What Is Transformational Leadership? Beyond Command and Control

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

For roughly 120 years, business organisations have led in more or less the same way: control, command, and conformity (Hamel, 2008). It worked, in the sense that it produced results. But it never came close to unlocking what organisations are actually capable of. That gap between what traditional leadership achieves and what is possible is the starting point for everything I want to explore in this series.

This is the first article in a 20-part series on transformational leadership. Over the coming months I will unpack what it is, why it matters more now than ever, and how it plays out in the everyday, unglamorous work of actually leading people through change.

Transactional vs Transformational

The term was coined by James MacGregor Burns (1978), who drew a sharp line between two kinds of leadership. Transactional leadership is an exchange: you do this, you get that. It relies on clear tasks, defined rewards, and correction when things go off track. It is efficient, predictable, and, for a long time, it was enough.

Transformational leadership is something else. Burns described it as a process where leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Bernard Bass (1985, 2008) later built this into a practical model, arguing that transformational leaders do not just manage performance, they change how people see their own potential, their work, and their organisation.

Bass and Avolio (1994) identified four behaviours that make this happen, often called the Four I’s:

• Idealized Influence – being someone people choose to follow, not just report to
• Inspirational Motivation – offering a vision compelling enough to lift people beyond routine
• Intellectual Stimulation – challenging assumptions and inviting people to think, not just execute
• Individualized Consideration – treating each person as an individual with their own needs and potential, not an interchangeable resource

I will give each of these its own article later in this series. For now, the important point is that they are not soft add-ons to real leadership. They are, according to the research, what makes organisations capable of innovation and change at all.

Why This Matters More Now Than Ever

Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report (2016), surveying 7,000 companies across 130 countries, found that organisational design, leadership, culture, engagement, and learning were the five strongest business priorities worldwide, all five sitting squarely in transformational leadership’s territory rather than transactional leadership’s.

John Kotter (1996), whose eight-step change model remains one of the most cited frameworks in the field, found that roughly 70% of organisational change efforts fail. In my own research, and in over two decades of leading change across different organisations and countries, I have seen the pattern Kotter describes again and again: leaders mix theories, chase speed over sequence, and declare victory before the change has actually stuck.

During my time leading a shared service centre for a global telecom company, I watched a technically excellent transformation programme struggle for a simple reason: it was led transactionally. Milestones were hit and budgets were respected, and the technical delivery was, by most measures, a success. But the organisation never truly adopted the change, because nobody had done the harder work of bringing people’s motivation, ownership, and identity along with it. The project succeeded on paper. It did not succeed in practice.

What My Own Research Found

This question, how transactional and transformational leadership actually shape an organisation’s ability to innovate and change, was the subject of my own MA research at York St John University (Kallmyr, 2017), based on a 140-year-old telecom corporation in Sweden. Through interviews with leaders inside the organisation, the study found that transformational leadership, with its emphasis on people management and personal development, was consistently what enabled successful change and innovation. Just as importantly, it found that top leadership’s own behaviour set the ceiling for how far this could go: you cannot build a transformational culture beneath a transactional summit.

That finding matches what Jim Collins (2001) observed across the companies in his own research: the organisations that made the leap from good to great were not the ones with the cleverest strategy, but the ones with leaders who built an unshakeable internal commitment among their people first.

What This Series Will Cover

Over the next nineteen articles, I will go deep into each of the Four I’s, into the cultural and change-management realities that transformational leadership has to operate inside, and into the practical tools, dialogue, vision, goal-setting, succession, that make it real rather than aspirational. Some of it will draw on established research. Some of it will draw on my own mistakes and hard-won lessons across telecom, e-commerce, public sector, and consulting environments on three continents.

If there is one thing worth taking away from this first instalment, it is this: transformational leadership is not a personality trait some people are lucky enough to have. It is a set of behaviours, grounded in decades of research, that can be learned, practised, and deliberately built into how an organisation operates.

References

• Bass, B.M. (1985) Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: Free Press.
• Bass, B.M. (2008) The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications. 4th edn. New York: Free Press.
• Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B.J. (1994) Improving Organizational Effectiveness Through Transformational Leadership. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
• Burns, J.M. (1978) Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.
• Collins, J. (2001) Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Do Not. New York: HarperBusiness.
• Deloitte (2016) Global Human Capital Trends 2016. New York: Deloitte University Press.
• Hamel, G. (2008) The Future of Management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.
• Kotter, J.P. (1996) Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant specialising in change leadership, operational excellence, and organisational development. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Mats works globally with organisations that want to lead innovation and drive change sustainably. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.