Week 5: Transformational Leadership

Over the past 5 weeks at The Hartford, I have had the opportunity to meet with numerous different leaders across the marketing department. From this, I realize how prevalent transformational leadership is within the organization. Burns describes transformational leadership as the process of leaders and followers helping one another to push toward a higher level of morale and motivation (Burns, 1978). Everyone that I have met with has been extremely supportive and does what they can to help me learn and grow. 

Focusing on my manager Patrick, I find that he continues to push me to challenge myself and the norms of the organization. He has said numerous times that he doesn’t want this internship experience to be boring and for me to not get anything out of it. Instead of just doing what is asked of me, I have been going one step further and asking questions, making suggestions and discovering ways that processes can be improved. Patrick and I had a conversation this week where he asked if I felt like I was learning enough and was being given enough responsibility. I was honest with him, and told him that there were times where I didn’t have much to do and was looking for more work. While I have a good amount of responsibility, I feel like I get through the work fairly quickly and then I don’t know what to do with the rest of my day. In response, he said he wanted to push me to not always need direction from him or other team members, but rather to take initiative because there is always more that can be done. I took this to heart, and have been working to find gaps in the business that I feel that I can help with/improve without direction. In this way, I feel that Patrick is a transformational leader, as he is inspiring me to become more of a leader than a follower.

I also had the opportunity to meet with the creative director of the in-house agency this week, Jamie. We spoke for an hour and he told me all about his professional experience within the agency world and then how he moved over to corporate. The conversation was extremely insightful, and he left me with many takeaways that inspired me to dig deeper into the ad industry, which is where I’m interested in ending up. Through this short conversation, he also acted as a transformational leader, with inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation and idealized influence. The fact that he took a full hour out of his busy day to speak directly with me and give me all of these great insights was awesome. I’m glad that I’ve been able to be influenced by so many transformational leaders thus far, and I’m sure there will be more to come!