TRANSFORMATIONAL leadership is about inspiring and motivating teams to achieve beyond expectations, fostering innovation, and driving meaningful change.
Successful transformational leaders possess key capabilities that enable them to influence others and create a strong vision for the future.
Visionary thinking
As an entrepreneur, the fundamental pillar you should engage your mind in is visionary thinking.
What is visionary thinking? This is the ability to see beyond the present and anticipate the future trends.
Being a visionary thinker has the potential of aiding you to see into the future and lay down a strategic plan on how to salvage opportunities that would lie ahead in untapped markets.
You can also plan on how to carry out an innovative process successfully to fit into the dynamic business environment.
For example, your business might be small at the moment, but changing your mindset to becoming a visionary thinker helps you as a manager in setting a compelling vision that will help you to work towards scaling to become a big company.
As a leader or a business owner, it is your responsibility to share your vision with the management who will then trickle it down to their employees so that they will work with a shared purpose towards achieving set goals.
Innovation and creativity
The other fundamental concept that could help you as business manager to remain relevant in the industry is to be innovative and creative.
This could be achieved through employing experts who are eager to learn and come up with new efficient methods of producing products and services that will have a competitive urge in the market.
Some companies have innovative and creative business units which fosters new methods and techniques of doing business.
Empowering and developing others
It is often said a good manager is the one who grooms an employee to become better than him or her.
The best way to groom future leaders is by delegating duties and responsibilities to employees and giving them the runway to exercise their leadership muscle.
This acts as a catalyst to boost their confidence, consequently motivating them.
It is of importance to assign an experienced senior employee who is competent enough to mentor a junior worker.
Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is all about understanding your emotions and those of the employees.
This will make you as a manager or entrepreneur to understand your emotional strengths and weaknesses.
This has a couple of benefits.
As a manager, you will be able to meet people where they are, when solving conflicts in the organisation.
It will also help in building a strong relationship with employees and understand them better.
Motivation
A transformational leader knows what to say and how to say it because they have a road map or the strategic direction of where the organisation is heading.
One of the ways to motivate employees to give it their all is by giving them incentives or a token of appreciation.
Ethical leadership and integrity
One of the best ways to gain trust from employees is to lead with honesty, fairness and transparency.
As a leader, you should build trust through consistent actions and values.
Decisions that are made should be consistent with the mission and vision of the organisation.
Strong decision-making skills
As a transformational leader, you need to be able to analyse information and make decisions that help the organisation to move the needle positively.
For example, this will aid management in problem identification and coming up with ways of how to solve it.
Resilience and adaptability
The leader will be able to navigate uncertainty and stay calm under pressure and quickly adjust to changes in the business environment.
In that regard, the manager needs to possess strong-decision making skills to remain resilient in the face of a crisis.
A visionary manager gathers information about the market that will help in navigating uncertainty and staying calm under pressure.
Visionary thinkers are able to lead with confidence during transitions or crises.
Transformational Leaders inspire, innovate, and empower those around them.
By developing these key capabilities, leaders can drive lasting change, create high performing teams, and make a meaningful impact in their organisations or communities.
- Innocent Hadebe is a United States based certified John Maxwell Leadership business coach and mentor. He runs the Innocent Leadership Group (ILG), an organisation inclined on capacitating upcoming entrepreneurs with the requisite skills to run their businesses
