

Lawrence, P., & Pirson, M. (2015). Economistic and Humanistic Narratives of Leadership in the
Age of Globality: Toward a Renewed Darwinian Theory of Leadership. Journal of
Business Ethics, 128(2), 383-394.

Nyman, M., & Thach, L. (2013). Coaching as a new leadership option. Supervision, 74(2), 23-
26.
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Zenger, J., Sandholt, K., & Folkman, J. (2013). Developing Leaders. Leadership Excellence
30(8), 24.