Leaders are ubiquitous throughout the business landscape. However, transformational leaders are rare, and in the digital age, this type of leadership is becoming more coveted than ever. Transformational leadership works to improve the morale, motivation and job performance of personnel through a variety of mechanisms; these include connecting the workforce to a larger sense of identity and self and to the collective identity of the organization. These leaders strive to be role models for employees in order to inspire them to take deeper ownership for their work, and a greater understanding of their strengths and weaknesses giving the leader the ability to align their staff with tasks that enhance their performance. Transformational leadership is a management style that integrates emotional intelligence or EQ as a core value that sees an employee’s mental health and well-being as a cornerstone for long term growth and organizational success.
Management guru Peter Drucker writes, “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.” It is the transformational leader that understands that creating a strong corporate mental health initiative is vital to the business success of an organization. Transformational leaders recognize that in order to create a strong corporate culture they must first discover themselves to stay mentally engaged and healthy throughout the arc of there working life. The concept of self-care becomes critically important in dealing with the psychological demands of one’s everyday work life. In order to cultivate a robust best practice strategy, transformational leaders must look inward and begin to ask three critical questions about themselves to link the personal with the professional to foster a culture that sees mental health as a vital imperative in the corporate ecosystem.
Question #1 What Are My Strengths?
Leadership is defined by strength and creating a healthy productive work life should be predicated on the idea that discovering one’s strength offers individuals a sense of purpose and an understanding of where they belong. This sense of belonging eases anxiety and stress building a healthy ego that can be central to fostering a better-rounded person. In Drucker’s essay Managing Oneself, he writes that, “The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or twelve months later, compare the actual results with your expectations….Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years where your strengths lie - and this is the most important thing to know.” Drucker believes that this methodology will allow one to differentiate between high levels of competency and the areas that need improvement. Transformational leadership embraces the idea that growth is essential for constructing a healthy working life. Building strength is on a continuum, having an openness to focus on improving skill development to acquiring new expertise is all part of the process of self-actualization.
Question #2 How Do I Perform?
How one performs is a matter of personality and may, in fact, be even more valuable than knowing one’s own strengths because it ties the personal experience of self-care and corporate well-being to productivity and job satisfaction. Managing oneself effectively boils down to a series of key inquiries that a leader must expect of themselves starting with how does one learn? Understanding how one consumes information whether it be through listening, reading or writing offers up a critical piece of self-knowledge that is vital for better performance. Secondly, leaders must think about interpersonal skills examining such topics as how one works with others? Are they a loner? Connecting performance to interpersonal skills is often overlooked but from a corporate wellness and culture perspective can be paramount as far as the effective nature of an organization whether working as a team member or independently. The nature of work in the digital economy is changing at a rapid pace and transformational leaders must understand that the process of adaptation and finding a healthy balance of the individual with the collective will only benefit the organization in the long run.
Question #3 Where Do I Belong?
A sense of belonging may be the most important element in developing a successful corporate health and wellness strategy. This existential inquiry is rooted in the idea that successful careers are not planned, rather they develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths and their ability to perform. Knowing where one belongs provides the foundation for the transformational leader to create a pathway to help revolutionize an ordinary hardworking employee into an outstanding performer.
With the number of employees increasingly dealing with mental health issues, corporate health and wellness and emotional intelligence are becoming more important than ever to the toolkit of great leadership. Self-management offers greater insight into allowing C-level executives the skills needed to embrace the management strategies of the transformational leadership model and creating new opportunities for developing the blueprint for the healthy workplace of the 21st century.
