Transformational Leadership: How to Positively Change Company Culture
You don't need to spend a long time in the business world to understand there are various kinds of leaders. Each type of leader develops, motivates, and challenges employees differently. Their corresponding style can lead to different results.
In the past few years, transformational leadership has emerged to the surface. Transformational leadership is all about encouraging, engaging, and inspiring employees to work in ways that produce meaningful change. This leads to a motivated workforce that is empowered to innovate and help shape a company's future success.
Your curiosity might make you wonder, "What is transformational leadership, exactly?" Continue reading this article as we explain the principles of transformational leaders and the benefits of adopting this leadership style. We will also discuss the steps business professionals need to take to become transformational leaders.
Here is everything you need to know.
The Premise: What Is Transformational Leadership?
Transformational leadership is defined as a leadership approach that causes a change in individuals and social systems. In its ideal form, it creates positive and valuable change in the followers with the ultimate goal of developing followers into leaders.
Through the power of their personality and vision, transformational leaders can inspire followers to change perceptions, motivations, and expectations to work towards common goals.
Components of Transformational Leadership
Because transformational leaders work with their team members to implement change, they depend on things such as charisma, communication, empathy, and adaptability. In practice, this style of leadership has four components, including:
1. Intellectual Stimulation
Transformational leaders take risks, solicit team members' ideas and inputs, and challenge the norms and status quo. They are not afraid of failure and rather create an environment that facilitates conversations, encourages creativity, and allows individuals to voice their diverse perspectives.
The leader enables followers to think of new methods of completing tasks and new learning opportunities. This empowers employees to practice a higher level of autonomy, ask questions, and ultimately determine more successful ways to perform their tasks.
2. Individualized Consideration
Transformational leadership also entails providing encouragement and support to individual team members. To develop supportive and healthy relationships, transformational leaders maintain open communication. This allows followers to share their ideas and enables leaders to recognize the distinct contributions of every individual directly.
Moreover, transformational leaders listen to their employees' needs and concerns so they can provide the right level of support. They understand the fact that what might motivate one follower might not work for the other. Consequently, they can adapt their management styles to cater to all the individuals on their team.
3. Inspirational Motivation
Transformational leaders can articulate a clear and unified vision to their followers. They are able to assist team members in experiencing the same motivation and passion for achieving their goals and surpassing expectations.
Such leaders understand that the most motivated employees are those who have a strong sense of purpose and are, therefore, adept at giving meaning to the tasks at hand.
4. Idealized Influence
A transformational leader has high standards of ethical and moral behavior and is a role model for team members. Since followers respect and trust the leader, they imitate this person and internalize their ideals. This allows leaders to steer decision-making that works to benefit the whole organization.
How Can Transformational Leadership Positively Change Company Culture?
Transformational leaders influence and inspire their team through their actions and motivate them to step outside of their comfort zone. They work with their team to improve their morale and help unleash their true potential. Such positive changes can consequently impact entire organizations.
Transformational leaders are also generally more charismatic and easily gain the loyalty and trust of their people. They can
Now let's look at how transformational leadership can positively impact company culture.
1. Builds Strongly Connections
Transformational leaders know that in order to build a strong business, one needs to start by building healthy and sturdy relationships. All strong relationships are based on transparent and honest communication. Building relationships within a team helps minimize internal conflicts and develops unique talents within a team. Ultimately, transformational leaders eliminate toxic relationships and foster harmony within the team.
2. Serves as a Role Model
According to Ken Blanchard, an American author, motivational speaker, and business consultant, "The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority."
Transformational leaders exemplify the behaviors they want to see in their people. A transformational leader leads by action and earns the respect and trust of their employees.
Such leaders are quick to understand the needs of the team and help them attain their goals. On a bigger scale, this results in the growth of a business.
3. Improves Employee Well-Being
The transformational style of leadership, which both conveys a sense of meaningfulness and trust and individually develops and challenges employees, also has a positive impact on the well-being of employees. This benefit is supported by a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine which states that transformational leadership is beneficial to employee well-being.
4. Increases Employee Retention
According to a Deloitte Study, "The retention of high potentials at all levels has strong links to an organization's ability to meet and/or exceed financial targets."
Employee retention is imperative for a company's success, partly because recruiting and training new employees is very costly and partly because high employee turnover can reduce team morale and hamper smooth work processes.
By boosting employee morale and helping them attain personal satisfaction, transformational leaders can retain a higher number of employees. They generally follow an inspirational process for acquiring the loyalty and trust of their team members instead of treating their role as a dictatorship. Consequently, employees trust and admire their leader and find fewer reasons to resign.
