Leadership

This leader that we interviewed, Brayan Karas, is a Plant Manager of a family-owned business, Cold Chain Technologies. Brayan has a working experience of about 5 years with more than 3 years as a plant manager. Prior to that, he was working for Military and started his career with Cold Chain after retirement from military. He has a Bachelors degree in Economics. He joined Cold Chain as a Quality Technician and was promoted to Quality Manager within a few months joining. The owner of the company, Larry soon promoted him as a Plant Manager. Cold Chain Technologies (formerly FDC Packaging) provides shipping solutions for customer's cold chain management requirements - distribution and transport of temperature-sensitive products - with a family of top-quality temperature related products that include refrigerants, insulated shipping containers, temperature data loggers and indicators.

The brief organizational structure of the company is as follows:

Larry, Owner of the company

Brayan Karas, Plant Manager

Operations Mgr Materials Mgr Traffic Mgr Accounts Mgr Admn Mgr

Brayan is responsible for the entire plant operations and has a team of five people reporting to him with a total of 100 employees in the company. Brayan is a classic example of a heroic leader with coercive leadership style. He delegates the responsibilities to his followers and expects them to come up with the best solution for an issue. However, the decision is made only after he reviews the option that the managers come up with. He finally takes the decision on the direction that �he’ thinks best fits the situation. The managers are made to think on an issue, but it is the leader who shows the direction that the group follows. Thus, his leadership style can be defined as coercive because he believes in driving the group to achieve the desired results and administers self-control in order to do that. Ultimately, he expects people to do what he tells them to do immediately.

Brayan strongly believes that there is a cause-effect monetary relationship in every situation. For any business, in any situation, one has to analyze what monetary benefit is a given situation going to give – may it be a situation where you are making a contract with the vendor or resolving a conflict amongst employees. He would not intend to do anything in business, if the business is not expecting to get any monetary