Steve jobs leadership style have been often criticized by many with his implementation of

autocratic style of leadership after his appointment as CEO. In September 1997, Steve
Jobs was appointed interim CEO by Apple's management board. Steve Jobs is often very
authoritarian, his decisions are made with little consultation, and his decisions are
quicker, so he can react quickly to changes in the business environment. His behavior
and authoritarian style during the meetings were described as rude and annoying.
Because he strives for perfection, he has a compelling presence that makes some people
afraid of him.

The strengths of Steve jobs leadership style is that this style of driving often puts a lot of
pressure on colleagues, so the working environment is not an interesting place (Kaiser,
McGinnis and Overfield, 2012, p 119). But, like all leading styles, there is a time and
situation in which the style is appropriate. Effective for X-theory employees as it allows
managers to control decisions and in time, it becomes inefficient. Y-theory employees
cannot react. It has no training for future leaders. At work, where conditions require only
immediate action, authoritarian leadership can be the best thing to adopt. Surprisingly,
most employees have already worked for an authoritarian leader, so there is not much
effort to adapt to this style. In short, authoritarian leadership is very effective but is very
stressful when there is too much pressure to stay away from your followers or colleagues
(Lunenburg, 2012, p 7). Steve Jobs, for example, prefers authoritarian style to make
faster decisions while controlling them. His deadlines often seem hard to meet, but he
has made progress in all areas and areas of improving his work.

Some weaknesses of authoritarian leaders are the style of communication of

authoritarian leaders is often described as a one-way street. The feedback received from
these managers is usually not planned (Owens, Wallace and Waldman, 2015, p 1203).
Decision-making is generally one-sided and the goal is achieved through human
resource management.

Whether you believe he was a genius or a lunatic, there's no denying that Steve Jobs was
an innovator. His ideas molded the way that present and future generations interact of
personal computers, telephones and music.

Never be Satisfied (Reality Distortion Field)

Pros:

Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Right?

Without this trait, Jobs may have been perfectly content to work on the Apple II with
Woz throughout the 80s. He would have been fine letting Jef Raskin lead the Mac
team and build a cheap product with a 5-inch screen and an underpowered
microprocessor. He may have been content to stick to the personal computer
industry, instead of pursuing animated films, telephony and the music industry.

Luckily for those who worked with him, Steve was never able to accept mediocrity,
which is where his reality distortion field took effect. Even when team members
thought they had created the perfect tool or designed an amazing application, Jobs
would walk into the room and tear it to shreds. The responsible team member would
then go back to fix what Jobs disliked and find a few other minor improvements in
the process. Then, again, Jobs would call it shit and walk away, and once again his
colleague would find something to improve. By bending to Jobs' will, members of the
Mac team were able to take something they initially thought was great and improve it
half a dozen times. It was his unbending will that drove everyone on his team to
create products that were far better than they would have otherwise believed was
possible.

"He reminded me of Rasputin. He laser-beamed in on you and didn't blink. It didn't

matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it. It was a self-fulfilling
distortion. You did the impossible because you didn't realize it was impossible." -
Debi Coleman, Mac team member.

Cons:

Despite this genius, Jobs was often overly argumentative, even when a colleague
had created a product to the best of their ability. His persistent negativity forced a lot
of team members to despise him, which does not create a truly productive work
environment. No matter who you are, being consistently told that your first four
attempts weren't good enough will have a negative impact on your psyche. It's one
thing to find imperfections in sloppy work, it's an entirely different animal when - as
Jobs did - you see defects where there aren't any. At some point, for the good of the
team, a project manager has to walk into a room and agree that the product looks
great. If you worked for Jobs, that is something you likely never experienced.

"He had these huge expectations, and if people didn't deliver he couldn't stand it. He
couldn't control himself," explained Ann Bowers, who joined Apple in 1980, in Jobs'
biography. "I could understand why Steve would get upset, and he usually was right,
but it had a hurtful effect. It created a fear factor."
Motivating is one thing. Fear mongering is a completely different monster.

Make it Personal and Show Emotion

Pros:

What better way to motivate someone than to call them out and challenge them on a
personal level? This is a tactic Jobs took advantage of time and time again. Usually,
his colleagues stepped up to the challenge and achieved what was asked of them
simply because they would personally responsible if it wasn't done correctly.

It wasn't just his colleagues that Jobs got personal with - he also made it personal
with competitors. While he had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft, what people
remember most were his personal attacks against Bill Gates. And how about the full-
page ad that Apple took out welcoming IBM to the PC industry?

