Transformational Leadership and Creating a Relational Workforce

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If not you then who?

If you are reading this, chances are pretty good that you already are a Transformational Leader. According to psychologist Robert Kegan, who I have quoted before, only 1% of the adult population reach a self-transformational level of development. So, congratulations, you are the 1%!

It is those 1% of leaders who feel called to drive transformation in their organizations, understanding that in an age of transformation and AI, we need to also transform not just how we work, but who we are being at work.

This shift is not merely about new skills or horizontal development, but about vertical personal development, about activating new ways of being. It is about activating relational — and ultimately higher circuits of — intelligence and guiding employees in their upleveling from socialized to self-authoring, and from self-authoring to self-transforming development stages.

Ontological coaching has long understood that to shift an individual requires activation on somatic, emotional, and linguistic levels; that behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg, and that focusing on identity provides much greater leverage when transforming “how we do things around here.”

Each of us creates ripples. Culture emerges in the interference pattern of how each individual shows up. This is true for our families and groups in our personal lives, for our teams, organizations, nations and even humanity as a whole.

Each of us then also has the opportunity, invitation, and maybe even duty to step up to the challenge at hand, and transform our world. After all, the simplest definition of leadership is “see something, do something.”

Our times require transformational leaders to

• uplevel the workforce,
• to innovate and implement new ways of organizing,
• and to craft culture consciously.

Upleveling toward a Relational Workforce

As technology takes over new functions in the organization, there will be a shift from transactional to relational work environments where human connections and collaborative networks are prioritized.

Transformational leaders are called to not just manage the work, but to actively develop their people, fostering authenticity and environments that encourage self-authoring and decision making — all the while promoting open communication and ensuring that all team members feel valued and included.

Prototyping Future Organizational Structures

There are a myriad of new organizational forms. New organizations feature flat hierarchies, decentralized decision-making, and agility, but there is no new “right way” to do things. Instead, the organization has to flexibly adapt to serving ever changing strategies, while reaping the benefits of more and more possibilities of automation with AI.

Transformational leaders are called to guide organizations through these changes by embracing flexibility, fostering innovation, and maintaining a clear vision for their areas. Within that, they can encourage experiments on the three horizons of change (upleveling existing processes), transformation (replacing existing processes), and innovation (creating altogether new processes).

Crafting Culture Consciously

Enabling these experiments will require a culture of experimentation, one that embraces risk and manages the possibility of failure scientifically. After decades of optimization, expansive experiments are required as markets and supply chains continue to become even more uncertain than they are now.

Transformational leaders can set the tone by embodying the archetypes and principles they wish to see in their teams, thus creating ripples that lead to broader cultural shifts. They can plant language and symbols consciously to unconsciously trigger shifts in practices, and ultimately measurable behaviors.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. — Aldous Huxley

Transformational Leadership sounds great, but how?

But where to start? We cannot change all of our work environment, but we can start with what my colleague Margaret Wheatley calls “Islands of Sanity”, then focus on the ripples you create. Keep focus also on your own development and on how each interaction provides the opportunity to evolve. Remembering that leadership is about developing your own and your teams’ capacity to create and that it starts with you and how you take care of yourself.

Creating Islands of Sanity

You cannot change the organization as a whole, but you can become a beacon of a new way of doing things.

• Leadership is independent of title and position. Anyone in the organization, no matter at which level can show up with ownership and drive toward new outcomes — no matter how small.
• Even small actions can have significant impacts, such as how you conduct meetings. Having regular check-ins, celebrating small wins, and fostering an environment of psychological safety are key to guiding people toward new shores.

Creating Ripples

Each of us is creating ripples as I mentioned above. No matter where you are in the organization, you can start ripples of new behavior.

• Individual behavior change is best done with small incremental changes as James Clear pointed out in “Atomic Habits”. The same is true for organizational cultures. Making small positive changes gradually transforms the entire organization.
• One of our clients researched the efficacy of our programs and found that in average one participant affected ten other people in their home department in how they worked. By showing up differently, you can seed a new culture.

Vertical Development

Leadership starts with leading yourself — you get to go first. Your constant reaching up will open the path so others can go. With AI breathing down our neck, and catching up to the lower functions of what humans can do, leaders get to focus on higher human development stages.

