5 Qualities You Need to Be a Transformational Leader
In a recent Harvard Business Review article on transformational leadership, David Lancefield and Christian Rangen said, “leaders who want their organizations to meet this moment and succeed long-term need to move away from the status quo and change their approach to how they’ll lead the necessary transformations.”
In 2023, you are being asked as a leader to not only navigate immense change but to reimagine and reshape entire systems and organizations. You are being asked to be a transformational leader.
At the Tenacious Leadership Institute, we define transformational leadership as “the ability to identify, strategize, design and lead substantial change that results in transformation of our people, thinking, actions, systems, processes, people, organizations and world.”
There is a shift away from “change management” to actually generating change that is transformational in all ways.
As a truly transformational leader, you will naturally be an initiator of substantial change so that you can profoundly impact our current challenges in a lasting way rather than simply solving smaller, interim problems that represent “incremental change” in our work at TLI.
We define incremental change as “work that is limited in impact, affects only one part of a system or process, short-term as a solution and is often built on past thinking that is targeting what is broken v. what is possible.”
Here are five qualities you need to move out of incremental thinking and change towards more transformational leadership.
1. You are committed to creating a significant impact that is long-lasting and sustainable.
2. You are willing to take a holistic, strategic approach to how you are seeing the problems and opportunities you face.
3. You are willing to be innovative in your approach and ask the difficult questions about the current system/process to forward a new future.
4. You involve new people in your ideation process to get new perspectives about the challenges you are facing.
5. You are comfortable designing new solutions in a collaborative manner to generate entirely new thinking that will result in transformation of people, processes, systems and organizations.
In 2023, leadership is faced with the challenge of making major shifts, shifts that restructure the way we work and the results we get. Too often, leaders find themselves putting things back together again and again, when we’d be better off building something new that doesn't break.
Transformative leadership is the key to making a real, lasting impact that can make the difference between your organization's success and failure.
At Tenacious Leadership Institute, we are committed to creating a world of tenacious, transformational leaders to usher in the change most needed now. We’d be happy to help you and your team build their capacity to create change that is more transformational, less incremental.
Leadership Practice
Consider an incremental change you’ve made in the past and the outcomes of making that change. What lasting effect did that change have and for how long?
Now, take time to write down three ways transformational leadership could have created a bigger impact and how things might be different now if it did.
About Athena
Athena Williams, Founder and CEO of Tenacious Leadership Institute, has been supporting leaders worldwide to become more tenacious for over 20 years. She has found that tenacity is the key to sustained leadership success in today’s ever-changing world. Through her coaching and leadership development programs, she helps leaders expertly handle change, complexity and other challenges so they can quickly get better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations. Take the first step to becoming a tenacious leader by scheduling a call with us.
