Transformative Leadership

Leaflet held upwards with inscription, next to it a traffic light on green — Source: Rob Walsh on Unsplash.

Leadership forms an essential prerequisite for organisational and societal development. However, conventional modes of leadership have proven adverse to the requirements of deep and path-deviant sustainability transformations: lacking an ethical compass, drawing on control instruments and hierarchy, and acting out of step with those supposed to follow, such leadership is prone to run into lock-in situations.

While power positions and charismatic personality remain important factors, transformative leadership focuses on the specific qualities leaders need if striving to motivate and enable transformative organisational and/or societal change. A synergistic approach underpins this leadership style, emphasising accountability, co-creation, and feedbacks. Key aspects include the ability to co-develop shared visions with explicit normativity (i.e. sustainability), articulate discourses that inspire and motivate change, draw on system-thinking to understand challenges and dynamics, and translate between wider environments and those immediately concerned. Transformative leadership is highly collaborative and is ideally exercised simultaneously by multiple agents in diverse positions (Ardoin et al., 2015; Caldwell et al., 2012; Senge, 2008). As such, the approach also forms an important component of transformative capacity (Wolfram, 2016).

Supporting its fellows in becoming transformative leaders is also a core aspiration of the Dresden Leibniz Graduate School. The DLGS programme imparts current scientific knowledge and practical skills for developing transformative leadership. This includes cooperation with the Collective Leadership Institute through a dedicated course, as well as opportunities to actively practice transformative leadership. The programme ultimately aims to empower graduates to take on transformative roles in their future professional paths.

Further references:

Ardoin, N.M., Gould, R.K., Kelsey, E., Fielding-Singh, P., 2015. Collaborative and Transformational Leadership in the Environmental Realm. J. Environ. Policy Plan. 17, 360–380. doi.org/10.1080/1523908X.2014.954075.
Caldwell, C., Dixon, R.D., Floyd, L.A., Chaudoin, J., Post, J., Cheokas, G., 2012. Transformative Leadership: Achieving Unparalleled Excellence. J. Bus. Ethics 109, 175–187. doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1116-2.
Senge, P. (Ed.), 2008. Presence: exploring profound change in people, organizations, and society. New York, NY: Currency Doubleday [u.a.].
Wolfram, M., 2016. Conceptualizing urban transformative capacity: A framework for research and policy. Curr. Res. Cities 51, 121–130. doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.011.