The pandemic has accelerated the future of everything—including leadership.

We’ve been operating for a while in an environment of extreme uncertainty and complexity, and CEOs have already begun to accelerate trends that were already there—the move to more team-oriented work, the digital transformation of businesses, the move to make our current economic and cultural system more equitable and sustainable. The leaders that have risen to this moment are transformational, not transactional.

Many of the most successful leaders in this moment have been women, and all have been leaders who brought a bigger range of emotional intelligence to a moment that demands it in abundance. When grief and anger and despair have surfaced they’ve been able to cultivate hope, provide empathy, and unite their cultures even remotely. They have seen their role as being to build teamwork, unite people, and lead with love, not fear, into the unknown. They have shown what transformational leadership looks like.

Transformational leadership is about inspiring and empowering people to collaborate in new ways. It differs from traditional kinds of more transactional leadership, where leaders focus on directing people, giving orders, and structuring work in a known environment.

Any institution that wants to thrive in this future will need to cultivate more transformational leadership. 

Many of the problems we face are systemic in nature: from racism to climate change. They will require a transformational approach. Climate change, racism, misogyny, socio-economic disparities—these are systemic challenges that are interconnected and demand systemic solutions. Transformational leadership is about redesigning the systems we participate in to make them better, rather than reflexively reinforcing them. 

In a more uncertain world, the only true stability is coming from a guiding purpose and values—not from traditional incentives. As one COO put it, this has been a moment when “we had to throw everything out except our mission, vision, and values” in order to see each challenge as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Purpose was already becoming important (finally) to businesses. Now purpose becomes central, and leaders have to make it systemic, not an event or a thing that sits alone, but something operationalized meaningfully throughout their businesses. 

True teamwork is the only way to manage the complexity of a modern enterprise—which means leaders need to know how to build teams intelligently and quickly. The pandemic forced leaders to form new teams fast—plan-ahead teams, red teams, tiger teams, teams of teams—that made smart, informed decisions in unheard of timeframes, and in cross-functional, enterprise-minded ways so hard to achieve in the past. The leadership approach that is most tuned to collaboration and team-building is transformational.  

The prevailing leadership paradigm is still a traditional one—individualistic, transactional, hierarchical. Traditional leadership styles are deeply embedded in our culture and our language of leadership. We mythologize the heroic CEO, when really it has taken a team to succeed. We tend to emphasize traditionally masculine stereotypes and aggressive approaches, and undervalue qualities such as empathy and vulnerability. We still punish failure more than we use it to learn. We talk about winning more than we talk about kindness. 

CEOs and public sector leaders are starting to acknowledge this, and to see the importance of transformational skills like team-building, but they have little confidence their organization can execute. They see that teamwork is becoming more and more essential to their businesses, but find their own teams operating in silos, or run a leadership team that is a team in name only. They see the value of more empowerment but are at a loss how to create that while meeting their numbers. They see the value of more inclusive communication and diversity, but tend to delegate it to a project team or an HR department, when it needs to start with the leadership team. 

TJA offers a new way of leading for a new era. 

We help leaders and teams design and develop transformational leadership—so they can lead positive change, and build a world where everyone thrives.

Photo courtesy of Erica Fkiaras