This is a distinction level report for two possible questions that could come up in the Level 3 BTEC business Level January 2025 Exam. Unit 6 Principles of Management. Based on Human Resources Planning and Leadership and Management Styles.
The answers are formulated to contain the requirements...
Stone Stylists Report Activity– Potential Questions and High Grade Answers
Introduction
Add an introduction about the company, its competitors and what you aim to do in this report i.e.
what main points you will address.
Stone Stylists Ltd – business profile
Stone Stylists Ltd are a SME sized chain of hair salons and barbershops aiming to be ranked number
1 in Sheffield, Lisa the owner employs has been known to employ charismatic leadership style. In
2023 she decided to take a more hands-off approach after running the chain for over 30 years and
decided to appoint her son James as Operations manager. He is inexperienced within hairdressing
industry and has implemented some changes to the business. Some decisions have caused some
conflict with staff and lead to some issues identified with the business.
Question number 1
With reference to the information and data in the Part A Set Task Information, you must
prepare a report for Ton Stylists Ltd.
Your report should:
• identify the issues with Management and leadership changes at Stone Stylists Ltd
• recommend ways to improve decision making at Stone Stylists Ltd
Issues with Leadership Style
Employees at Stone Stylists have been satisfied with Lisa’s charismatic style of leadership for many
years, as the focus was on developing individuals. Goals were shared with staff whom supported
them. This shows a positive and trusting culture with the staff who worked to achieve business
goals without the need for excessive monitoring or controlling staff at stone stylists. This is
supported by high levels of employee satisfaction at 100% and a low level of employee absenteeism
at only 4% in 2022 whilst Lisa was in charge.
However, the appointment of James appears to has unsettled the staff after 30 long years of
charismatic leadership. James is a more participative or democratic manager having been a store
manager and some of his attempts to improve the business has not been readily accepted by the
staff at Stone Stylists. This is shown by employee satisfaction reducing from 100% in 2022 to 72% in
2024 with an increase in absenteeism.
Furthermore, James implementation of a more retail sales target driven approach does not appear
to be working within the hairdressing industry where customer service quality is far more important
for sales growth. Therefore, James has not understood the requirements of the industry leading to
some growing client complaints. Customer satisfaction reducing from 98% in 2022 to only 75% in
2024, which has impacted in a decline in sales, which has also had a detrimental impact on customer
retention from 92% in 2022 to only 68% in 2024. There is no buy-in with staff with James approach
, as being the best way to improve its business leading to frustrated staff who appear to care about
the business.
In addition to this, James attempts to improve communication with staff with lots of meetings has
left many staff disillusioned as they cannot see a clear strategy of decisions being made and his
laissez faire leadership style of allowing staff to get on with their tasks despite clear issues of poor
performance is exacerbating the problems within the business.
Therefore, it is not likely that with the current leadership with James, Stone Stylists Ltd will simply
not meet their business goals of client retention of 90%. If customers feel they are not getting the
service, then they will not be prepared to pay Stone Stylists prices which are looking to achieve 10%
profit. As a result, they will not be number 1 Salon and Barbers in Sheffield.
Recommendation on Leadership Styles
I would recommend that James develops a more autocratic style of management in order to effect
the changes that are required. His current hands-off approach to the issues with behaviour and
having a poor human resource planning in place will lead to further business-related consequences
with a decline in customer retention and profits, He will simply not achieve the business goals. The
advantages of an autocratic approach are that commands are placed upon staff whom can easily
follow these orders, this will lead to improved discipline at the salons, however there are inevitably
problems with the autocratic approach as some staff will not like the issue of directions without
being able to contribute to the decision making and some of these staff could leave. The alternative
is to combine the autocratic approach with Management by Objectives (MBO), this would be a more
transactional approach to management and can lead to more support from staff as they become
rewarded for meeting their targets. However, MBO’s require each staff to have specific targets
through the business and this may not be suited as James need to find a solution more quickly.
Therefore, another alternative solution would be that Lisa, who is capable and is well liked due to
her charismatic nature, to take a more strategic role and embed a set of Company vision and values
to improve how staff behave and contribute to organisational changes. This will allow James to
effect that changes that he has found to work at the Leeds Salon, He can then implement a
performance management system to improve the performance monitoring and giving each staff
member targets to achieve. Also implement more effective IT system to monitor staff resourcing as
this will reduce costs and improve profitability. Also develop a better training and development
programme to fill skills gap as this would encourage staff to broaden their skills so Stone Stylists Ltd
could offer beauty treatments and hair extensions which are more profitable, this could also be done
in conjunction with a local Academy using the skills of a college to help train and nurture young
talent into the business. The key benefit to this is that Lisa can take an overall strategic role, which
would be hands-off after the initial meetings with staff to implement changes, whilst James then as
Operations Director consolidates the strategy with effective policies and measures that will
ultimately aim to achieve its business goals of being the number ranked hair salon in Sheffield.
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