There are lots of ways to skin a cat, or so the saying goes. While we aren’t in favour of skinning any creatures, we understand leadership has many faces. These transformational leadership examples show several different styles and characteristics that have been used successfully over time to capitalise on the advantages of transformational leadership styles.
The concept of transformational leadership has changed since its creation by James V. Downton (1973), especially after books on the subject were published by James McGregor Burns (1978) and researcher Bernard M. Bass (1985).
It centres around the idea that a leader and their team can come up with a long-term vision for the future, pinpoints the challenges of achieving it, set aside tools and funding to deal with these challenges, and inspire the people around them to make it happen in a way that benefits themselves, too.
This is the opposite of a transactional leader, who gets followers to do his (or her) bidding by offering rewards and punishment.
In every successful transformation in history, leaders made use of one of the four main styles and showed many common characteristics. The four transformational leadership styles are:
Companies wanting to go digital might know they need high quality, thoughtful managers, but it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some of the best-known transformational leadership examples to help guide you.
Steve Jobs used inspirational motivation to challenge his team to think outside the box and stimulated them intellectually to develop products we didn’t even know we needed. Characteristics of Jobs’ leadership were his decision-making ability and adaptability, and in later years he was willing to take risks appropriate to his achievements.
In spite of everything Mandela had experienced, he came out of prison to lead the country as its next President, promoting forgiveness and unity. By doing so, he transformed South Africa into a democratic nation without the predicted bloodbath of racial revenge that the public feared and expected.
Mandela demonstrated an idealised influence leadership style and was respected by his followers and society in general because of his ethics and morals. His complete lack of personal ego and his excellent self-management showed that his values went beyond personal gains, and his actions were all seen to be for good of the country.
Deming went back to the U.S. to apply transformational leadership examples in manufacturing, where his style of inspirational motivation produced results by 1980. Accounts of his achievements clearly show characteristics of collective consciousness, combined with effective self-management and an ability to keep his ego in check.
Transformational leadership theory states that team members support each other and the company out of trust, loyalty, and respect for their leader. This means it takes an exceptional person to become a transformational leader, but there is no shortage of these leaders in the history of Great Britain or the world. Some of the best known, past and present, are:
If you’re thinking about making the shift to digital technology in your company you might find it useful to study these transformational leadership examples. It’s one thing to succeed in making the change over to digital, but it’s quite another to do it as successfully as the best role models in the business.
On a daily basis, organisations across the U.K. deal with challenges and obstacles, which are the nature of doing business.
Far too often, however, the setbacks resulting from these are caused by what the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) calls the national “accidental manager” complex. This occurs when a person is promoted internally based on their performance in a job, but they remain inadequately trained in managing others.
The research shows a total of 2.4m of these accidental managers currently functioning throughout the U.K., which, combined with other poor management practices, could be costing the economy up to £84 billion per year.
A transformational leader encourages, not commands. He (or she) inspires and motivates, not instructs, and leads by example, rather than by direction.
The 21st-century digital revolution is an unstoppable force, and at this point in time, we don’t know what the outcome will be. With the speed technology moves at, companies that can’t keep up with the changing scenarios are likely to fail, unless they can find themselves transformational leaders who can figure out how to succeed like the best in the business have done.
There are countless transformational leadership examples to be found, but the question is: how should you apply this concept to bring your business into the digital age?