Transformational Leaders
Graham Cox
Building custom learning solutions for clients across Asia and Oceania || Senior Executive Talent Development || Partnering organisations to challenge what is and inspire what could be
How does your change affect your leadership style?
When I sit with leaders they can be shocked at how different their behaviour can be depending on what is going on at work (and outside work). As well as the resulting impact on their teams, business and careers. Now, they know that there is a change to their leadership style but they are not 100% sure what it is. I'll start sharing our transformational leadership model here in this article to help better understand how you might show up when change appears.
The topic of leaders' ability and agility to deal with change has always been an increasingly important topic. However, due to the current circumstances,?the level of impacting factors on the leaders' role has exploded, including distance created due to remote/blended working environments, and an increased need to define yourself as a leader.
And here comes?the new series topic of?Transformational Business Environments, which will last for a series of six webinars, looking at the various transformational leadership behaviours and how they intersect with world business.
How Leaders Show Up
Many managerial mobiles fail to include skills and competencies for the leader to match the ever-increasing speed, scale and nature of transformation within the world business.
Many traditional leadership models fail to take this into account. They are instead focusing on more conventional risk management and maintenance of the status quo with an aim of ever-increasing growth and yield.
Therefore?we can break down how leaders show up into two categories:
In simple terms?the leader we become when there is a significant increase in fear due to lack of control.
However, when we partner with many organizations to develop their leaders, they often see the two states (of traditional leadership and leading during change) as the same. This is a rather frightening state of affairs as it shows?a lack of awareness of leadership styles and choosing the best solution to build the strongest team.?
It's not about 'being' transformational
Let’s just update our existing definition of a manager to include the context of change.
“A manager is the person who has been allotted the companies resources in order to achieve the business desired outcomes during a period of change.”
So if established that it's not about being a transformational leader but instead it is about understanding how are you leading when things transform and change. All it breaks down into a simple binary choice:
1. go and look before change happens
Either point we have value because if you look before change happens you are prepared but maybe you do not have a chance to experience that behaviour live.
领英推荐
2. or look when change is happening
If you wait to find out when changes happening you are likely to be very busy with other things and may find it challenging to both manage to change and make any changes to your leadership style. However, you will have a chance to practice and in this case, if multiple leaders or teams were to look it would give you a chance to practice and support each other.
Transformational Model
Here we would like to present to you the transformational model that can be applied to understand different styles as a leader navigating a changing environment.
These four behaviours sit on a scale and it is not important for a leader to demonstrate any specific behaviour but to be aware of how they behave once change happens.
1 - Cultivating uncertainty - Risk management
A leader’s ability to handle and thrive in long-term dynamic business situations.
Maintain and manage long-lasting uncertainty, devise options and welcome opportunities, build creative thinking and develop a mature mindset failure. Experiment and make progress via trial and error. Or the leader could prefer to reduce the levels of uncertainty by identifying and reducing risk.
2 - Develop a vision -?Planning and execution
Be able to build buy-in into a new vision for the organization.
Develop a meaningful future taking environmental factors into consideration; imagine the future and also provide reasons for the change. Get buy-in from others, get other people on board and involved. The more disruptive and long-term vision, the more self-confidence is required to build trust with others. Or the leader will be more focused on getting executing against that vision and questioning ‘how’ it will roll out.
3 - Develop trust/confidence - Control activities
A leader’s comfort with blindly trusting others to deliver.
Hold convictions but are willing to challenge or reconsider. Assemble and motivate others through energy, enthusiasm and assertiveness, courageousness strives for consistent and constant trust building to deploy vision. See other people's potential and their ability to build towards the goal. Or is the leader that needs proof before they will say ‘yes’ and believe what the other person shares without seeing the evidence.
4 - Cultivate empathy – Monitors Results
Ability to look at what needs to improve and work with others through change to achieve results.
Encourage understanding, and promote comradeship and mutual understanding/assistance. Develop guidance and support, and stand with staff through obstacles and obstructions to overcome them. Resilience. Ability to look at what needs to improve.
In Conclusion
It is not important for a leader to demonstrate any one specific behaviour but?to be aware of how they behave once change happens. It is also valuable?to build a team where the other behaviours are represented so that you don’t have blind spots. However, at this point, you would also need to learn how to listen to these different perspectives in order to get value from them.
If you are a leader going through change and you’d like support in this area to assess how you lead change don’t hesitate to reach out!