Posted: March 24th, 2023

What is Leaders?

 Course Project 6

Leaders is a financial institution that offers commercial, industrial, real-estate lending, treasury management, and retail banking services for privately owned businesses and entrepreneurs. According to chapter 7 of the course textbook, the firm’s business has boomed since its inception in 2000, probably because of its value to consumers, unique business model, and strong culture. Besides maintaining its customer value proposition of a personalized banking experience, Leaders Bank must ensure that trust, communication, and respect prevail throughout the organization’s processes for its business model to be successful.

Leaders’ customer value proposition is a personalized banking experience for entrepreneurs and small businesses. As evident from the case study, this value proposition was founded on the current changes in the financial industry, including mergers and acquisitions that depersonalize financial services (Hess, 2011). Leaders observed a niche in these changes and sought to bridge it by offering personalized financial services to small businesses and entrepreneurs whose needs were not satisfactorily met in larger banks.

Besides its value proposition, Leaders also has a unique model that empowers employees to serve the firm’s customers to their satisfaction. However, trust, communication, and respect must prevail for this business model’s success. As the literature shows, “felt trust,” defined as the feeling of being trusted by supervisors, positively affects work outcomes such as job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, satisfaction, and organizational performance (Melhem & Al Qudah, 2019). LaGree et al. (2021) also note that a positive relationship exists between respectful engagement, occupational resilience, and long-term business benefits. A considerable body of literature also shows that employee engagement is a possible outcome of internal communication (Tkalac Verčič et al., 2021). Synthesis of this information suggests that leaders must foster respect in internal relationships and trust rather than control and ensure effective communication exists in the firm for employees to remain engaged, satisfied, and willing to serve consumers in the best way possible.

Takeaways from the Leaders’ case study can be used to design a vision that leads to the desired growth-focused culture in Listen Quick. Listen Quick aims to employ organic growth strategies to grow its wealth and attract a large consumer base. Therefore, the company’s strategic vision is to build on its internal strengths to continually define its leadership in producing efficient listening aids resulting in wealth and value creation for shareholders, employees, and customers.

In summary, Leaders has a unique business model whose success is highly dependent on communication, trust, and respect. The company also offers value to consumers by providing personalized financial services. Like Leaders, I can enhance Listen Quick’s growth by focusing on a strategic vision embedded in organic growth and leadership strength in producing efficient products.

References

Hess, E.D. (2011). Growing an entrepreneurial business: Concepts and cases (Ist Ed). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

LaGree, D., Houston, B., Duffy, M., & Shin, H. (2021). The effect of respect: Respectful communication at work drives resiliency, engagement, and job satisfaction among early career employees. International Journal of Business Communication, 1(1), 232948842110165. https://doi.org/10.1177/23294884211016529

Melhem, Y. S., & Al Qudah, M. F. (2019). Work engagement: Trust and respect to engage your people. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 12(17), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.17485/ijst/2019/v12i17/144033

Tkalac Verčič, A., Galić, Z., & Žnidar, K. (2021). The relationship of internal communication satisfaction with employee engagement and employer attractiveness: Testing the joint mediating effect of the social exchange quality indicators. International Journal of Business Communication, 1(1), 232948842110538. https://doi.org/10.1177/23294884211053839