By Elizabeth Gooding, Insight Forums

The ability to drive change is critical for corporate leaders in the printing industry. Print equipment manufacturers and their customers are no strangers to the need for effective change management—whether change involves diversifying into more robust sectors, developing more flexible processes, adopting new technology, or driving automation to combat labor shortages. What is less well understood is the role that corporate leadership style can play in the success, or failure, of these endeavors.

How Leadership Style Impacts the Ability to Enact Changes

Several studies from the past five years, along with case examples from inside and outside of the printing industry, suggest that there are key lessons to learn about the impact and management style on driving change and innovation particularly the value of trust-building over charisma.

Consider the charismatic Apple founder Steve Jobs, who was forced to resign in 1985 because of his chaotic management style and confrontational attitude. Twelve years later he returned to pull Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy and create one of the world’s most valuable companies. Despite Jobs’ financial success, Psychology Today author Ronald E. Riggio Ph.D. described Jobs in 2012 as a leadership nightmare saying that his “success despite his bad behavior might give young people the wrong message: that it’s okay to behave badly as a leader.” Jobs delivered enormous shareholder value but also created an intense, pressurized, and even traumatic work environment for employees.

Travis Kalanic, founder of Uber, is also a highly charismatic tech leader who created hyper growth, massive market scale along with a negative, litigation-riddled work culture. In 2017 Kalanic was forced out of the company he founded. This year, Benny Landa, the polarizing printing icon whose personal charisma attracted extensive capital to Landa Digital Printing for decades, was forced out of the company he founded following bankruptcy proceedings and LDPs subsequent acquisition by FIMI.

In counterpoint to the highly charismatic leaders above, Tony Hsieh demonstrates a different and highly successful leadership style. Hsieh joined online retailer Zappos shortly after its founding and guided its acquisition by Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009. At Zappos, and his previous company LinkExchange, which was sold to Microsoft for $265 million, Hsieh was famous for his focus on employees, customers, and creating engagement between them. In his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Hsieh emphasized the importance of happiness, personal growth, and building a strong, adaptable company culture. Despite being described as quiet more often than charismatic, Hsieh garnered the trust and respect to drive shareholder profits without sacrificing employee’s mental health.

Historically, charismatic leaders have been able to accelerate fundraising, product adoption and decision-making. In the current decade, which opened with a pandemic, cultural and economic changes shifted the emphasis to other leadership qualities. While charisma may still be an attribute investors value in start-up founders, in mature industries vision, structure, and entrepreneurship are far more important. The print industry is unquestionably mature and facing continuous headwinds that stir up new challenges for its corporate leaders.

Research from global management firm McKinsey and Company supports the premise that traditional leadership models are undergoing a shift. Their 2024 report, “The Art of 21st-Century Leadership” recommends that corporate leaders embrace an adaptive approach that fosters trust, continuous learning, and stakeholder engagement. They describe key traits for today’s leaders such as humility, resilience, and a focus on long-term stewardship. Also emphasized were leadership best-practices such as creating a culture of trust and developing “learning journeys” for leadership succession. This certainly sounds like a description of Tony Hsieh rather than Steve Jobs.

Keep in mind that there is nothing inherently wrong with personal charisma. However, a person’s sense of self-importance can be mistaken for charisma while a truly charismatic person can focus on others rather than on themselves. In their book Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading,Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky talk about adaptive leadership in a very personal way. They start with the perspective that, when you belong to the organization or community that you are trying to lead, you are part of the problem you are trying to solve. They recommend that leaders identify and accept responsibility for their contributions to the current state as part of the strategy to move people toward a better result. Adaptive leadership entails taking personal responsibility and the ability to mobilize people to tackle tough problems by gaining their trust.

Consider the example of Robert Keane who demonstrates an authentic and adaptive leadership style. Keane founded Vistaprint back in1995 and continues to lead the company under the Cimpress banner today. While Stanley Davis originally coined the term “mass customization” in his 1987 book, Future Perfect, Vistaprint has exemplified the practice it in the printing industry. In leading this change, Keane demonstrated his ability to envision the future of print and to develop the entrepreneurial culture, corporate structure, and customer engagement necessary to drive continuous improvements. The company evolved from a focus on non-technical print buyers tailoring a limited menu of templated print jobs to serving graphic designers and high-end business customers across a much wider array of formats, substrates and technologies. Over time, the company has expanded into nearly every niche of business and consumer-oriented print including packaging, textiles and specialty printing.  They also deliver revenue generating services to complement print such as  graphic design, website hosting and email marketing.

As the vision has grown, so has the structure to support it.  A widely varied customer and product mix required a decentralized and empowered management structure. The parent brand, Cimpress, was created to house Vistaprint and other businesses in an international framework. According to their website, Cimpress’ operations “leverage a select few shared strategic capabilities and otherwise manage our businesses in a decentralized, autonomous manner to ensure we remain close to our customers, focused, and entrepreneurial.” 

This approach has allowed Cimpress to weather the potential disruptions of numerous acquisitions (e.g., Packstyle, Pixartprinting, BuildAsign, Exagroup, People & Print Group) and maintain predominantly positive employee sentiment (>75% on Glassdoor would recommend the company). Many employees cite a strong work-life balance, remote work options, and decentralized management as positives. Keane’s continued tenure as CEO indicates that he has fostered a culture of trust and reduced reliance on himself in favor of decentralized teams both of which are key catalysts in enabling change and innovation.

The McKinsey study referenced earlier stresses the importance of networked leadership and the need to build leadership pipelines and develop future leaders in parallel with any change initiatives. McKinsey refers to this as building “leadership factories.” Leadership Factories are not possible if senior leadership is not willing to relinquish control. An effective change leader must be comfortable with, and advocate for, distributed decisionmaking.

Paradoxically, the print industry is both mature and continuing to evolve. In this environment, complementary leadership styles are more important to the success of change management initiatives than a single, charismatic leader.