Creating social value and reshaping the surrounding environment can be challenging tasks for social entrepreneurs. In order to perform such endeavors, these individuals often rely on various leadership styles that promote change and allow them to easily integrate the needed alterations into the company’s working environment (Al Khajeh, 2018). As such, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Maui Raw, Michelle Valentin, has demonstrated excellent knowledge of transformative, charismatic, and collaborative leadership skills throughout her career, incorporating change practices into organizational activities. By utilizing creativity, innovation, communication, problem-solving and system-changing competencies, Valentin was able to transform Maui Raw, improving its outputs and securing high productivity levels that bring social change.
Michelle Valentin is an upcoming entrepreneur whose endeavors have significant potential to reshape the current approach to food production and consumption. Valentin is a creative founder of Maui Raw, a young corporation that is focused on creating and delivering healthy food to its customers while maintaining high quality (Trahant, 2019). After establishing this company, Valentin contributed significant effort to enhance its image and services, with Maui Raw becoming a promising venture that distributes vegan, non-GMO, raw foods (Trahant, 2019). The main focus for Valentine is to enhance the customers’ experience by providing interesting, healthy food options (Our mission, n.d.). However, as healthy food is often considered as lacking taste, the executive is forced to continuously search for new combinations of products, inventing novel foods that adhere to the clients’ needs (Schomaker et al., 2022). The variety of dips, sauces, and condiments available at Maui Raw is a perfect example of Valentin’s innovation and creative leadership skills.
Addressing such social and cultural issues as food prejudices and ethnic preferences is crucial in this endeavor. Valentin excellently implemented her creativity and problem-solving skills to introduce product options that challenge the established healthy food biases and simultaneously offer a wide variety of choices for people from different cultures. In addition, to ensure environmental and health safety, all items are produced using natural ingredients (Our mission, n.d.). This action solved such problems as the organization’s sustainability and the food’s quality and appeal.
An essential leadership mastery that allowed Valentin to enact alterations successfully is the system-changing skill. During her career, Valentin transformed the organizational processes according to the emerging company needs and challenges, making sure that all complications were properly addressed. As such, the executive frequently communicated with the employees and the enterprise’s shareholders, manifesting her communicative leadership qualities (Our mission, n.d.). This activity allowed Valentin to identify the primary problems faced by Maui Raw, such as the demand for food variety, production costs, the use of meat substitutes, and the inclusion of probiotics into distributed items.
To further advance the corporation’s standing, it is vital for Valentin to consider such aspects as replication, expansion, and sustainability. For instance, to promote replication, it would be beneficial to research the current market demand for vegan and non-dairy food, clarifying the most promising locations. This activity could also help establish promising areas for expansion, determining which resources are needed to facilitate the company’s growth. Nevertheless, Maui Raw should use alternative pathways for producing meat substitutes, as its production can be hazardous for the environment (Ismail et al., 2020). By using the product the creation of which leave a smaller carbon footprint, the corporation can tremendously improve its sustainability.
References
Al Khajeh, E. H. (2018). Impact of leadership styles on organizational performance. Journal of Human Resources Management Research, 1–10. Web.
Ismail, I., Hwang, Y.-H., & Joo, S.-T. (2020). Meat analog as future food: A review. Journal of Animal Science and Technology, 62(2), 111–120. Web.
Our mission. (n.d.). Mauiraw. Web.
Schomaker, J., Vriens, M., & Jarva, H. A. (2022). Healthy or not: Influencing attention to bias food choices. Food Quality and Preference, 96. Web.
Trahant, G. (2019). The 35 social entrepreneurs to watch for in 2019. Causeartist. Web.
