Learn why Transformational Leadership is the best style for growth.
“A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goeth
The title tells you that I’m going to give you three tips about leadership.
Before we get to those tips, I want you to think about your business.
I’m not giving you generic tips. I’m giving you actionable advice you can apply to your own life and business success.
So let’s start with exactly where YOU are.
Think about the most money you’ve ever made in a calendar year. Bring that number clearly into your mind.
I don’t know your number, but you should. Write it down or have it in your thoughts.
You worked really hard to get to that number… it might even fill you with pride.
But what would it be like to earn that same amount in a month?
Did you just say, “No way… if it sounds too good to be true…”?
Don’t finish that sentence. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s because your thoughts aren’t aligned with where you would love to be.
Here’s the deal.
People who have made quantum leaps in their results, who have increased their profits by 10 or 12 times what they’d earned in the past, they have one thing in common.
They’ve learned the critical truth of transformational leadership.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to teach you today. In this post we’ll discuss what makes an amazing leader and why Transformational Leaders achieve greater success and influence.
I’ll tell you what the one critical truth of transformational leadership is and give you three actionable tips about leadership. At the end of the post, you’ll have some good nuggets of information you can implement today.
As an added bonus, download 22 Great Qualities of a Transformational Leader to learn more fantastic tips to unleash the powerful leader within and motivate your team!
What Makes a Successful Leader?
You hold a vision for what a successful leader looks like. Some characteristics that come to mind include an ability to inspire and influence, a brilliant mind, the driving desire to guide your team, and a caring connection that seeks to lift your employees to higher achievements.
And of course, a great leader finds ways to create more wins.
Transformational leadership goes above and beyond other leadership styles. To understand why this style is so different, let’s unpack the word transformation:
There are three parts to the word transformation.
- Trans = to go beyond.
- Form = the current state of the circumstance, situation, or condition.
- Ation = the experience of.
When you put those three parts together, you realize that transformation is the experience of going beyond the current form.
The most common definition of a leader is someone who guides or influences others in service of a common objective or goal.
Let’s put these two words together.
Transformational leadership is holding in mind the experience of going beyond the current form and guiding a group of people in service of reaching that vision.
1 Critical Truth All Transformational Leaders Know
In the title, I promised you a critical truth. And here it is:
All great Transformational Leaders know that there is a difference between facts and truth.
Many people think facts and truth are the same thing, but they are not.
Facts are a version of the current state of what we see around us. They are the evidence of everything that has been created up until now. Then there is the truth, which is something different.
For example:
There was a time in history when the fact was that human beings couldn’t fly. The Wright brothers knew the truth: with the right technology, we could fly.
Steve Jobs believed so much in possibility over the current state of facts, people said he had a reality distortion field. It was said when someone working at Apple thought something was impossible, if they got close to Steve, they entered his reality distortion field. They, too, suddenly believed it was possible.
Transformational Leaders know that the facts do not determine possibility.
There is possibility beyond the facts that we see, and that is the truth.
What Are Good Leadership Tips?
Good leadership tips should be actionable. While there are many wonderful resources to improve your knowledge and uplevel your skills. When looking at “tips” they should be something you can implement to see real results.
Some things to look for in good leadership tips:
- Actionable. Tips should be things you can implement right away. There are higher level learnings and things that can deepen your understanding of any number of aspects of business (which I also recommend). A great tip has value and is something that you can start implementing.
- Deepen Your Insight in a Leadership Role. They highlight your role as a leader and how you show up for your team as a true guide.
- Spotlight the Needs of Your Team. Your role as a leader is all about bringing out the best in your team, so leadership tips that move performance will showcase how to support your team.
I’m an avid reader and I enjoy immersing myself in books and articles that help me evolve. I want to learn new things, deepen my knowledge, and continually push to be the best leader and version of myself that I can.
So I love finding articles with leadership tips by experts in the field as much as I enjoy sharing my own knowledge.
3 Tips About Leadership for Transformational Leaders
And here we are. If you clicked into this post because the tips in the title piqued your interest, I don’t want to waste any more time getting to them.
