Indra Nooyi Leadership Analysis paper

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Fundamentals of Leadership 5

Effective Thinking 7

Emotional Intelligence 8

Personal Competency 8

Social Competency 9

Conclusion 10

References 11

Introduction of Indra Nooyi Leadership Analysis

Indira Krishnamurthy Nooyi was the President and Chief financial officer of one of the biggest conglomerates in the world, PepsiCo. Stepping down from the helm of PepsiCo after a glorious 26 years with the company, Indira Nooyi has left a legacy for the young and aspiring leaders around the world, who wants to leave a mark in business and serving humanity. As an immigrant from Indian origin, she has used her experiences that she gained from different walks of her life to shape up her mantle of a CEO.

Indira Nooyi hails from the city of Chennai, formerly known as Madras, in Tamil Nadu, India. She did her bachelors from Madras Christian College and went on to pursue her master’s in business administration from Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. She was headstrong and a rule breaker to come out of the shackles of conservative middle-class family ideologies in India and chase her dream to pursue higher studies from Yale University.

She was able to stick to her ideologies and traditions, which helped her to start her career in corporate America. From the time she joined Boston Consulting Group and eventually to become the CEO of PepsiCo, Indira Nooyi has remained loyal to her core beliefs and teaching and has applied them throughout her successful career journey to accomplish what she has achieved today.  

Despite her success, she is quintessentially an Indian woman, combining her fiery energy of job with a balanced and calm demeanor that is needed to run both professional and personal life. She is an inspiration to many women across the globe who aspire to become a great leader like her. I take immense inspiration and motivation from her to pursue my career goals and I’m honored to present a brief study about the leader whom I admire and respect. This Paper display the aspects of the Fundamentals of Leadership, Effective Thinking and Emotional Intelligence of Indra Nooyi as a leader during her tenure.

According to Lussier & Achau (2012), Leadership roles are categorized as – “Interpersonal Roles, Informational Roles, and Decisional Roles”. Indra Nooyi is a very successful Entrepreneur who transformed the PepsiCo to focus on healthy products. She possesses negotiation skills which were clearly reflected in her achievements.  She helped in the purchase of Tropicana Company for $3.3 billion and Quaker Oats for $13.4 Billion which diversified PepsiCo products. (Driver, 2016). These facts help in the interpretation of Indra Nooyi role for the decisional role.

Fundamentals of Leadership

According to Lussier & Achau (2012) “Influencing is the process of a leader communicating ideas, gaining acceptance of them, and motivating followers to support and implement the ideas through change” (p.7). Indra Nooyi has these leadership skills to influence people by sharing her vision of the company with the team. During her transition period from CFO to CEO, she did her research about the opportunities the company can embrace. She then came up with Short, Medium and Long term goals and shared with the team. Her team supported her and started believing in her as they were seeing substantial changes in the company (Novak, 2018).

Lussier & Achau (2012) states “Technical skills involve the ability to use methods and techniques to perform a task”. During her tenure of CEO, she took a decision to repair the IT systems of the PepsiCo Company. She went through 10 textbooks, called her professors, did detail research to find out what’s best for the company. Indra Nooyi follows 5 C’s model – “Competency, Courage and Confidence, Communication Skills, Consistency, and Compass” to achieve successful leadership (Gallo, 2018).

            Based on Lewis (2003), Hersey and Blanchard leadership styles are of four types – “Directive, Consultative, Participative, and Delegative”. Indra Nooyi possesses the Participative leadership style because of her supportive behavior. Indra Nooyi mentioned in an interview that she wanted to hire a candidate and to do it; she went overboard and called her mom and convinced her on why the candidate should join PepsiCo (Kruse, 2014). She is motivating the employees and shows interest in their personal life. This shows her supportive behavior towards the employees.

According to Lewis (2003) Myers and Briggs indicator, there are four scaled in the Jung theory – “Extroversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, Judging-Perceiving”. As per the analysis, Indra Nooyi possesses an ESTP type of personality.  She is extrovert as she actively participates in events, motivates others and treats the employees of the company as her extended family. (Chris, 2015). She has sensing personality who believes in reality. She visits the grocery store to find out about PepsiCo products as a customer (Umoh, 2018). Her design thinking of dispensing machine and including healthy snacks exhibits her thinking personality. Her spontaneous nature and openness exhibit her perceiving style of personality.

According to Lussier & Achau (2012), “The Big Five Model of Personality categorizes traits into the dimensions of surgency, agreeableness, adjustment, conscientiousness, and openness to experience” (P.37).Indra Nooyi possess all these personality traits depending on the situation. One of the mission of her “performance with purpose” is to empower the people. She gives the employees a clear picture of what is she looking for and give them authority to come up with the solutions. For example, to make the chips, Doritos products in a more healthy way by making it less salty. She gives authority for employees to be creative and implement their ideas which shows her mindset of introducing new ideas. For example, “Employees around the world are empowered to invent local flavors for the lay’s potato chip brand “(Tang, 2017). She is open to discussions and oppositions and believe in taking challenges (Chris, 2015).

