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Wayne Huizenga

1) Explain Wayne Huizenga's personality traits for each of the big Five dimensions.

In psychology, the Big Five personality traits are five vast dimensions of personality discovered through empirical research. These factors are surgency, agreeableness, adjustment, conscientiousness and openness to experience.

“Surgency personality dimension includes leadership and extroversion traits. In other words, extroverts are more out going and want more power, thus they are more likely to emerge as leaders in group” (Lussier, 43). Wayne Huizenga built blockbuster entertainment, and left the company after he sold it to Viacom telling the shareholders that either he leads or leaves. (Lussier, ?)

Agreeableness is getting along with people. Strong agreeable personality types are sociable, spend most of their time with other people, and have lots of friends. Wayne’s basic approach to growing a business is to gather his key people and discuss ideas for expansion and possible deals. His key people point his weakness and give him ideas for improving his proposals. He mentions that people determine our success in future and so we should surround ourselves with good people.

Adjustment personality dimension includes traits related to emotional stability. It refers to self-control, calmness- good under pressure, relaxed, secure and positive. Wayne Huizenga talks in a relaxed, calm, chummy manner when dealing with other party, and makes an effort to be clearly understood.

Conscientiousness is trait of being painstaking and careful. In simple words it means self- discipline. Wayne starts his day at 4 A.M. He is hard driving, and hard working. He enjoys giving advice and solving problems.

Openness to experience personality dimension includes traits related to being willing to change and try new things. Wayne Huizenga’s basic approach to grow a business is to share his ideas with his key people, and get suggestions from them to improve his ideas. Wayne Huizenga is the only person in the history to build three fortune 1000 companies starting from scratch.

In Personality classification, it has a two dimensional method Type A and B. Type A personality is characterized as fast moving, hard working, hard driving, time Conscious, competitive, impatient, and preoccupied with work. While, Type B personality is the opposite of Type A. They are patient, relaxed and easygoing.

After reading through the Case study, I can analyze Huizenga can be tagged with Type-A personality. This can be revealed from his identity of being impatient, that always strives to achieve more and always desires to get better through the services tendered by his company. He is highly disciplined, aggressive and hard working. When he started his business he used to start work at 2.30 am until noon and then spend rest of the day looking up for new business. This does also unfolds his identity of being a hard-worker, time-conscious, who is always insecure and uncomfortable in order to achieve more and thus competent to acquire new opportunities. He appreciates solutions rather than problems from his team-mates. When he works, he is completely into it. He believes in team work and therefore his basic approach for expansion of the business is to get his key team mates together and discuss ideas for acquisitions, opportunities and possible deals. When making deals, he is in a relaxed, peaceful, and friendly atmosphere. He makes an effort to be clear and concise. He picks his team by himself and works with them to execute the project and to ensure its success. He suggests that young people should have a passion for what they do and should work hard to accomplish it. They should have great people with some excellent personalities. Though, he advises that life has to be balanced between family and work.

4) Which Learning Style Do You Think Huizenga Prefers? H. Wayne Huizenga is a very successful entrepreneur. “Fortune 500 called him the only person to ever build three Fortune 500 companies and own three professional sports teams.” (Lussier 61). Huizenga is a very successful man; in order for him to be successful he had to learn different aspects of business. All people have different learning styles. Our learning style is just the way in which we learn and everyone does it differently. Huizenga uses the assimilator learning style. This means that he prefers to learn by observing and thinking. “Assimilators are effective at understanding a wide range of information and putting it into concise, logical form.” (Lussier 52). In other words Huizenga likes to see and hear what’s going on and then process it. Huizenga is obviously an assimilator because he likes to gather who he believes to be his key people and discuss ideas for expansion (Lussier, ?). He likes to observe, then sit down and go over what he observed and think of ways to expand and grow. He has his close key people there to give him ideas about how he can improve his proposal. Assimilators like to observe and think and that is what Huizenga does. Often assimilators can be too idealistic and not practical enough, but showing what Huizenga has accomplished it is pretty obvious that he doesn’t have that problem.

