Leadership at Nissan: Key to Transformation

Case Study Chapter 3

LEADERSHIP AT NISSAN: KEY TO TRANSFORMATION

What makes someone a good, or even great, leader?

A leader should have the following three conditions to be a good leader. He should have the ability to develop a vision, to inspire and to get the job done; i.e. he should have a plan to get to a better place, know how to convince other to share this vision and be able to motivate others to work hard to achieve this vision.

There are seven traits associated with leadership: drive, desire to lead, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, intelligence, job-relevant knowledge and extraversion. A great leader will show all of these features, he will be ambitious and showing initiative, he will demonstrate the willingness to take responsibilities, he will build trusting relationships between followers and himself, with his self-confidence he will be able to convince people about the rightness of his goals and decisions and finally he will be energetic, sociable and assertive. It can be said with all confidence that a person that has all, or the majority, of these characteristics will be a great leader.

How much of a difference does leadership make? Can one person really make that much of a difference?

Diverse leaderships can make immense differences in companies’ success. Even if it sounds very hard to believe one person, the leader, can be the responsible one for achieving or not the enterprises’ goals. A leader is someone who can influence others and who has managerial authority, so if it is not used in the appropriate way it can lead to not great results. Nissan, a big name car firm, has seen the difference a leader can make, from suffering a crisis to reaching not even their new goals but beating them with a greater expectation.

Is there one leadership type that works best?

The University of Iowa studied the behavioural theories of Leadership, indentifying three different leadership styles. The autocratic style centralises the authority...