The three tips I’m highlighting today are very important for transformational leaders:
- Create a Compelling Vision for a Quantum Leap
- Understand It’s All About Growth
- Understand the Power of What It Means to Lead by Example
Create a Compelling Vision for a Quantum Leap
Have you ever created a compelling vision for a quantum leap?
That’s where transformational leadership really excels — we create high level visions for things we would love.
The step here is to create a compelling vision and then share it with your team.
An example:
This is a tip I use with my coaching clients. Let me give you a case study.
My client, Susan, had a real estate brokerage that was producing about $10 million per year.
When we started working together, I asked her to create a compelling vision. And her vision was good. It was to move her brokerage from $10 million to $20 million a year.
Doubling her yearly profit was quite a quantum leap. But I asked her to create a vision of what it would be to go from $10 million to $50 million.
Who would she be? How would she walk? What would it take to create that result?
I explained that we don’t deny the facts as transformational leaders. We respect the current state of things but we also know that we are more than the current circumstances.
We create a vision based on the question, “What would we love?”
She set her vision for $100 million (blasting straight through my suggestion of half that. lol).
Susan did not reach $100 million that year. Her brokerage produced $43 million that year.
She took her business from $10 million to $43 million in a single year with her compelling vision.
Understand It’s All About Growth
One of my favorite mentors said, “Goals aren’t for getting, goals are for growing”. As Transformational Leaders, we always have our eyes on growth.
Goals are important but it’s really about who we become in the process. And who our team members become in the process.
If you haven’t studied Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s compelling. Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who listed the level of need for human beings. I talked about this a bit in the Leadership Style post under Transformational Leadership, if you’d like more information.
In short, there are five levels of human need:
- The lowest two levels of needs are basic things, like food, water, air, shelter, and safety. Things like being able to take care of ourselves and pay our bills.
- The middle two levels are psychological needs. These include belonging to a community, friendship, love, and self-esteem.
- The highest level is self-fulfillment. This need is all about fulfilling one’s highest potential and it’s the only need that actually propels you or motivates you to keep going. In other words, when the lower needs are met, the motivation goes away. When self-fulfillment is met, you want to keep doing more of what you love.
When I say, it’s all about growth, this is what I mean:
Transformational Leaders focus on meeting the highest two levels of human need.
We focus on helping our team reach their highest potential of self-fulfillment and psychological need.
When you set your goals there, you’re aiming for growth.
Understand the Power of What It Means to Lead by Example
In other words, walk the talk!
At Brave Thinking® Institute, our third core value is integrity. We believe in integrity. We live what we teach and we deliver what we promise.
We’re focused on meeting Maslow’s highest levels of need through esteem, pride, respect, and ultimately, growth.
Most importantly, we know that as leaders, our number one priority is to see ourselves as part of the team.
Our leaders are not above other team members. We are part of the team and therefore, we do all the things that we require the rest of our team to do.
We prioritize our own growth and development, as well. Leaders are learners first.
Personally, I read something on a daily basis that can help me improve. But I don’t only read it for myself. I also share that knowledge with the team.
We follow the same protocols we expect team members to follow.
We know that our processes are designed to help do the job better and foster great love and care… and that starts from the top down.
Using These Lessons as a Transformational Leader
Today, we talked about what it means to be a successful leader. You learned the one critical truth all transformational leaders know.
We also talked about what good leadership tips do, and I gave you three of my favorite leadership tips. To recap, my tips were to create a compelling vision, understand that leadership is about growth, and to understand what it means to lead by example.
I encourage you to spend some time thinking about how you can implement those three tips into your leadership style, for yourself, your team, and your business. I’d love to hear about your results in the comment section.
As we discussed, great leaders are constant learners.
If you’d like to continue your evolution in leadership, be sure to grab your free eBook 22 Great Qualities of a Transformational Leader. It’s full of amazing insights that will help you level up your ability to motivate and inspire your team.
Think Bravely and Act Boldly!
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