5) Which bias in perception do you think Huizenga had to overcome during his early business years? “The term perception refers to a person’s interpretation of reality. In the perception process, you select, organize, and interoperate environmental stimuli through your senses. No two people experience anything exactly the same through this perception process” (Lussier, 41). In other words perception is how people view their reality and no two people view reality the same way. The bias in perception that affected Huizenga the most in the early years of his career had to be stereotypes. “Stereotypes are the process of generalizing behavior of all members of a group” (Lussier, 54). Stereotypes basically mean that people are perceived a certain way based on bias opinions about people’s behavior. When Huizenga co-founded Waste Management he had to overcome stereotypes people perceive on new businesses. For example, people perceive new businesses to be out of business within the first two years. Since Huizenga was a young co-owner of the business he was stereotyped through the perception that young owners of businesses don’t last long due to a lack of experience. Soon after Waste Management was founded Huizenga did a great job suppressing the stereotypes perceived on him and the business. The way Huizenga handled the stereotypes about him and the company was he bought out thousands of small companies in the same business as Waste Management. Then Huizenga took the company nation wide because all the smaller business that was bought out was located all across the nation. Huizenga then turned the company from a new start up business to a complex conglomerate and that helped suppress the stereotypes of the young owner. Huizenga had to overcome some stereotypes when he first started out but after turning waste management into a fortune 500 company there weren’t too many stereotypes that could be perceived in the company and young owner.

6) Assess Huizenga’s intrapersonal, interpersonal, and leadership skills.

In this book there are three type of skills Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Leadership skills. Intrapersonal skills depend on personality, self-concept, and honesty. Interpersonal skills are the ability to work well with a mixture of people. These skills also have the ability to initiate, build and maintain relationships to expectations. They also have good communication and conflict resolution skills. Leadership skills comprises with the ability to control others and work well within teams. It includes persistency and ability to motive others (Lussier 20).

Huizenga has his own ideas, thoughts and concepts. Initially, in1968 when he started a garbage dumping business merely with one thrasher he had a desire to put in his hard work and commitment thus eventually to become a market leader. His intrapersonal skills comprises of such a unique talent to achieve his desires. Huizenga’s believed that risk had to be taken to achieve success and his personality consisted of always taking risk and a firm decision-taker. He believed in myth of “Do unto other and do it quick”. He always focused on service industry where there is scope of recurring income and business.

He had some extraordinary interpersonal skills as well. He always maintained and advised a balance between work and family. He is quite friendly who gets into main streamline to enjoy what he does and to succeed as a team. He believes in team work and listens to what other team mates have to say. He believes in concise and clear communication. He has many instances when he had to sack his team mates solely because of their inefficiency and non-performance. But he believes that is the requirement of business. Though, he still upholds good relationships personally with such former colleagues who have been sacked. He has some good relationships within political circles and business community.

He possesses some excellent leadership skills as he made such a vast business empire. He has the vision and has the talent to transform those visions into facts. His leadership skills gets motivated by working with people who make it happen and achieving the results. He appreciates solutions rather than problems. He believes that there are lots of great ideas but to execute those ideas through right leadership is key to success. Being; a leader and to execute any project successfully, he picks his own players, develop the project plan and execute them after mutual considerations. He has a passion to work hard, has great people with enormous personalities and this all together does put his leadership skills in right context.

Resources:

Lussier Robert. Human relations in organizations (seventh edition). McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2008.

Thompson Edgar. "Huizenga wants character guys”. Palm Beach post. 28, March. 2007. Lexis-Nexis. Ohlone College Lib., Fremont, CA. 16 July. 2007. [Article from Palm Beach Post Newspapers online database subscription, accessed July. 16, 2007.]

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_22/b3835609.htm

Marvel, Alex. "Huizenga wants pick signed quick." Tribune Business News.29 Mar. 2007. EBSCOhost Academic search. EBSCOhost. Ohlone College Lib., Fremont, CA. 16 July. 2007 . 

 [Article from EBSCOhost online database subscription, accessed July. 16, 2007.]

http://www2.ohlone.edu/org/library/

http://galenet.galegroup.com.bob.csueastbay.edu/servlet/BCRC;jsessionid=7E35D425CF9497595B51CD15D5D211EA?locID=csuh_main

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