Unilever’s Management Case Study

The first step to successfully changing the management process is developing a sense of urgency. Management ought to analyze the competitive and market realties (Kotter, 1995). In Unilever’s case, Poleman came in as CEO at a time when the company’s share price was falling and the globe facing a financial crisis. Poleman confronted Unilever’s old practices urging shareholders to change the company’s culture and start taking responsibility for society. The second step is creating a powerful guiding coalition to lead in the transformation efforts. In our case, Poleman replaced a third of the leading 100 executives at Unilever within a year as CEO (Bartlett, 2016).  The third step is developing a vision that will assist in directing the transformation efforts. Unilever unveiled its USLP plan as the key to meeting its Compass Vision.  The fourth step is using all efficient means available to communicate the new vision. Unilever expanded the three main goals to seven commitments and further broken into over 50 unique, measurable targets.

The next step is empowering others to act on the vision. Unilever did so through its Corporate Social Responsibility group’s brand imprint workshops that assisted all its brand leaders to analyze the social and environmental impacts of their brands (Bartlett, 2016). Another step is identifying short-term wins. In Unilever’s case, the company established water and waste as its key pollutant sources shortly after Poleman became CEO.  Another step is consolidating improvements while enacting additional change. Poleman created a new role in the company’s executives charged with the responsibility of overseeing the USLP vision. The final step is institutionalizing new approaches. One way Unilever tried to do so is through introducing laundry detergents that require fewer wash cycles in an effort to minimize its water footprint.

Poleman’s leadership style is unique and can be termed as both ethical and authentic. An ethical leader is different at an individual- level. An ethical leader is one that demonstrates normatively appropriate conduct through their actions as well as interpersonal relationships and encouraging such behaviour to subordinates through two-way communication, reinforcing and making decisions (Maak, 2011). In Poleman’s case, he stands out at an individual level as demonstrated through his action of shaking-up Unilever’s established culture and operations shortly after becoming CEO. Poleman also shows normatively appropriate conduct by driving for social, customer and environment responsibility as Unilever’s core strategy to meeting its stakeholder targets.  In addition, Poleman’s decisions are in line with promoting the company’s responsibility vision as he adds a new role to Unilever’s executives to help in overseeing the vision. He also promotes audits that measure the environmental footprint of Unilever’s general product portfolio. A key assumption of authentic leadership theory is that it leads to trust, engagement and well-being, contributing to the effectiveness of leadership. An authentic leader is one who is true to themselves in the spirit of positive organizational scholarship. Poleman’s authentic leadership style is seen through engaging the marketing team with the sustainability department to realize Unilever’s responsibility vision. He goes beyond the norm when he creates a new role to oversee the vision rather than handing it to the CSR team as is usually the norm.

References

Bartlett, C. (2016, August 24). Unilever’s New Global Strategy: Competing through Sustainability. Harvard Business Review, pp. 1-20.

Kotter, J. (1995, April). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fails. Havard Business Review, pp. 1-12.

Maak, N. P. (2011). Responsible Leadership: Pathways to the Future. J Bus Ethics, 1-12.