| Sr No | Leader’s skills | Definition | Nadella’s ideologies depicting leader’s skills (Example) | |
| 1 | Self-Awareness | Authentic leaders exhibit the awareness their strength, weakness; express how others see them and how he impacts others. Leaders having a high level of self-awareness can influence their followers’ choice of behaviour, thinking, and motivate them to encourage trust for building positive interpersonal relationships among their followers, which eventually promotes creativity. | Nadella gained the top spot in “Best CEO for diversity 2020” in Comparably Awards, where employees of color voted i.e., employees think Nadella to be an inclusive leader and who give equal opportunity to all irrespective of any color. He endeavoured diversity and said diversity leads to new creative innovative ideas. Nadella’s strength lies in influencing followers to develop new ideas by providing brainstorming sessions, giving equal opportunity to all, and his constant encouragement to work in teams. He encourages employees to be innovative and creative by providing his support, thus developing an environment of trust among employees. Also, followers tend to feel good when he is around, depicting his positive interpersonal relationships. He believes in Teamwork and thus introduced new features in Microsoft Teams i.e., “Together Mode” for encouraging teamwork for everyone. Through Nadella’s declaration of doing meaningful work, he positively influences his employees to develop innovative ideas to endeavour sustainability. His global skill initiative to help others (not only his employees) is driven by his empathetic characteristics, which are highly appreciated by individuals globally, improving Nadella and Microsoft’s overall impression. He communicated 3R to his followers that can help them to overcome challenges faced • Reacting, • Responding • Reimagining | |
| 2 | Relational transparency | Authentic Leaders display authentic selves because they openly share information, feelings, emotions, and thoughts with their followers. It provides an opportunity for their followers to express their opinions, ideas, and challenges. Authentic Leaders create an environment of honesty, openness, and trust for promoting creativity among their followers and encourage them to generate new ideas. | Nadella openly communicated his expectation to his employees in three simple approach • Create clarity • Strike energy • Ability to achieve success He hosts open sessions like “ask me anything” to encourage the forthcoming employees with ideas and develop a relationship of accessible information and trust He supports his followers, develops trust through his leadership style, and encourages teamwork among his employees. He gave way to brainstorming sessions and a new open work environment to enhance creativity. He collaborated with competitors to embrace innovation and creativity. He encourages employees to examine market critically and come up with innovative ideas
He is rated highest in interpersonal skills by his employees as they refer to him as a happening person and tagged him as most favorite individual. He allowed individual employees to create innovative ideas and support employees in creative yet risky projects. He encourages challenge taking behavior of employees. | |
| 3 | Internalized moral perspective | Authentic leaders strongly express their consistent moral values and standards while comparing it to social, organizational, and team pressures. They also reveal how much their behaviours and decisions are aligned with internalized values. They promote integrity and honesty, and discourage unethical behaviours that lead to positive climate and trust and, thereby, creativity. | Nadella is rated as “Best CEO for Diversity 2020” depicting his high moral and ethical values regarding diversity and inclusivity. His values and fair decisions have imprinted him as best inclusive leader by the employees of color. He prefers diversity for enhancing creativity as he stated that Diversity inclusion is “A pillar for success.” He addressed the social injustice in America by clearly communicating his commitment, through mail to all his employees, to take actions to control racial injustice, inequity, and unambiguously believe that “Black lives matter.” He updated Microsoft policies and taking initiatives to make Black lives better by providing technological support to individuals of color. Nadella’s behaviour is consistent with his moral value of embracing inclusive diversity to enhance creativity
He believes in happier customers, employees and partners by focusing on “inclusivity, trust & sustainability.” | |
| 4 | Balanced processing | Authentic leaders analyze the entire information objectively before making a decision, improving fairness in decision-making to promote positive interpersonal relationships and trust, which eventually develops an emotional attachment among followers towards their organizations and enhances creativity. | Collaborating with rival firms and taking risks to encourage team work and grow with them. The collaboration brings trust in leader’s role for enhancing creativity. Nadella’s his initiative to bring education back on track by working with a partner is highly appreciated by his followers. His three meeting rules i.e., •listen more • talk less • be decisive, became very popular. He intends to combine the fragments of Microsoft into one.
After examining the environment, Nadella stated that the world is heading towards transforming from the traditional work culture into new a hybrid work system and culture. He calls it the new regular work, which focuses on results rather than the number of hours logged in. This decision has encouraged employees to be more productive and developed a sense of attachment for Nadella in pandemics. | |