This year my talent development colleagues have been engaging our chief human resources officers in conversations about transformational HR. The conversations are meant to support human resources leaders as we begin a system-wide effort to move key transactional work to regional service centers. The move is designed to create efficiencies in our system and assist HR leaders so they can spend more of their time doing strategic work at the local level.
As we go down that path, it begs the question, what do we mean by transformational? Our HR community has agreed upon a discipline-specific definition of transformational HR that includes mastery of the following leadership competencies:
- strategic leadership and partnership
- organization development
- employee engagement
- diversity, equity, and inclusion
- change management
Still, the core idea of transformational HR builds upon transformational leadership itself. With that in mind, we thought it might be helpful to discuss the broader concept of transformational leadership this month. We’ll explore the following questions:
- What exactly is a transformational leader?
- What differentiates transformational from transactional leadership?
- Why does it matter?
We’ll also explore some of the characteristics of transformational leadership in our blog posts.
Before we dig in, tell us your thoughts on transformational leadership. What does it mean to you?
Anita Rios
Higher EDge 