Becoming a Transformative Leader

Transformational leadership is a set of skills, aptitudes and personal confidence which are inherently inter-personal.

For many leaders, their leadership journey began as a recognition of their excellent performance, rewarded with a promotion into a leadership role. The issue with rewarding someone for exceeding their performance targets does not guarantee they will be good at building an effective team.

 The new leader may excel at understanding and driving transactional outcomes but will often flounder when it comes to picking up the transformational behaviours required to build people and manage them to achieve personal and team success.

Transactional leadership is often supported with policy and process documents such as role descriptions, performance management and supervisory templates.

Transformational leadership is a set of skills, aptitudes and personal confidence which are inherently inter-personal. Bass & Avolio, in their Full Range Leadership Model, articulate five transformational behaviours leaders need to intentionally develop in order to succeed.

1. Building a high trust environment. Trusted leaders are people we’re proud to be associated with. While displaying confidence and competence, they build respect and go beyond their self-interest to build the team.
2. Acts with integrity. A leader not only shares the vision, values and beliefs that motivate them, they work hard to ensure that who they say they are, is aligned with people’s experience of them.
3. Inspires others. Motivating people is a complex relational task because we’re all motivated differently. Good leaders inspire a rational optimism about where the team is headed.
4. Encourages Innovative Thinking. Leaders can be gate keepers of the status quo or they can encourage their team to explore possibilities and to improve in many small ways that add up.
5. Coaches people. Effective leaders free themselves from their daily transactional work and invest time in coaching their people to develop their strengths.

Andrew Jones

1. Andrew Jones, our Lead Consultant, is passionate about helping leaders to succeed. Over the past twenty years, he has engaged thousands of people in Australia and internationally through his consulting roles. Andrew is a gregarious and perceptive facilitator and public speaker whose focus is improving the self-awareness, performance and ongoing effectiveness of leaders, teams and organisations.

Contact Andrew