CAROLYN M. SHIELDS
For over 30 years, as the above quotations suggest, some leadership scholars have asserted a belief in the potential of transformative leadership to create equitable change; yet in this century, its potential is still unrealized. Perhaps, this is because the theory is comprehensive and complex. Its focus on advocacy and activism for justice and equity require practitioners to act with moral courage, recognizing the potential for both push-back and considerable rewards as they work to transform workplaces and communities.
This chapter will briefly explain the origins of the theory, clarify its fundamental characteristics, and offer some insight into its potential as a vehicle for social change. It will demonstrate that transformative leadership theory (TLT) responds to the current sense of alienation, marginalization, or even oppression expressed by so many people throughout the world by offering a vision of hope and solidarity for an interdependent world. This chapter will begin with a very brief overview of some of today’s challenges and the need for socially just, activist-oriented leadership that will not only improve organizations but, as argued above, successfully meet today’s challenges.
NEEDED: A NEW APPROACH
More than 30 years ago, Maxine Green expressed the need to teach
to the end of arousing a consciousness of membership, active and participant membership in a society of unfulfilled promises – teaching for what Paulo Freire used to call “conscientization” (1970), heightened social consciousness, a wide-awakeness that might make injustice unendurable. (1988, p. xxx)
Yet, I was surprised to find, when I used this quotation at a major leadership conference, that people were confused. One attendee actually interrupted the presentation asking, “What do you mean by unfulfilled promise?” It had seemed so obvious. America was founded on the principle of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all; yet, wealth and income gaps have been increasing annually not only in the United States, but in many developed countries; urgent cries of “Black lives matter” reflect the still disproportionate arrests and incarceration of people of color; terrorist incidents occur with frightening regularity; new diseases and their antidotes have raised the cost of prescription drugs beyond the reach of many who need them; thousands are homeless and others are faced with urban blight or rural displacement. And these are only a few of the many concerns that reflect the unfulfilled promises of a world in which too many still cannot live in safety, peace, and economic security.
The world in which most of our food was produced by family farms, in which manual labor was valued, and in which “community” implied a homogeneous ethnic background, language, and religious belief, seems like a long-ago fairy tale. Nevertheless, in reality, it was also a world of slavery, of classism, of industrialization in which many were exploited, devalued, and excluded, and in which some were advantaged while others were marginalized, unable to fully participate in the goods and benefits of a democratic society. Today’s world may look more diverse, but inequitable outcomes persist. Almost 70% of us do not know our neighbors who may look unlike us, speak a different language, or practice a different religion from ourselves (Matthews, 2018). We are often filled with fear – fear of the those who have been displaced by conflict, fear about jobs being moved overseas; fear about the rapid destruction of agricultural lands and rain forests, decline in the size of glaciers, and impending extinction of many plants and animal species. We are concerned about a world in which more people feel isolated than ever before, in which hate groups abound (SPLC, 2019), in which civility seems elusive, and in which selfishness and individualism still protect privilege at the expense of both the environment and groups of people who, for historic reasons relating to identity markers, cannot access power and hence cannot fully participate in democratic life.
The need for change is great and often seems overwhelming. Yet, after centuries and decades of attempts at reform, thousands of books and theories about what characterizes good leadership or offering “seven steps” to being a good leader, society is still marked by uncertainty, volatility, and disparity. How have we reached this point and what can we do about it?
A Brief Trajectory of Leadership Theories
Scholars often trace the beginning of thinking about leadership to the stratagem of military leaders such as Sun Tzu, Napoleon, or Alexander the Great. Some suggest that Plato’s discussion of what makes a good leader and how to educate him marks the beginning of leadership studies. Yet, despite the fact that thinking about and studying leadership is centuries old, for our purposes, formal studies of administration may be said to have begun with the management studies of the early twentieth century. These early conceptions drew heavily on ideas from scientific management theories as well as transactional approaches to leadership which tended to emphasize exchange, division of labor between workers and “bosses,” time and motion studies, and the notion of a scalar chain as the appropriate structure for meaningful organizational communication. In these approaches, administrators did the thinking and the workers performed what was often manual or heavy labor (Fayol, [1916]1997; Taylor, [1912]1990). Although widely critiqued, the influence of these approaches still persists in business and industry, in governmental and nonprofit organizations, as well as in educational institutions and may be seen in top-down managerial approaches aimed at exercising control over an organization or a group of people.
