Transforming Church

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership behaviors have been studied in the secular world. The following notes have been adapted from a graduate course at Georgia State University called Enhancing Leadership Skills. Six behaviors of transformational leaders have been identified as useful in leading organizations:
1. Supportive Leader Behavior: Take an interest in the person as an individual. Spend time learning their needs and helping to meet them. Provide positive feedback. Explore their vision of the future. Followers are more likely to support a leader who is in touch with the follower's vision of a desired future.
2. Identify and Articulate a Vision: Develop, articulate and inspire others with a vision of the future. People yearn to be part of a great cause.
3. Provide an appropriate role model: Setting an example, practicing what you preach. People will observe how you spend your time and how you spend the organization's resources. Those must sync up with what you say is important.
4. Foster acceptance of group goals over individual goals: Help people move beyond their own desires to embrace the goals of the group is the keystone to effective teams. Cooperation is essential for accomplishment.
5. High performance expectations: The Pygmalion Effect, if you set high standards and demonstrate your belief in them, people will stretch to accomplish lofty goals.
6. Intellectual Stimulation: Challenge the followers to re-examine their mental models and assumptions and rethink how their work can best be performed. Good examples are: the role of the pastor and the leadership team; the council-committee structure; inward versus external focus (maintenance versus mission). Churches on a plateau or in decline usually have some unhealthy behaviors and ideas at their core. Efforts to clarify values and bedrock beliefs are attempts to examine mental models.

The effect of these behaviors is to increase trust, satisfaction, and performance. The result is performance beyond expectation. Trust is the trigger for the improved performance. People are willing to go above and beyond if they trust their leader. The link to satisfaction is not as tight, because the leader is only one component of satisfaction, where trust is directly attributed to the leader. This is a very personal issue where people identify with their leader, not the organization. People do for other people, not for the church.