The Transformational Leader: The Post-Pandemic Norm

The Covid-19 pandemic has inevitably accelerated the dawn of a new era as life during the pandemic has forevermore been disrupted. The pandemic’s impact has not only been on the organization as an entity itself as the varying governmental responses levied to mitigate the virus’ spread have also impacted individual expectations and norms as stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits have often outpaced potential job earnings. The latter has resulted in mindset changes of individuals who, for varying reasons, are opting to not return to the world of work or who are demanding pandemic-related changes remain the new status quo.

Organizational leaders must not only contend with this debris and collateral damage but they must also contend with the ongoing social justice changes underway that have increasingly polarized the USA and that have begun to spread across Western Europe. The confluence of these phenomena has created a high-risk vortex within which organizational leaders must navigate. Organizations may wish to revert to pre-pandemic leadership norms, norms that allowed for decades-long low employee engagement; however, Eagle3 believes the adroit senior leader will opt to migrate the organizational leadership team to a post-pandemic norm of transformational leadership. The sections below address this leader transformation and specifically target the highly engaged leader as the desired new norm.  

A Positive Perspective: Leader Engagement vice Employee Engagement 

The norm for many organizations is to look at the negative, e.g., their weaknesses and the threats that emanate from the environment, as opposed to their aspirations and the results that could result from a more positive perspective. This is seen in the myriad of reports by consulting firms that have focused on the historically low levels of employee engagement around the world. Eagle3 considers the positive approach both more effective and more satisfying for organizational members ergo its preference to focus on leader engagement vice employee engagement. Eagle3’s research and experience are such that seeking to increase leadership engagement virtually eliminates low employee engagement as each member is engaged by design. 

Appreciative Inquiry: Aspirations Matter 

The migration from pre-pandemic leader styles to a team of transformational leaders is both aspirational and doable. This migration is aspirational because of the recognition that transformational leaders exude confidence as they engage every member in a positive manner to maximize that person’s professional and personal growth. The migration is doable because leaders can learn how to become transformational leaders with deliberate exposure to modeled behavior, formal and informal development, and mentored activities. Learning the fundamentals of transformational leadership takes time, practice, and is experiential in nature yet anyone currently in or pending assignment into a leadership position can be taught the critical skills required to reach this pinnacle of leadership style. 

Outcomes: Organizational Citizen Behaviors

         With foresight the organization migrating to transformational leadership can anticipate the positive tangible and intangible benefits that are natural outcomes of transformational leadership’s application. Very succinctly, the organization will benefit from increased member trust, loyalty, and productivity as the members see the migration in-process. Gone will be the days of leader avoidance and passivity, micromanagement, and leadership by intimidation. Gone will be the days of fighting fires and wondering why key metrics are not being met. As the migration progresses the emerging transformational leaders will become more inspiring and more motivational to the members as every member is actively engaged. The personal touch that was missing before will captivate the members as the emerging transformational leaders no longer tacitly or openly allow out-groups to exist: Everyone will be in the leader’s in-group.

         The natural outcomes from these evolving leader-member engagements will be an amplification in trust, mutual respect, and mutual obligation. Member self-identification with the leaders and the organization will increase as will productivity and effectiveness. The migration to a transformational leadership team positively impacts the relationships that undergird every organization – as these relationships improve performance improves commensurately. Win-win becomes the new norm as leader engagement becomes ever more prevalent. 

By Design: Developing Transformational Leaders 

The development of transformational leaders requires an understanding of the components of transformational leadership. This understanding becomes the baseline from which to plan the migration to a leadership team comprised of emerging and extant transformational leaders. The migration plan must recognize the individual nature of each leader’s current leadership style and be tailored to a specific path designed to ensure every leader is deeply aware of the transformational leader style components of:

1.   Idealized Influence’s Behaviors and Attributes. Within this domain the emerging transformational leader learns to articulate and emulate the goodness that comes with mutual trust, respect, and cooperation as well as the value and belief system of the organization. The leader is known to be focused on the collective good vice being self-centered which impacts members in a positive way. The leader is seen as worthy of emulation. 

