Using Transformational Leadership to Guide an Organization’s Success

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A compelling business-leadership paradigm has begun emerging in organizations across the globe. It shows up that when you systematically place the growth and well-being of your people above profits, paradoxically perhaps, your profits soar and sustainable, long-term success emerges.

Transactional vs. Transformational leadership

This was introduced by Pulitzer Prize and professor James McGregor Burns. The transactional leadership, based on a quid-pro-quo exchange: “you the follower have something I the leader want (labor), and I have something you want (money). So let’s make an exchange.” This transaction forms the basis for the leader follower relationship.

The transforming leader sees their jobs as a responsibility to move their followers toward becoming more fully autonomous moral agents and leaders in their own right. this type of leader generally speaking, seems to have more energy and even more time than the traditional leader, even though, as a rule, he or she expends more energy and has a much broader spectrum of focus and greater responsibility to attend to than the conventional leader. Not only is the transformational leader more likely to be successful in traditional terms (wealth, achievement, and stature), but he or she is also more likely to be happy.

Four universal needs

•  Need to love and be loved. it’s essential to leading and developing a powerful, fully expressed workforce. Need to grow. The transformational leader recognizes that stasis, or maintenance, is a myth that exists only in the human imagination.
• Need to contribute. life works when we forget about ourselves and contribute to others. To feel fulfilled and empowered, employees must know they are contributing to the whole.
•  Need for meaning. if we are not engaged in some larger purpose, we will not be fully satisfied.

The transformation must begin at the top

By definition, beyond the responsibilities of helping to protect the company from unwarranted legal action, the HR leader’s mandate is the people. In addition to policy and procedure you are expected to be concerned with issues surrounding the employees’ well-being, training, and development. Thus, there is a natural opening to initiate and lead at the top. The following recommendations can help HR take the lead in transforming the organization.

1.  Understand It and Have Conviction About It. You must genuinely grasp the virtue, the importance, and the urgency of your company becoming transformative.
2. Come from a Place of Courage. Courage is the capacity to have fear and, in the midst of that fear, out of resolve for the good that you would do, still act and it is a choice, a love-based choice that says “this must be and I will have it be”
3.  Own the Company. A HR leader sees his or her responsibility in the company’s overall success, in sales, finance, marketing, customer relations, and so on.
4.  Learn and Practice the Art of Enrollment. Enrollment happens when you, the enroller, have understood what the fundamental needs and desires of the person you would enroll are, and you have helped that person to understand how your dream, vision, or proposition actually satisfies his or her wants and/or needs.