How to Become a Transformational Leader
In order to become a transformational leader, you need to follow these steps:
Develop an inspiring vision for your team.
Motivate People to Buy into and Deliver the Vision
Manage the Delivery of the Vision
Foster Strong, Trust-Based Relationships with Employees
Regularly Evaluate Your Workflows and Processes
Ask for Feedback
Use these steps and the tools we mention below to work on your transformational leadership skills.
Step #1 – Create an Inspiring Vision for Your Team
Transformational leaders have a solid vision for their teams. Thus, the first step in modeling this style of leadership is to create an inspiring vision. Do you need to know where you want your team to go? What are your goals, and where are you headed?
Bear in mind that the leader's vision needs to support the company's broader purpose and goals. Thus, it is important to comprehend the organization's goals first. Unfortunately, MIT Sloan Management Review research revealed that only 28 percent of middle managers and executives responsible for executing strategy could list three of their organization's strategic priorities.
How to Develop an Inspiring Vision?
When creating a vision for your team, connect with other leaders to understand the company's vision, mission, and goals. Then explore and identify ways in which your team can contribute directly to it. This gives the required context and helps your team members feel more motivated to pursue those goals.
Step #2 – Motivate People to Buy into and Deliver the Vision
Transformational leaders know that nothing significant happens unless they motivate their people. Thus, in this step, you need to get your team to buy into the vision and inspire them with where you are going to lead them and why.
How to Motivate Team Members to Deliver the Vision?
Use business storytelling as part of your call to action. This will help team members understand the positive impact of your vision on the people you are aiming to help. Also, discuss your vision regularly. Link it to people's tasks and goals to make it contextually relevant and help people understand how they can contribute to it.
Step #3 – Manage Delivery of the Vision
A vision will not lead to anything on its own – it has to become a reality. Nevertheless, a lot of leaders tend to develop a vision but fail to invest the rigorous efforts to deliver it.
How to Manage the Delivery of Your Vision?
To manage the delivery of your vision, you will have to combine sensitive change management with effective project management. This will allow you to deliver the required changes with the complete support of your team.
It is also important to articulate every person's responsibilities and roles and connect them to your plans. Everyone should have a clear understanding of what they are responsible for and how you will measure their success.
Next, establish SMART goals for all team members, including some short-term objectives that will help members stay motivated through quick wins.
Lastly, practice management by wandering around to stay visible to your team members. This is a great technique for transformational leaders as it helps you stay connected with everyday activities and allows you to address concerns as they arise.
Step #4 – Foster Strong, Trust-Based Relationships with Employees
Being a transformational leader, you should focus on your employees and work hard to help them fulfill their dreams and goals.
How to Foster Strong Employer-Employee Relationships?
The best way to foster strong relationships with your people is to meet them individually to learn about their developmental needs and help them meet their career objectives. You should also set aside time to coach your team members. When you help them discover their own solutions, you don't just create a skilled team, but you also fortify their self-confidence and faith in you.
Step #5 – Regularly Evaluate Your Workflows and Processes
Transformational leadership is all about improvement. This means you can never get too comfortable with the way things work.
Remember, outdated processes can lead to inefficiency and dissatisfaction among employees and hamper the organization's overall success. In fact, in a survey commissioned by Webexpenses of more than 5,000 office-based employees, 51 percent of the respondents said that dated business processes prevented them from performing their jobs effectively.
How to Regularly Evaluate Workflows and Processes?
The best way to evaluate workflows and processes is through flowcharting. Flowcharts can help you identify areas of improvement required in a workflow. Apart from that, project wrap-up discussions are also an excellent opportunity to understand how you can streamline your work.
Step #6 – Ask for Feedback
Your team members or employees are the ones who do the heavy lifting and have insight into what's working and what's not. You should ask for their insights and opinions about what's going well and what should change.
When you have gained their input, make sure you take it seriously and act on it. In a survey of 1,000 employees from across the globe, 82 percent of respondents said they had ideas to improve an organization, yet 34 percent said their company doesn't value those ideas. Keep in mind that the real transformation happens when you convert people's suggestions into actions.
How to Ask for Feedback?
Performance reviews are an excellent opportunity for leaders to learn about how their team perceives their styles and performance and if they have any suggestions for improvement. As performance reviews are already part of an organization, leaders might find it easier to get honest and constructive feedback from team members at that time.
Last Few Words
Transformational leaders have the ability to take their organizations and teams to new heights. To become a transformational leader, you need to motivate your employees and keep them focused on attaining common goals.
If people lose faith in your leadership or don't share the same vision as yours, then this leadership style will not be effective.