According to Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal, a study done by Blake E.

Ashforth and Ronald H Humphrey in 1995:

The great potential for emotion to revitalize our perspectives on motivation has only
begun to be tapped. Two recent examples will suffice. Kahn suggests that the
greater the investment of oneself in work, the greater one's motivation. Following
Kelman, the lowest investment is solely physical... the next level is cognitive... and
the highest level is emotional, typified by the individual who forgets to have dinner
and works late into the night, lost in the thrill of her work. Individuals experiencing
high 'personal engagement' and 'flow' become physically, cognitively, and
emotionally immersed in the experience of an activity, in pursuit of a goal.

In other words, whether it's a direct challenge to teammates or a personal attack

toward a competitor, bringing emotion into the professional realm can ignite an
amazing work ethic and give a team something to rally around.

Cons:

High emotions and individual attacks don't always bode well in the professional
world. While some people thrive on the challenges, others resent them and would
prefer to have a levelheaded boss that won’t throw a fit in the middle of a meeting.
With Jobs, you were either a "genius” or a “shithead who sucks." As good as it would
feel to be on the genius side of the line, it would be equally crushing to be on the
latter end. What benefit can come from making one of your best developers, testers
or designers revile you on a personal level? Probably nothing.

Details, Details, Details

 Pros:

It's hard to argue against attention-to-detail at any level. As a developer, attention to

detail may help you catch a colleague’s crippling bug. As a tester, it may be the one
thing that saves your company's app from crashing at the first sign of a traffic spike.
But it's the project manager that has to set the tone when it comes to creating an
atmosphere that does not accept defects.

I would argue that this was Jobs' trademark. The guy just could not accept even the
smallest imperfection in any product - whether it was an asymmetrical board or the
askew tiles in the men's room of the NeXT office. That kind of tone is contagious and
when it is implemented so strictly into a project, everyone else on the team follows
suit. And when this strict code of quality is removed from a company - well, you
get Apple Maps.

Cons:

As with most things, Jobs took details to an extreme. Yes, attention to detail is great,
but it's hardly worth it at this point to spend days adjusting the typeface of your app
or the precise curvature of the borders on your website. Time is money, and most
companies don't have the currency to waste on such minor details. Yes, Jobs' hyper-
critical attention-to-detail probably resulted in boosted sales of Apple products, but it
was also very costly for the company as a whole. He had the financial flexibility to
pull this off - the majority of project managers don't.

Get Creative
 Pros:
Jobs' claim to fame was his ability to combine the beauty of the arts with the wonders
of technology. His goal was to make new, complex products innately easy for people
to understand - look no further than the metaphor of the desktop or the innovation of
the iPod. He thought outside the box, both with his product ideas and with his style of
motivating teammates.

Jobs always blazed his own path, and that compelled his team to follow him. The
Mac team was inspired to work 90 hours a week because he challenged them
creatively. They were excited to be working on something that no one else had seen
before. If a manager is afraid to be creative or is hesitant to blaze their own trail,
teams can lose interest all together.

Cons:

Trail blazing is absolutely noble, but it's also dangerous.

If you don't have the full trust of your co-workers or investors, you may end up
walking off a cliff all by yourself. This is even more likely to happen when you
combine excessive creativity with the rest of the traits mentioned above.Yes, the first
Macintosh had some extremely creative (albeit stolen) features, and yes, NeXT was
an extremely creative company at its core, but neither of these projects were
extremely financially successful - in part because of the amount of money Jobs spent
on experimenting with his creative ideas. Unless you have the capital of Ross Perot
backing you, you might want to leave some of the creative gambles to someone
else.

Steve Jobs was described as an autocratic leader during his time at Apple. His
leadership style, fast-decision making and eye for detail were crucial for achieving
Apple’s success.

“Being the main communicator and main business decider of things. He was very
good at [that]”, said Steve Wozniak about Steve Jobs’ leadership style. On the other
hand, the British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen commented,
“There is no democracy at Apple […] It is Steve’s company – pursuing his vision, at
his pace, with his team, making his products”.

But what is exactly autocratic leadership? What are its advantages and
disadvantages? And what can we learn from Steve Jobs’ leadership?

Autocratic Leadership

Autocratic leadership describes a leader who has absolute power and control in
every part of a business. These leaders like to control everything related to work,
from the company’s policies, vision and goals to employees’ work style.

