Charlotte Beers Leadership

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Joseph Lynn Organisational Behaviour A4006828 Joseph Lynn A4006828 LSBF – MBA4 Organisational Behaviour: Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather How did Charlotte Beers gain support and trust at Ogilvy and Mather and how did she use networking to sustain her powerful position? 1 Joseph Lynn Organisational Behaviour Contents A4006828 Page Introduction 3 Structural Sources of Power and Support 3 Decision Making Process Building Support and Trust 4 Personal Sources of Power and Leadership 6 Networking and Sustaining her Powerful Position 7 Conclusion 10 Appendix A 11 Table 1: Phases of the Judgement Process Appendix B Table 2: Personal Sources of Power Appendix C Table 3: Leadership Styles Bibliography 11 12 12 13 13 14 2 Joseph Lynn Organisational Behaviour A4006828 Introduction In 1992, Charlotte Beers was appointed as CEO of the world famous but struggling marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather (Sackley, 1999). During the first years of her tenure, she strove to turn around Ogilvy’s declining performance and develop a new path for Ogilvy, building an organisational culture centred on a vision and core values with a strong focus on brands. In order to achieve this, she had to deal with many challenges, including a traditional and conservative culture, an adverse organisational structure, and power-based political conflicts. Despite these issues, she managed to gain support and trust within the organisation through awareness of structural and personal sources of power, leadership skills and sensitivity and legitimacy in her implementation of the decision process which allowed her to gain supportive consensus for her vision. David Ogilvy had created a strong and well-defined organisational culture, which was internalised in the traditions and habitus of the

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