Transformational Leadership 2 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)  

Hello again.  I'm in part two of a four part series on Transformational Leadership.  I asked the question "what do you want to be and what do you want them (meaning your followers) to be?”  Last time I talked about defining what exactly transformational leadership was and there were four elements.  I'll just say them again:  Idealized influence, Inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation and Individualized consideration. Those are big words that probably don't make a lot of sense to hear them, but hopefully throughout the course of this series they'll make more sense because I think they're the components of true transformation.

Today, I'm going to talk about well-being in its relationship to transformational leadership and then I'm going to talk next week about becoming a transformational leader and follower.  And then finally I'm going to apply some of this stuff to a multicultural context.  Today I want to talk about well being, and certainly one of the problems that we have is that I know that I'm talking to a multicultural audience and so I want to be very careful that people have the opportunity to evaluate, apply and change.   Some of these contexts may be a little bit out of the North American shell and I want to make sure that we don't run over other cultural issues.

However, well-being in my context goes beyond the absence of illness.  It's an aspiration to learn.  It's being appropriately independent and it also includes possessing confidence.  So it’s beyond the absence of illness.  It looks at the aspirations that we have the goal to learn, the motivation.  It looks at the ability to be appropriately independent and that means that in some contexts you're very dependant on others - the team context for example.  To be appropriately independent refers to the ability to do things on your own as well.  You have to have both of those.  Finally, the possessing of confidence - if you don't have confidence, it becomes very difficult to do anything.

Now we take that beyond and look at what I'm talking about here in Transformational Leadership.  We're talking about well-being.  We're talking about job related well-being which is the promotion of both psychological and physical health in the work situation.  Now as we evaluate ourselves, we typically evaluate on the negative.  You know – ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Fine.’  Now – ‘How are you really doing?’  Most of our dialogue, most of our comments, when we don't think about it, refer to the whole issue of avoiding difficulty.  Things are going pretty well now as opposed to when they weren’t going well before.  I don't have pain today…and stuff like that.  That's not what we're getting at by well-being.  We usually evaluate the negative and so we're concerned about things like anxiety, depression, distress or physical symptoms. The positive psychology influence focuses on the positive mental health, the degree of happiness we have, the degree of enthusiasm we have, the pleasure and satisfaction we find in our work activities.

So as you think about this difference, how do you usually respond?  Do you do what I think, in that you're focused on comparing yourself to the absence of negative, or do you look for the presence of the positive?  Something interesting to think about.  It's interesting to note that this whole issue of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with job ignores what we call the arousal state.  The arousal state is the degree of enthusiasm or motivation we have about doing that which we're required or electing to do and so I think that's a very important thing that we don't often see.  For example, there is a kind of a resigned satisfaction state.  I may be satisfied with what I'm doing, but I'm not necessarily happy about it nor am I aspiring to do very much.  You know - don't make me do extra.  I just want to do this.  Just let me finish this and get out of my job.  The problem with that is that I don't think many of us have an extremely satisfying life outside of our jobs.  So if we leave out that aspiration component I think we're going to find that we're a lot less satisfied over the long run and then we're going to be likely vulnerable, if you will, to other things happening to us to the degree that we let things slide.  To that degree we become complacent, we backslide and we become less effective.

One of the other things that's important here is that there are actually characteristics of mental health that have a persevering quality.  That is, they stick around.  That is, they carry us through thick and thin, if you will.  They help us to react, to avoid or to adjust and they include things like positive self regard, perceived confidence, aspiration which is ‘goal directedness’, autonomy and integrated functioning which is balance and harmony and ‘interdirectedness’.  Let me go through those again:  positive self regard -- how do you see yourself?  If you only see yourself as some abhorrent, evil, worthless, broken thing, guess what?  That's going to impact you a lot.  But, if you see yourself as someone who is working, trying, challenging, pushing, and succeeding as best as he or she can, then maybe there's a big difference there.  Perceived confidence - how I approach a task, whether it’s new or something that I'm very familiar with has a big bearing on whether I will be effective at it.  If I say "oh my goodness I've never done anything like this before;  I have no idea what I'm doing, I most likely am going to fail, people are going to be embarrassed, I'm going to be embarrassed, I'm going to be shamed”, guess what?  You're not going to do very well.  How does this sound though?  Turn that on its head:  “wow, I've never done anything like this but this looks an awful lot like this other thing that I did.  I wonder if I tried it using some of those things that helped me before, hey you know what?  It does work!”  That's a whole different thing.  Perceived competence --what we carry around.

That's interesting, those first two have to do with my internal state of what's going on.  Then aspiration is the degree of goal directedness I have.  If I know where the goal is and what I can do and it seems like I can get there, I'm going to do much better.

Autonomy, I think, is variable in different cultures but I think we need to be able to work on our own as well as together.  And then integrated functioning has to do with balance, harmony, my ability to connect with people.  So why is all of this important?

Well, first of all, our experience of work translates directly to other health outcomes.  Job related well-being reflects overall life satisfaction.  We can't separate them.

So whatever we do as transformational leaders should help our followers towards positive outcomes.  It's powerful if we can help them achieve effectiveness or success.

As transformational leaders, we need to help them see what might be, which is another way to describe inspirational motivation.  So imagine a context that you as a transformational leader are setting up -- encouraging the positive, diminishing the negative, encouraging competence, ignoring incompetence where available.  Encourage aspiration not avoid goal determination.  Encourage integrated functioning as opposed to dysfunction.

How are you doing?  Take a few minutes and look through these lists.  Try and figure out if there's some area you need to address.  Positive mental attitude seems to be important.  It's been shown in research that the environment that we create has a tremendous and global impact on those people we lead.

Have a great week.  Talk to you next time.