After immediately focusing first on investors and clients, Beers decided the best course for the company to take. Having decided to differentiate the company in terms of its branding capabilities, her second move was to bring together a group of insiders that would support her vision. At this point she falls neatly into the “leader-member exchange (LMX) theory” by her Machiavellian approach to forming a team. She chose people on one criterion – that they shared her opinions. This meant that she ignored many people in the upper echelons of Ogilvy & Mather in favour of people that would go along with her ideas. In doing this, she probably alienated many powerful managers, thereby burning many of the bridges that she hoped to build in changing the mindset of the company.
Once a basic outline of the company’s new “Brand Stewardship” focus had been put to paper, Beers turned her attention to winning accounts and left her team to communicate the new vision to the rest of the company. Her lack of participation and attention to detail at this point resulted in confusion at Ogilvy & Mather, as clients were ready to embrace Brand Stewardship while most people in the company had no idea what the concept really meant. Beers also formed the Worldwide Client Service at this point, to help the company better serve international clients. This new layer of authority at the company met with much backlash at the highly localized offices, again because Beers failed to achieve buy-in throughout the company or to properly communicate the new strategy.
Her next adopted style of leadership was the “Democratic Style”. Two years after Beers first began her “Brand Stewardship” initiative, the entire worldwide board of directors and a number of local presidents came together for the first time to try and craft a vision statement. Beers was reluctant to allow this group to convene, as she feared losing control of the final product. However, she allowed the meeting to take place, most likely to elicit what would seem like a collective decision about the future direction of Ogilvy & Mather. However, when things didn’t happen quickly enough (no consensus was reached by the end of the first day); Beers switched to the “Coercive” style, directly challenging anyone who dared disagree with her strategy: “I have heard that in any change effort, one-third are supporters, one-third are resisters, and one-third are apathetic. I’m in the first group. Where are you?” The executives had to choice but to concede at that point.
Beers’ previous experience and talents equipped her with the ability to make good decisions for the company’s new strategy. As evidenced by client enthusiasm, her ideas were correct for growing the business. However, her personal charisma notwithstanding, she lacks a fundamental quality in a good leader – honesty and integrity. Someone who blatantly divides a company into in- and out-groups and is autocratic would not achieve enough trust to achieve sweeping change. Her casual attempt to saddle Ogilvy & Mather with a matrix structure via the WCS was not executed with a change management strategy, showing that she lacks management skills and does not bother to source them.
A way to repair the situation at Ogilvy & Mather would be for Beers to view the people at the company as “customers” and discover a way to sell them her vision. It’s surprising that it hasn’t occurred to her to execute a Brand Audit on her own company – the results could chart a way forward.
Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide (A), HBR Reference No: 9-495-031, p.15
B.M. Bass, Organizational Dynamics,Winter 1885.
Goleman, D., 2000. Leadership that gets results HBR 78 (2), 78-90
HBR Reference No: 9-495-031, p.11