Susan Wojcicki Leadership Style

From renting out her garage to two Stanford students who were developing their new company, Google Inc., so she can pay her mortgage, to becoming Google's marketing genius, Susan Wojcicki has risen up the ranks to become the CEO of YouTube. Let's retrace her steps by analysing Susan Wojcicki's leadership style, the principles involved and her leadership qualities.

Who is Susan Wojcicki?

Susan Diane Wojcicki is one of the most successful technology industry executives in Silicon Valley, and the current CEO of the video-sharing website, YouTube. She was born July 5, 1968 in California, US as the eldest of three sisters, she holds a Master's degree in Economics from the University of California and a Business Administration degree from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Google's first marketing manager, Susan Wojcicki, was tasked with creating new ways to monetize the Google search engine, with her first major breakthrough coming in the year 2000 after the launch of Google Adwords.

In 2003, Susan Wojcicki's Google Adsense idea exponentially increased Google's digital advertising power, allowing Google to record a $100 billion advertisement revenue in 2018, and dominate digital advertisement.

She also led Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, Admeld and Admob, allowing Google new ways to monetize consumers' web engagement. This was in line with Susan Wojcicki's goal to produce customer-based services.

Her first experience with online video sharing came in 2005 when Google launched a free video sharing platform called Google videos. The next year, she oversaw Google's purchase of YouTube, a similar video sharing platform that was performing better than Google videos.

She was promoted from the role of vice president of the marketing department to senior vice president of advertising and commerce in the year 2010, and became the CEO of YouTube in 2014.

Susan Wojcicki Leadership Style

When Susan Wojcicki first joined Google, she was tasked with providing new ways for Google's monetization, which she achieved through innovation. Some proposed innovations under Susan Wojcicki leadership style include AdSense, the doodles on Google's homepage, Google analytics, DoubleClick, Google videos, YouTube and AdWords.

The introduction of AdSense which is considered as one of Google's highest revenue generators is considered one of the largest innovation successes of Susan Wojcicki's leadership style.

The innovative leadership style also helped promote a conducive working space where employees work stress-free, and workers can thrive creatively.

Susan Wojcicki encourages employees to provide value to the organization by proposing innovative ideas, whether new or reworking an existing idea. This has been essential in developing different strategies for Google and reaching both organizational goals and Susan Wojcicki's specific goal of providing customer-based services.

She also always takes into account all recommendations provided by teams and implements them if they are beneficial to the organization. By implementing some of these recommendations, Google was able to provide services like the automated feature of AdWords and the creative idea of publishing museum art pieces on Google Art Project.

In a move to implement this leadership style in Google, Susan Wojcicki also encouraged the democratic leadership style in the decision-making processes.

This shows her team members how much trust she has in them and encourages collaboration among them through idea-sharing.

Susan Wojcicki Leadership Qualities

Figure 2 shows Susan Wojcicki's leadership qualities.

1. Great communication skills and an effective listener

Susan Wojcicki places a lot of trust in her teams to generate innovative ideas. Thus, she believes that the proper communication of problems from the organization's position is the first step to solving a problem. The second step is listening to understand the proposed solutions, which is followed by the implementation of the ideas that were generated. She divided her teams into small units to increase productivity, improve communications and solve problems efficiently.

In a bid to reach the organization's innovation goals, Susan Wojcicki not only encouraged creativity among her teams but was also creative herself. She also made sure that recreational opportunities were given to all company employees to sustain their creativity. She believes that only through sustained creativity can innovation be achieved.

3. Collaboration

By implementing different principles of democratic leadership style during decision-making, Susan Wojcicki showed the importance of collaboration towards innovation. She also makes sure she is present in all team meetings and encourages collaboration among teams by combining different skills to help generate different ideas that are beneficial to the organization.

4. Transparency

She showed high transparency with justifications in all decisions she made during her stay with Google. This promoted a certain culture within Google, whereby Google shared information contained in the Board letter to all staff, thus sustaining creative dialogue between leaders and employees.

5. Innovation Oriented

It was her innovative drive that led to the development of AdSense and the monetization of the Google search engine. She is also focused on keeping the innovative mindset of her teams, which has led to her teams performing at higher levels.

Due to her high drive towards innovation and the tasks assigned to her during her stay with Google, Susan Wojcicki's leadership style is the innovative leadership style. She is always looking for innovative ways to drive her organization forward and produce the best results. One of her innovative ideas in Google was AdSense, which is now a major avenue of revenue generation for Google.

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