Bill Gates: Leader and Role Model Essay

Bill Gates is an effective leader and leadership role model and he is my choice for a role a model. Bill Gates has demonstrated and employed good leadership skills to be a successful business man. He has also demonstrated why he is a good role model for those who want to become leaders themselves. I believe that I share many of the leadership traits with Bill Gates and that those traits will help me in my plan for success. The reasons I chose Bill Gates as my leadership role model are as follows: he is one of the founders of Microsoft and has shown good leadership with the decisions he has made running the company and is also in the same field as my career of study which is programming. Bill Gates has many qualities of a leader, but most notably is the fact that he drove his employees hard and himself harder (Boyd, 1995). Throughout the years Bill Gates has shown his leadership capabilities through his dedication and hard work by the ever growing success of Microsoft. Another example of his leadership ability was when he released Windows 3.0 and won the battle for the first GUI operating system, he did this by keeping his hand involved in all the major, potential competitors to his pet project while also continuing development of his own product (Boyd, 1995). A few of the characteristics of an effective leader are knowing the industry in which you plan to work, building your team so that you have sufficient help to accomplish what you set out to do, and most importantly develop a vision and solid goal so the people that work for you know what they are working towards (Hill, 2009). Bill Gates has these traits as well as many more such as being motivated, being intelligent, and being hard working. In his earliest days developing DOS he would joke about what he called his seven-hour turnaround: leave the office late at night, go home, eat, sleep, and be back in the office only seven hours later, and he was proud of it (Boyd, 1995) this just goes to show how hard working he was. My own personal strengths that I have noticed are math, reading, technology (Cook, Week 2 CSI Summary, 2011), and being logical when it comes to problem solving (Cook, Personal Profile(Week 2 Journal Entry), 2011) which I believe I share with Bill Gates. The reasons I believe that these personal strengths will help me to succeed are that it will make it easier to solve work related problems because of my logical thinking process (Cook, Personal Profile(Week 2 Journal Entry), 2011). Also these strengths are an ideal match for the career path that I have chosen with is computer programming. In the field of programming you need to be efficient in all of these areas in order to succeed. Critical thinking is going to play a big part in my plan for success; it will help me to improve upon myself and to make better decisions, not only in my personal life but in my career as well. It will help me to not only know what company I should work for, but also provide me with the best way to tackle particular projects at work. Leadership skills will also play a big part in my plan for success by making it easier to accomplish my goals and giving me more options for my career. By having leadership skills I won’t be limited to just being a programmer I could in fact be a lead programmer heading up and directing an entire team. Accountability will help me to increase my chances of completing my goals of having a higher paying job that I love, like leadership skills will, but in a different way. It will make me more responsible because I am taking accountability for my actions whether it is positive or negative results. So by employing motivation, intellect, and hard work along with other leadership qualities Bill Gates has made Microsoft the company that it is today. So, with a little determination, hard work, and know how anyone can be like Bill Gates and create a thriving company. So in conclusion we should all strive to be like Bill Gates and be just as motivated and hard working in everything we do. References Boyd, A. (1995). Smart money: the story of bill Gates. In A. Boyd, Smart money: the story of bill gates. (pp. 9-26). Greensboro: Morgan Reynolds Inc. Cook, W. (2011). Personal profile(week 2 journal entry). Rockford. Cook, W. (2011). Week 2 csi summary. Rockford. Hill, C. (2009, April). Daily news. Retrieved August 14, 2011, from NYDailyNews.com: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-04-04/news/17928884_1_leader-understands-achievable Serrano, G. (2009, April). The gates’ leadership. Retrieved August 14, 2011, from Trends Updates: http://trendsupdates.com/the-gates%E2%80%99-leadership/