Transformational leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate employees and stakeholders to create the conditions for successful transformation.
What do we mean by leadership and management?
Transformational leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate employees and stakeholders to create the conditions for successful transformation.
Transformational leaders create the culture within which outcomes can be achieved, striking a balance between the necessary standards, controls, and guardrails to ensure effective strategic alignment and cross council co-ordination and management of risk, while encouraging collaboration, creativity, and innovation.
Leaders create (or even better, co-create), a compelling vision that explains both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ and this is supported by a clear strategy to achieve it. Leaders understand the necessary ingredients for success and enable this through effective teamwork organisation wide and by modelling behaviours to create a positive work environment that supports the achievement of council objectives.
Essential for:
- All types of transformation.
Capabilities
The ability to:
- be visionary and think strategically
- focus on outcomes
- make decisions
- solve problems
- build relationships
- have contextual awareness
- be emotionally intelligent
- manage risk
- set and model positive behaviours
- work ethically
- collaborate
- encourage innovation.
Related roles
- Leadership capabilities can exist at any level.
To enable council-wide transformation, it is essential that there is a sufficient balance of leadership and management capabilities at the Executive and Senior Management layers of the council.
Councils that do not have transformation leadership capabilities in place and in sufficient quantity among the Executive and Senior Management Team are unlikely to deliver transformational change.
Leadership and management – maturity index
The index attached sets out the typical leadership and management characteristics demonstrated by councils at each stage of their transformation maturity.
