Transformational leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate employees and stakeholders to create the conditions for successful transformation. Encouraging innovation is vital to this.
What do we mean by encouraging innovation?
Creating an environment and ways of working that enable employees, partners and customers to express innovative ideas and have these heard. This includes continual promotion and and reward of good ideas, encouraging multi-disciplinary ways of working and diversity in teams and governance, ensuring 'thinking time' and encouraging cross service working.
Essential for:
- All types of transformation.
Knowledge
- Clarity on the desired end outcomes including success measures and timescales for delivery.
Skills
Able to:
- Think strategically: With a whole council mindset, aligning transformation activities to wider council objectives and creating the conditions for success.
- Plan for the long term
- Communicate effectively: With stakeholders at all levels both verbally and in writing, use storytelling techniques to ‘paint a picture’ of the end state.
- Build relationships: Establish, nurture and maintain positive relationships to achieve transformation outcomes.
- Manage conflict: Openly address differences in a constructive and positive way.
- Prioritise: Activities based on importance, dependencies and the most valuable or challenging deliverables first.
Behaviours
- Collaborative
- Act with integrity
- Decisive
- Authentic
- Empathetic
- Continual learning orientation
Related roles
- Executive and Senior Leadership
- Chief Transformation Officer / Director of Transformation
- Directors
- Heads of Service
Leadership and management – maturity index
The index attached below sets out the typical leadership and management characteristics demonstrated by councils at each stage of their transformation maturity.