It’s more common to find autocratic leadership in small businesses than in big
corporations. It offers a good starting point for the management. Small companies
don’t have many employees, and running a company under this leadership style is
easy.

Autocratic leadership enables fast decision-making and, among other things,

provides a structure for inexperienced teams. However, this leadership style may not
be suitable when you are aiming to foster team collaboration.

Steve Jobs’ Autocratic Leadership

Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976. In 1985, he was forced to leave Apple.
Nevertheless, in 1997, he was asked to return to Apple to save the company from
bankruptcy.

Steve Jobs was an autocratic leader, and his style was questioned and criticised by
others. He was impatient, a perfectionist person and a leader with high expectations.
At Apple, he had a clear vision of what he wanted from his employees and how
things should work.

As an autocratic leader, he believed that being in control of all decisions was efficient
and quick. His competitive side let him take risks, pushed the company’s limit, and
allowed Apple to be ahead of its competitors.

Jobs wanted every Apple product to be perfect. His impatient and high expectancy
traits portrayed him as a tough boss to work with. He liked to work with the best
people in their field, and yes, he didn’t have a good reputation when it came to being
friendly or polite with others. In his interview with Walter Isaacson, he told Isaacson
about his being tough “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” and added, “but if
something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest.”

Steve Jobs’ autocratic leadership worked well in Apple when he was the CEO. His
leadership style was criticised by others, such as his being controlling and his
communication skills with his co-workers and employees. On the other hand, he was
described as one of our times’ strong and successful leaders, alongside Bill Gates,
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others.
When is Autocratic Leadership Effective?

Even though others have criticised Jobs’ leadership, that doesn’t mean autocratic
leadership doesn’t bring benefits to leaders and companies:

Strong Leadership

An autocratic leader is needed for quick and efficient solutions to complex problems.
In these environments, autocratic leadership provides the direction that may be
lacking when teams are inexperienced.

People who worked with Steve Jobs said he was quick at making critical decisions
about products. For instance, Jony Ive talked about the decision process for the
colours of the first iMacs, “in most places that decision would have taken months.
Steve did it in a half-hour.”

Effective Handling of Pressure

In stressful situations when the company needs to solve short-term and urgent
issues, autocratic leaders are the ones who are in charge of the situation. Their
experience and expertise allow them to solve the issues quickly.

Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997 when the company was going bankrupt. He dealt
with the pressure effectively, saved the company and turned it into a profitable one.

Provides Structure in Inexperienced Teams

In startups, it’s normal to see employees struggling with tasks. The team is getting to
know the work environment and the production process. Autocratic leadership works
well under these circumstances. Autocratic leaders assign tasks to employees,
provide guidelines and control the whole process. They create a structure that is
easy to follow for the employees and themselves.

When Does Autocratic Leadership Bring Disadvantages?

Like every other leadership style, autocratic leadership comes with some downsides:

Overwork Load for the Leader

Sharing the tasks with your co-workers is nice because it will reduce your stress and
workload. However, autocratic leaders like Steve Jobs are keen to be in every part of
the product journey. It increases the time they spend at work.

Trust Problems

Autocratic leaders like to see the production, design and any other process going
how they envisioned it. Because of that, leaders tend to micromanage their
employees, discouraging their input and feedback. This causes trust problems within
the company and ultimately hurts productivity.
Communication Problems

Autocratic leaders set very high goals and expectations, which are not usually
communicated clearly to the team. They expect the business to run the way they
envision it, but sometimes it’s hard for the team to grasp what their leader is thinking.
Those leaders must set clear guidelines and make the team aware of them.

Former employees and the media often mention Steve Jobs’ communication
problems (e.g., how he handled firing people or communicated when something he
didn’t like happened.)

Dependence

Autocratic leadership creates dependency in the workplace. Employees will need

feedback from their leader before taking further steps. This decreases productivity
and increases the workload of the leader.

Damages Creativity

An autocratic leader is the only one in charge of any process that eventually
damages creativity. This leadership style doesn’t offer enough space for employees
to let their creativity run free. Usually, employees end up keeping their ideas to
themselves. In the long run, it affects the employees’ creativity and productivity.

Conclusion

Today, Apple is a well-known brand. Even though there were criticisms of Steve
Jobs’ leadership style, we know that his way of running Apple played a role in the
company’s success.

Due to its nature, autocratic leadership is not suitable for every business, especially
since today’s business world focuses on teamwork. However, in the early stages of a
business, autocratic leadership can help run a business smoothly until you find a
more suitable structure for your growing team.