The Five Pillars of Transformational Leadership
Transformational leadership is a powerful force capable of transforming teams or entire organizations. It provides agility in the face of ever-changing industries and is an essential ingredient in motivating and inspiring employees. However, understanding transformational leadership requires knowledge of the five pillars that support it.
What Are the Five Pillars?
Transformational leadership is supported by five pillars – the four I’s of transformational leadership, plus a fifth pillar. Bernard A. Bass is credited with codifying the original four Is of transformational leadership in 1985.
Idealized Influence
The first of the original four pillars of transformational leadership, idealized influence cements the leader as a role model. This explains how these leaders exert their influence within a group setting. By “walking the walk,” these leaders earn deep respect from their team members. They also provide a sense of belonging, a clear vision, and a deep connection to the organization for individual team members. That influence also extends to helping others to move up to leadership positions, where they will continue to exemplify that behavior.
Some key capabilities for transformational leaders around influencing are:
- Modeling the change expected of others, including being able to change one’s own mind and behaviors
- Using specific techniques to coach others to change their minds and behaviors
- Create a ‘movement’ for change by inspiring, empowering, and accelerating supporters across formal and informal networks
- Proactively work with and break through various forms of resistance to change
Intellectual Stimulation
Innovation does not occur in environments where team members are not free to think, try, or fail. One of the most important of the original components of transformational leadership is intellectual stimulation. Transformational leaders strive to create open environments that celebrate diversity which allows people to (respectfully) challenge received wisdom and follow curiosities that unlock creative ideas and innovations.. They call on team members to innovate and explore new pathways to push new boundaries and come up with novel solutions to existing, emerging, and future challenges.
Some key capabilities for transformational leaders around intellectual stimulation are:
- Fostering a variety of places, spaces, and channels for innovative and creative thinking
- Taking ownership of novel problems rather than deny or disown them, defining them effectively for innovation
- Managing the tensions between driving excellence/improvements/accountability and guiding exploration/innovations/agility
- Leading others with confidence and compassion through the intensities and challenges of innovation
Individualized Consideration
Transformational leaders celebrate the individual. They support each team member in their personal journeys and skill development efforts. They also make time to listen to concerns, feedback, and input from each individual while acting as coaches or mentors to empower team members to achieve more.
Some key capabilities for transformational leaders around individualized consideration are:
- Coaching others to courageously break through their perceived and actual limitations and ensure they are kind to themselves when they do not
- Empowering others to take full ownership and not blame, shame, or complain about others
- Asking open-ended questions to help others reflect on their challenges and find their own solutions
- Inspiring others to see, feel, and realize their full potential through coaching and empowerment
Inspirational Motivation
The final of the original 4 pillars of transformational leadership, inspirational motivation, speaks to how these leaders transform team morale. They harness motivational techniques and inspire team members by communicating expectations and goals clearly, gaining team member commitment, which then fuels further performance improvements.
Some key capabilities for transformational leaders around inspirational motivation are:
- Motivating different people using a mix of extrinsic motivations (e.g., pay, promotions, prizes, etc.) and intrinsic motivations (e.g., agency, purpose, belonging, etc.)
- Ensuring others see their work as important and that their unique strengths are utilized
- Helping others find meaning and learning in tasks they might find dull or difficult
- Being a reliable source of appreciation and celebration to maintain motivation in challenging times
The Fifth Pillar: Inspirational Communication
We’ve now covered the original four I’s of transformational leadership, but there is one more that has recently been added: inspirational communication.
Inspirational communication is a wide-ranging concept that touches on everything from how leaders speak of the organization itself to how they describe employee performance to peers. Transformational leaders use positive, uplifting, but accurate language when discussing their teams and the organization as a whole. However, they don’t mislead when it comes to challenges or performance issues.
One of the reasons that transformational leadership works so well is that it builds a strong bond of trust between team members and leaders. That trust is built on honesty, integrity, and clarity in communications. If there is a problem, the leader calls it out but does so in a constructive way that provides positive feedback and helps to chart a path forward toward improvement.
Some key capabilities for transformational leaders around inspirational communication
- Communicating with others with clarity, even when uncertain or confused
- Communicating early and often, never assuming others are clear or certain
- Ensuring both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feedback, pushbacks, and disagreements are provided clearly but without adding unnecessary confusion or tension
- Being a calm, supportive, and energizing presence for others, even in challenging moments
- Regularly communicating and clarifying urgencies, responsibilities, and direction of travel even in noisy environments with competing demands
- Tirelessly engaging tired, jaded, or stressed people in vision and strategy by bringing it to life over and over again
The same thing applies to hurdles an organization as a whole might face. We live in rapidly changing times. The lingering effects of the pandemic, increasing armed conflicts around the world, food scarcity, and even the need for social justice are not things that organizations can ignore. They matter to the organization’s customers but also to its employees.
If an organization does not take a stand related to those matters, employee motivation and buy-in falter. Eventually, they will begin looking elsewhere for employment, usually with an organization that doesn’t believe in “business as usual” but is actively developing strategies to mitigate situations those employees care about.
Transformational leaders must be invested in, well, transformation. That applies to their teams and organizations but also to their own mindsets and ways of thinking. Business leaders still mired in the same attitudes and mental processes they had 10 or 20 years ago will find themselves increasingly sidelined and irrelevant – impediments to organization growth and success rather than assets or drivers.
The Benefits of Transformational Leadership
When applied according to the five pillars discussed above, transformational leadership offers significant benefits, including:
- Adapt products, services, and business models
- Lead change and business transformation
- Improved employee motivation
- Enhanced productivity
- Increase discretionary effort
- Reduced turnover/churn
- Increased collaboration, teamwork, and relational energy
- Improved personal and professional development
- Increased in-house leadership
- Increased psychological safety, trust, and resilience
- Greater sense of purpose and belonging
- Increased agility in the face of challenges and hardships
In Conclusion
The four pillars of transformational leadership, plus the newly enshrined fifth pillar, provide touchstones for leaders hoping to change their teams and even entire organizations for the better. By changing yourself and embracing these pillars, you can guide your team toward meaningful, measurable success, whatever that might mean to you.
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