Transactional Leadership: What leaders do to get stuff done!

By Dr. Marcus Robinson

The main thing you need to know about transactional leadership is that it focuses on performance outcomes and the tangible results produced to achieve business objectives. To that extent, transactional leaders guide or motivate individual contributors toward established goals by clarifying role and task requirements.?

The critical elements of this kind of leadership are:?

• Control?
• Measurement?
• Administration?
• Performance?

The mechanics of transactional leadership range from controlling ideas such as values, goals, and specific objectives to more concrete systems defined by policy, process, and procedure.?At the level of controlling ideas, transactional leaders manage performance by helping people interpret vision, values, and strategy to ensure the success of the business initiative.

These interpretations must lead to clearly defined tactics and actions that generate incremental gains toward achieving performance goals and business objectives. Leaders must set clear objectives, and the processes must be implemented to achieve those objectives. These tactics and actions are often codified as documented policies and procedures to ensure that winning processes are maintained and improved over time.?

"The drive for predictable, sustainable results is an intrinsic motivation of a transactional leader".?

A transactional leader monitors progress through a broad range of measurement tools and standards for performance. A clear example of this principle is the constellation of ideas and methodologies that address continuous improvement issues. In this domain, data and information become the "breakfast of champions." Transactional leaders must become adept at developing metric formulations for all aspects of performance in their organization.?

When leaders and individual contributors gain and apply more knowledge and information about processes and performance, greater leverage can be applied to achieve well-defined performance objectives. Managing the knowledge and intelligence generated in a high-performing organization is a huge task. Administrating, documenting, sharing, and archiving vital information is critical to the success of any organizational endeavor. For these reasons, it is essential for transactional leaders at every level to have an integrated knowledge management strategy as a system for building a more capable organization.?

The key directional ideas of transactional leadership are:?

• Clear boundaries - having clearly defined boundaries between role and function, technical process, span of control, decision rights, and domains of influence allows transactional leaders to control and manage interactions to drive desired business results.?
• Order - for the transactional leader, everything has its own time, place, and usefulness to the process. By maintaining a highly ordered interaction system, transactional leaders can drive predictably uniform outcomes systematically over time.?
• Compliance - this aspect of transactional leadership focuses on complying with mutually defined operational guidelines and methodologies in every aspect of the business system. Deviation from the procedure, methodology, and process guidelines are considered problems to be resolved and eliminated to drive predictable, uniform outcomes.?
• Willfulness - striving to impose order and control on an otherwise chaotic and uncontrollable environment is a driving force behind transactional leadership?

From a behavioral standpoint, leaders must strive to build capacity within the organization to leverage its people, processes, and technology to achieve the business's mission and goals. Leaders must communicate the goals and intended outcomes to be achieved to everyone within their span of control and influence. Leaders must also create an environment where everyone's ideas are heard, valued, and applied to improve performance and success at the bottom line. The drive for predictable, sustainable results is an intrinsic motivation of a transactional leader.?

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