Effective Thinking

            Strategic thinking is very important to gain a competitive advantage in any industry. The leader must have these characteristics to make decisions on the complex issues. There are five lenses of the thinking – “Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Systems Thinking, Thinking in time and Ethical Thinking” (Meinhart, 2009). Indra Nooyi exhibit creative thinking in the way she changed the products of PepsiCo. She changed the focus of PepsiCo to healthier products from junk products by focusing on Dietary balance.

To resolve the problem in the restaurant chain, Indra Nooyi was working full week to find the solution. Then she came up with an idea of making PepsiCo a healthy product producing company. When she proposed the idea, she believed in her idea and it resulted in an increase in revenue from $24 billion to $33 billion in the span of 5 years. She classified PepsiCo products into –'fun for you’, ‘better for you’, and ’good for you’ to give more information to the customer about the products (Driver, 2016).

            She exhibits the inductive thinking approach. She developed a strategy by focusing on the design of the product. She went to the stores to look at the way they keep the products. One of the innovation is their fountain machine is to focus on the user experience and the way the product is displayed. With the scan of the ID card, it will show the flavors the users tried before and give the visual way of looking at other flavored drinks (Ignatius, 2015). These explain her strategic and innovative ways in developing the market of the PepsiCo Company. One way to boost creativity is by using the technique of “Zoom in” and “Zoom out”. This will help to view things in different perspective. She “defined new roles and new structures that help the previously decentralized organization both zoom out to a global perspective and zoom in on local differences” (Kanter, 2011).

Emotional Intelligence

According to Lewis (2003), “Emotional Intelligence is a greater determinant of leader success than purely cognitive skills or technical ability.” This Emotional Intelligence is divided into four skills that are based on personal and social competencies. Personal competency is how the person is able to manage the emotions and how they deal with it. Social competency is how the person is able to understand other person’s emotions and how they deal with it and maintain the relationship.

Personal Competency:

Self-awareness is defined as –“The ability to accurately perceive your own emotions in the moment and understand your tendencies across situations” (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). Indra Nooyi in aspen ideas festival said that “the biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with one another” (Nisen, 2014).

She managed the stress by training the family members and her extended family members -employees of PepsiCo. Her daughter was instructed to call her to take permission to play video games whenever she likes to. Her receptionist was instructed to go through the checklist to give permissions for her daughter to play video games. Then she was instructed to inform her about the conversation and the final outcome of the call. This way she was aware that she cannot have everything and balanced her personal and professional life. Also, during her transition, she was aware that her responsibilities are going to increase and she has to manage them.

Self-management is defined as- “The ability to use your awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior positively” (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). She challenges herself to do the tough assignments and resolve issues that no one has done before (Tkaczyk & Olster, 2014). She also exhibited proactive nature by grabbing the opportunities to enhance the PepsiCo products. She was very passionate about her job as she stated: “To be a CEO is a calling” (Nilekani, 2007).

Social Competency:

            Social Awareness is defined as – “The ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them” (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). Indra Nooyi exhibits this skills as she understood the struggle with ‘obesity’ issue and took an initiative to address it. She always focused on swapping junk food with healthy food.

            Relationship Management is defined as –“The ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage interactions successfully” (Bradberry & Greaves, 2009). Based on her experience during the visit to her parents, she wrote letters to the parents of her direct reportees. She mentioned her gratitude and their work at the company. This made the reportees very happy and appreciated which resulted in workplace satisfaction (Ward, 2017). She interacts with the customer to get feedback about the products and listen to their expectations. She blogs her employees often and be friendly to them, shows empathy and keeps them motivated.

Conclusion on Indra Nooyi Leadership Analysis

Indira Nooyi is hands down one of the few women leaders who has achieved the pinnacle of success and continue to inspire young minds around the world. She has been voted time and again as one of the top influential women leaders in the world. She has helped PepsiCo to transition from a regular cola company to a multi-billion dollar food and beverages company netting its profitability at 64 billion dollars in sales annually. She brought in various changes and was instrumental in acquiring companies like Tropicana, Quaker oats to give a new outlook to PepsiCo providing healthier products. She as exhibited effective and optimal thinking to accomplish such feats in driving new business for the company.

Indira Nooyi always states that a company runs and thrives because of its employees. She always credits the success of the company to her employees. She exhibited exceptional social and personal competencies to win the trust of her peers and also in her family which enabled her to balance her personal and professional life. Her style of leadership, the different leadership role she performed and the skills, both tangible and intangible, that she exhibited are admired by many and are often taken as a subject to study and better understand on how to employ these qualities in the day to day life. I take the opportunity to research more about the leader I admire and adore and take key points on leadership quality so that I can apply them to further sale my career goals and become a leader acknowledged by everyone.

 References of Indra Nooyi Leadership Analysis paper

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