The importance of effective supply chain leadership in the success of a business is clearly more defined nowadays. Whether you run a small, medium or multi-national/conglomerate across the globe, you need a supply chain leadership style that will effectively cover the end to end supply chain and motivate people.

For these reasons, companies need leaders to lead differently but to also adapt supply chain leadership styles that can combine both modes. With that said, there are 4 styles which must be adopted. These are command, control, consensus, and collaborative supply chain leadership style; among this first four Cs, the leader must choose which work best in the different modes.

Command and Control

In this supply chain leadership style, leaders work with a defined order where everything is well structured and arranged, but this style fails in a complex organization where innovation is important. Supply chain leadership skills can help leaders reduce the loses on a supply chain as they are able to

· Effectively manage every team on the supply chain like the manufacturers, contractors, vendors, suppliers, etc.

· Are able to share information and resources

· Rely on predictive analytics to see the direction the supply chain is heading

· Can make an impromptu decision with the aid of innovation

Consensus

Consensus on the other hand work in an organization where the staff is grouped into small teams that manage a particular task before the final result is drafted. This style of supply chain leadership, however, doesn’t seem to do so well where speed is of paramount importance due to the different work speed in the teams.

Collaborative Supply Chain Leadership

When diverse teams come together to solve a problem, collaborative leadership style is more suitable, For a supply chain leader, the ability to manage effectively different departments across an organization also requires a collaborative supply chain leadership skill.

Competency

Competency in supply chain means continually learning and remonstrating relevant knowledge and expertise, mostly in these technical competencies.

Consistency

In simple terms consistency means, doing what you say you will do over time.

For a supply chain leader who wants to master consistency should be able to

Builds trust and credibility along with the peers, suppliers, and customers.Builds trust and credibility along with the peers, suppliers, and customers.With consistency, you are able to predict the results and behaviorsConsistency achieves goals and delivers on expectationsConsistency builds the reputation and brand you are!

Commitment

Commitment breeds productivity and efficiency in a team and boosts the staff morale to deliver results regardless of the storm ahead.

Concern for the People

In the supply chain, we mostly manage ‘information flow’ to manage ‘material flow’. This information flow is mostly managed by people. So, for most supply chain teams, the investment in people represents a significant proportion of all investments.

Creativity

Creativity is an essential part of is entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship and more important for a supply chain leadership personnel as it enables them to get new businesses, sustain old ones and device mean to take the company to greater heights. The roles of a supply chain leadership are to be able to incorporate the effective management of people and logistics through utilizing appropriate information, market trends, data and systems to produce results.