The rise and fall of Carly Fiorina

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/09/scitech/pcanswer/main672809.shtml This article talks about the type of leader Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP, was. Carly became CEO of the company at a time when the business was declining, but her attempts to strengthen the company failed and upset many employees and coworkers. After reading this article I would classify Carly's leadership style as an S1 directing style on the situation leadership II grid. A directing style of leadership is characterized by a leader who focuses on communicating goal achievement and spends smaller amounts of time using supportive behavior. This type of leadership style should be used when employees are low in competence and high in commitment. I do not necessarily think the HP employees fit this development level which is probably why Carly's directing style failed. I came to the conclusion that Carly had an S1 directing leadership style because of how she went about the merger with Compaq. Even though many of her employees and stockholders were against the idea she still went ahead with the merger anyway, which shows that she was focused on goal achievement and not on supporting her staff. Another reason I would categorize Carly as and S1 directing leadership style is because of how she strayed away from the tradition of HP and instead tried to compete with Dell's low cost commodity business and IBM's high end high cost consulting and customer service business. This again shows that she was very goal oriented and did not seem to show support for HP and their tradition of doing what they were good at instead of changing the company to compete with their competitors. I think Carly may have taken this approach as a CEO at HP because she came in to the company as an outsider. Before becoming CEO she has never worked at the company before. I think because of her lack of experience with the company she felt she had to come in strong and show her employees and stake holders that she could be directive and powerful. Unfortunately, this approach was unsuccessful and Carly was ousted from the company. Angela Pitzo