Administration, management, and leadership were seen as synonyms, with the desired outcomes, regardless of the term used, being efficiency, effectiveness, and profit, often with little regard to the disparate and lived experiences of workers or participants and without consideration of how power and privilege perpetuate the status quo. Nevertheless, with management theorists like Mary Parker Follett ([1940]1973) and others, values and more collaborative and participatory approaches simmered under the surface.
By 1978, when James McGregor Burns wrote his seminal book, Leadership, there was recognition that a new approach was needed. He first described the heavy reliance on transactions and then introduced a new approach he called transforming leadership, an approach he believed responded to the need for a revolution – “a complete and pervasive transformation of an entire social system” (p. 202) and “real change – that is, a transformation to the marked degree in the attitudes, norms, institutions, and behaviors that structure our daily lives” (1978, p. 414, italics in original).
In the next decade, Foster, too, recognized the futility of overemphasizing managerial functions and argued that
The idea of leadership as a transforming practice, as an empowerment of followers, and as a vehicle for social change has been taken, adapted, and co-opted by managerial writers so that now leadership appears as a way of improving organizations, not of transforming our world. (1989, p. 45)
Leadership, he believed, needed to be “fundamentally addressed to social change and human emancipation” (1986, p. 48), to be “critically educative,” and to not “only look at the conditions in which we live” but decide how to change them (p. 185).
Twenty years later, Oakes and Rogers picked up Foster’s critique of managerial approaches and decried what they saw as the continued overemphasis on rational and technical reform. They called for more activist and more community-based approaches to leadership and change and argued that:
Technical changes by themselves, even in the hands of committed and skillful “change agents” or backed by court orders, are too weak to interrupt the intergenerational transmission of racial inequality. At root, the cultural norms of meritocracy and the politics of privilege are impervious to so puny attack. (2006, pp. 21–22)
Although the above statement highlights racial inequality, the premise holds for other kinds of inequality including social class, religion, language, culture, as well as environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Oakes and Rogers go on to argue that
when educators step in and speak and act for less powerful communities, they do nothing to build the local community power necessary to change the cultural and political asymmetries that sustain the very […] inequities they seek to disrupt. (2006, p. 31)
Oakes and Rogers argue that the work of John Dewey can provide some guidance for moving forward, in that Dewey calls for a “revitalized public” and “an agenda of activist, educative politics” that could build a new social order. They argue that Dewey’s participative social inquiry requires engaging those most affected by inequality, ensuring access to knowledge and its construction, adopting a critical stance, and developing a transformative goal (pp. 39–41).1 With them, I posit that an activist reform strategy, including a new approach to leadership, is necessary to dislodge the inequities firmly entrenched by a long history of overt discrimination combined with often unacknowledged implicit bias and privilege. This is exactly what TLT, emerging from Burns’ (1978) transforming leadership is intended to do.
An Overview of Transformative Leadership
Based on the writing and interpretations of numerous scholars in countries throughout the globe, transformative leadership
Begins with critical reflection and analysis and moves though enlightened understanding to action – action to redress wrongs and to ensure that all members of an organization are provided with as level a playing field as possible – not only with respect to access but also with regard to academic, social, and civic outcomes. (Shields, 2010, p. 572)
TLT as it has more recently been articulated is a comprehensive approach to leadership based on two fundamental premises or hypotheses and eight specific tenets. Although sometimes articulated in educational terms for leaders of schools and formal educational organizations (Shields, 2020), the premises may be broadly stated as followed:
1. The first premise is that whenever participants in an organization feel disrespected, excluded, or marginalized, are worried about how they will be treated, or what failure might mean for their social or cultural group, they will be unable to work to their full potential, to fully participate, and hence, their individual achievement will be limited.
2. The second premise is that when people are both encouraged and enabled to participate fully in the deliberative processes and actions of an institution or organization, capacity and civic participation are developed, and our very democratic society is strengthened.
To achieve these two outcomes, the following eight tenets help leaders to work toward desirable socially just, inclusive, equitable, and excellent outcomes for their organization as well as for more global transformation:
the mandate to effect deep and equitable change;
the need to deconstruct knowledge frameworks that perpetuate inequity and injustice and to reconstruct them in equitable ways;
the need to address the inequitable distribution of power;
an emphasis on both private and public (individual and collective) good;
a focus on democracy, emancipation, equity, and justice;
an emphasis on interconnectedness, interdependence, and global awareness;
the necessity of balancing critique with promise; and
the call to exhibit moral courage. (Shields, 2016)
Taken together, the tenets offer guidance for lea...
