Transactional and Transforming Leadership at Graham
After five full weeks at Graham, I am seeing the leadership theories from theories and models displayed in a professional setting. It is not always clear what theories occur at work and sometimes it requires additional effort to match actions with theories from last semester. Several come to mind and I will elaborate on those in this week’s post.
Transactional leadership jumped to my mind when thinking of a theory to reflect on, but after further thought I don’t think Graham has extraordinary transactional leadership. Instead, I think transactional leadership is almost always present in a workplace. When you succeed at a task or achieve a goal, usually you are encouraged by the person who assigned that task. This positive feedback serves as a reward for good work. I do not notice ways where analysts or other full time employees designate contingent reward for strong behavior. However, this may change when we have our modeling test or sourcing presentations soon. Both of these are competitions among interns to see who can build the fastest model or present the best project.
I have noticed transforming leadership recently at Graham. In Dr. Goethals’ class we defined this as a leader who raises the motivation and mortality of followers towards a common goal. This applies to the weekly sourcing projects interns complete with the head of business development at Graham. I briefly mentioned this project in my last blog, but this is a repetitive task that can easily feel like intern “grunt” work. We look through 150 small companies per week and decide if they fit Graham’s investment criteria. But when introducing this project, the head of business development told us that several interns have made a long-term impact on the company through this project. If you successfully identify a company and Graham ultimately pursues it, this task becomes something much greater than repetition. By planting this image in our heads, it added a stronger component to the work we do for this project and motivates interns to take each company seriously.
I think that your assessment about transactional leadership being part of every work environment, I think you are correct. Thanks for noting a factor of transactional leadership specifically (contingent reward) and noting that you have not observed actions/behaviors that illustrate this factor. How about management-by-exception (active or passive) – another transactional factor. From this post and previous ones, it also sounds as though some transformational leadership is evident. Would be good – even after finishing – to think about whether you experienced/observed any actions/behaviors that illustrate/embody the transformational leadership factors (individualized consideration, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and intellectual stimulation). From things you’ve described, I can think of examples that illustrate these factors.