2.   Inspirational Motivation. Members respond to a powerful vision casting narrative which is the key to this behavior. The vision casting captures the emotional attention of the members as they better understand how they are directly connected to this future state and begin to better align activities and efforts to attain the vision. A deeper sense of belonging occurs as people long to belong to something bigger than they are. 

3.   Intellectual Stimulation. Within this domain the leader gives members permission to assess current operations, to ponder new ways, and to advocate for changes. This domain connects with the rational side of members and is a powerful problem-solving approach given members are openly empowered while being led by a competent and confident leader. The seeds of innovation are planted here. 

4.   Individualized Consideration. This domain addresses each individual as unique as the leader strives to understand both wants and needs of every member and to posture each for growing professional and personal growth. It is this aspect of the transformational leader that separates him or her from the herd; no one is left out and everyone receives direct leader engagement. It is this leadership behavior that garners the deeper trust and commitment as the members experience growth and success opportunities. 

These components are critical to becoming a transformational leader and act in concert with one another as the leader engages each individual as well as the larger teams and the organization. These behaviors are skills that can be learned, and as learning occurs, modeled with every member interaction. This duality of approach gives the migration a near real-time aspect that begins positively impacting the organization upon implementation as the emerging transformational leaders activate their learning and mentoring real-time. 

Knowing: The Power of Strength Assessments 

         Leaders and members will benefit if they know their individual strengths as this positions the organization to leverage strengths via complementary approaches. The insight from strength assessments is rarely acknowledged or used by non-transformational leaders given the tendency to avoid interactions, to firefight, or to micromanage. For the transformational leader knowing member strengths postures both for better engagements and for enhanced communications, the prerequisites for amplified organizational success.

Becoming: The Power of Self-Reflection 

In addition to knowing one’s strengths leaders need to know themselves. This is a first step in developing the high degree of emotional intelligence (EI) that a transformational leader should possess; EI is critical to all aspects of transformational leader behaviors as EI skills provide the foundation upon which idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration reside. To better develop one’s EI skills the emerging and extant transformational leader should engage in recurring self-reflection to ponder one’s status and situation as well as the status and situation of others. Self-reflection positions the transformational leader to better understand how his or her behaviors impact others and can provide a path to better, more effective engagement with members; self-reflection can assist the transformational leader with deeper understanding of how the transformational behaviors above can be integrated to further amplify performance. 

Acting: Muscle Memory Requires Exercise

As with any new skill activating it in a recurring manner embeds it in one’s muscle memory making it automatic. The more the transformational leader engages in each of the transformational behaviors above the more success will be experienced by all which will lead to a positive reinforcing loop-type environment. Recurringly discussing the organizational vision, modeling its value and belief system, experiencing the positivity from empowered employees, and caring for each member as an individual deeply ingrains this leader style into the leader’s DNA while providing members with a model of behaviors worthy of emulation. To successfully migrate to the future state of a transformational leadership team experiential learning and doing are required.

Conclusion  

The negativity resulting from the pandemic and the overlaid social justice issues have created a unique environment, a leadership vortex, that can easily distract senior organizational leaders from the opportunity presented to migrate the leadership team to a fully transformational leadership style as society approaches the post-pandemic era. Many will not see this opportunity; however, it exists and for the senior leader gifted with foresight the opportunity to raise the performance of the leadership team exists. The transformational leadership behaviors epitomize the enlightened leader and can be, with time, resources, and application, both learned and ingrained by all current and prospective leaders.

The migration to a fully transformational leadership team overflows with organizational goodness as the members see leadership morph real time and begin to experience the positivity innate to transformational leadership. Members will no longer be subjected to the lack of positive leader engagement that many leaders exhibit as both people and problems are avoided, or as leaders only engage in reactive firefighting, or likely worse for all, micromanage as a means to find fault before problems arise. Migrating to transformational leadership is highly positive as members literally self-identify with the organization with trust, mutual respect, and loyalty the norm as productivity and effectiveness become personal to each member: The organization’s success become paramount to the members as they take pride in belonging to the organization. As this positive reinforcing loop continues the organization and all its members grow and prosper as no one is left behind. Positivity reigns as organizational effectiveness increases.

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