• All life goes through stages of development. From physical to emotional-territorial to rational mental development, we can trace our ancestry of life in the development of individual humans. Each of us has magnificent hardware available, but many do not have the software yet to run it. At the same time, we have been building technologies to replace those lower human functions.
• Current times don’t just require new skills (horizontal development), but require activation of higher human circuitry (vertical development), e.g. our capacity for creativity, for self-expression, visioning and actively creating reality. To lead others, you get to make time to work on those higher human circuits, get in touch with you genius, and lead from there.

Transformational relating

Leading others begins with how we interact with them.

• Every interaction has a transactional component, but also invites us to use each opportunity for connection, for growth and evolution.
• As a transformational leader, you also see each interaction as an opportunity for you and for your team to develop. Instead of simply seeing them for who they are, begin each interaction with connecting to who you, and who they could become in this moment. What is your highest potential in this situation and what can you see for them? By holding yourself and your employee to that during your interaction, you will ensure to relate not just transactionally but transformationally.

Management vs. Leadership

Management and Leadership still get confused a lot of times. As a transformational leader, you get to be clear about the distinction.

• Management is about distributing work and making sure outcomes are achieved. Leadership on the other hand is about enabling people to create these outcomes.
• As a transformational leader you will seek to push as much of the management down to your team. With the trend toward flat hierarchies, decision making is also becoming more distributed. Use AI and systems to automate as much of your task management as possible, and make it as asynchronous as possible, reserving your time together for the things that matter — relating. To foster a sense of ownership over outcomes, hold people accountable for the results they create — starting with holding them in a container where they can perform at their best.

Self-Care and Self-Regulation

To be able to perform at your own best, you require self-care and the capacity to regulate yourself.

• Selfcare isn’t selfish. It is the required foundation for you to focus on what matters. In order not to be distracted by unfulfilled needs, you get to check in with your own operating system first and make sure that you address your needs. As they say on the airplane: “put your own oxygen mask on first”.
• Strategic self-regulation is about your own ability to adopt new habits that serve you, and to let go of habits that don’t serve you any longer. By doing so, you also gain the ability to situationally self-regulate. E.g. when there is stress and tension in the room, you get to start by regulating your own nervous system down to a place of calm. In doing so, you also regulate the room around you due to limbic resonance, aiding your team in also regulating their own stress responses.

Self-Cultivation

Becoming a transformational leader is a never ending process. You are never perfect. Perfect means done anyway, and who wants to be “done” with life?

Within that, we get to continuously expand our awareness, take responsibility for what we become aware of, so that we can keep stepping back into ownership, into the center of our authentic self — and choose our identity, actions and the results we are committed to from there.

As you develop yourself and your team, experiment with new ways of organizing yourself, and actively step up to craft the culture of your organization, make sure to keep your vision in mind of who you would like to become in this process.

In order to have the necessary intrinsic motivation, especially for those moments, when it’s not fun, you require a vision of yourself that you are aspiring to. Not one to judge yourself by (otherwise, logically, you would fall short), but one to be inspired by, to reach toward, to strive toward every day.

We cannot escape from society and work, but within it we can keep orienting ourselves on our own — and others’ — highest potential.

As the German poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann said:

“I am certain that we must remain within the order, that there is no such thing as leaving society and that we must test ourselves against each other.

Within the boundaries, however, we have our eyes fixed on the perfect, the impossible, the unattainable, be it love, freedom or pure greatness.

In the interplay between the impossible and the possible, we expand our possibilities. I think it is important that we create this relationship of tension in which we grow; that we orient ourselves towards a goal that, of course, moves further away as we approach it.”

More about how you can transform your workforce and yourself in the previous installments:

• Part 1 — The Relational Workforce in an Age of Transformation and AI — How need to activate relational intelligence and authenticity in order to relate productively and collaboratively create value
• Part 2 — The Future of Organizing — Characteristics of new organizations — purpose driven and with a new Cultural Operating System focused on relationships and value creation
• Part 3 — How to shift your cultural operating system — how you can use your innovators and early adopters to build internal capacity and cross the chasm to “a new normal”
• Part 4 — Learning cycles of the individual — the leadership development and resilience required for those willing to use the liminal space of transformation in order to actively create the future

Are you curious about the future? Already actively creating it? Want to learn more about transformation or share with me how you are mastering it? Please connect and reach out on LinkedIn, my website or if you are leading transformation at your company and can use some support via LUMAN.