Deepwater Horizon Leadership Styles
Anonymous
BUS 4405: Leadership
The University of the People
Introduction In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon, under the direction of BP, through a series of engineering mistakes and cost cutting procedures, had a devastating accident which resulted in the loss of 11 lives and caused 17 injuries. In addition the accident led to the worst environmental oil disaster in the history of the United States. In this paper we will explore the most appropriate leadership style to lead British Petroleum through radical organizational change necessary to transform the company from a primarily fossil fuel company to a leader in the renewable energy marketplace. We will then evaluate the process through the process of…show more content… Bear with me; this will get relevant in a minute. The five paragraphs are situation, mission, execution, service and support and command and signal (I am impressed I got that from memory). If there was limited time, and we could not go through the whole order, we would concentrate on the third paragraph, execution. The reason for this is because execution is where the actual work gets done, and is therefore considered the most important. If we compare this to the five stages of the changes planning, enabling, launching, catalyzing, and maintaining the stage most closely relating to execution is launching. Launching takes place at the stage where you do things like implement steps, meet goals and get results (Reardon, Reardon, & Rowe, 1998). So when looking for a leader to take charge during a major change I would look to someone who was particularly adept at the skills needed to launch that change. If we look at the different leadership styles, commanding, logical, inspirational and supportive through the lens of which of these would be the most effective at the launch phase, we can quickly come to the conclusion that the most effective leader would be between the styles of commanding and logical styles. Logical leaders would excel at implementing steps and assessing progress while commanding leaders would be best at meeting goals and getting results. If these two are a tie…show more content… Ideally in my view the logical leader is best suited to bring BP though the planning, enabling, launching, catalyzing and maintaining stages of this change. References
Reardon, K.K., Reardon K.J., & Rowe, A.J. (1998). Leadership styles for the five stages of radical change. Acquisition Review Quarterly, 2.
Retrieved from: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dau/reardon.pdf Ingersoll, C., Locke, R., & Reavis, C. (2012). BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010. Cambridge, MA. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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