Theories in ActionUncategorized

Transformational Leadership in the Final Stretch

As we enter the final couple weeks of my internship, it has become important that our team focuses on completing the high priority assignments. While we still have many resources to contact and interview for the creation of our directory, it is crucial that each of us gets the information from the resources that our internship supervisors have deemed the most useful for our clients. In this process, my supervisor Tom expressed strong transformational leadership to inspire us to accomplish our goals.

One quality that marks transformational leadership is individualized consideration. This means that the leader shows genuine concerns for the needs of followers. A leader who demonstrates individualized consideration typically coaches and empowers followers to success. Tom certainly exhibited individualized consideration. He established weekly working meetings with us in small groups of two. This enabled him to work one on one with each of us to check our progress. However, not only did he check on our progress, he asked us where he could help us overcome any barriers or obstacles we had hit in attempting to finish our work. For me, he had stepped in and reached out directly to an individual at an organization whose contact information I was unable to get. He established an instant connection for me to make the completion of my interview and assignment easier. By taking the time out of his busy work schedule to meet with each intern individually and put in the work to meet our needs, Tom exemplified transformational leadership through individualized consideration.

Tom also expressed inspirational motivation, another aspect of transformational leadership, through these meetings with us. Many of us, myself included, were hesitant to bother organizations through repeated follow-up calls. We were unsure of how often was too often to call, or how soon was too soon to follow-up. Sometimes, this led to organizations never getting in contact with us because we failed to be persistent enough. In order to help encourage and motivate us, he reminded us of the impact our final project would have on the lives of vulnerable people. He explained how it takes persistence to ensure that clients aren’t put in jail unnecessarily. If he never followed up with people, he would be failing his clients. Explaining this to us helped contextualize the importance of the information we need, and how little it mattered if we felt as though we were being annoying to a resource. He furthered this point by explaining if an organization was unwilling to take the time to speak with us, then it was not an organization we would want to work with to send clients. This all served to motivate and inspire us to be more determined in contacting resources.