Effective leadership is central to any organization and more so in these uncertain times, resilient leaders are now more important than ever before. Authentic and Transformational leadership is a process whereby leaders engage with and influence employees by paying attention to their needs and raising their motivation and providing ethical framework for decisions making. Such leaders help employees to fulfil their potential by enabling them to reach their goals in a way that benefits employees as well as the organizations and the society. Whereas Transactional leadership just focuses on the transactions between getting the work done and getting rewarded.

Employees need to know their goals and what they can achieve when they meet those goals, but if leaders only focus on transactions, then performance will never be exceptional, and it will just be an average performance. Employees require meaningful engagement which Transformation leaders can offer. Some pseudo-transformational leaders may be charismatic and make people achieve their own goals and not provide right guidance that is needed for reaching the organisational goals.  Leaders may have their personal style and strengths but essentially there are five skill sets which connect them and the way they position themselves in relation to other people.

 First one is building trust by creating yourself as somebody that people actually want to follow.

Second area is about ‘values’ to help and guide the Employees using ethical frameworks for decisions and choices that people make.

Third area is encouraging others and motivating people when times are hard and transformation leaders can enable people by giving them the resources needed and not an empty hope. It is one trait which effectively all effective leaders have. They are driven to ‘achieve’ beyond expectations of their own and everyone else’s. The most important thing here is to ‘Achieve’.

Fourth is encouraging innovative thinking by challenging the status quo and looking at the things from many different perspectives.

Fifth is enabling people by empowering them to take decisions on their own. Generally, organisations are busy on day to day fire fighting and there is time constraint to empower people for decision making. Even if training people for decision making takes time, effort, and resources but in the long run it is beneficial and especially at the time of crisis, where people are already trained to take decisions on their own.

The transformational leaders provide Employees environment where they can psychologically feel safe to ‘speak up’ and are not rejected or marginalised, so that no good ideas are missed and lost in the organisation.

The purpose of the Corporates/company is no more maximization of shareholders value only, It is now Maximization of the Stake holder’s Value. Transformational Leader takes his decisions by considering the Interest of all the Stake holders. They motivate the Employees by bringing clarity about the Corporate Purpose, so that the Employees can align their individual Purpose with the Corporate Purpose.

In these trying times, the ‘alpha-male’ Leadership Style is not Effective and are replaced by Compassion and Empathy by Transformational leaders. The very word Empathy seems un-business like, out of place, amid fire-fighting tough realities of the marketplace. But Empathy is, thought fully considering employees feelings, along with other factor in the process of making intelligent decision, and is not to be seen as soft-approach by the Leader.

The transformational Leaders are Inclusive and encourage diversity at workplace. They encourage Gender Inclusion and also inclusion of non-dominant groups.

The transformational leaders exhibit courage and Integrity, the two most strongest predictors of leadership qualities, to bring about change in the organisational culture.

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