Transformation: The most overused & least understood word in leadership development

Advert: “Transformational leadership is one of the most inspiring leadership styles.

 Learn how to be a transformational leader”

Do I sign up or not? 

Let me be honest, like most people I want quick and painless change. I don’t want my transformation to create upheaval in my work, or personal life. I’d like my transformation completed in a one, or two days, off-site event, or six coaching sessions, over the next few months. I don’t want too much disruption, or something that demands too much patience and courage. 

I have to say…..I’m very curious about the business worlds use of the word, ‘transformation’. We’ve gone from management development, to effective management development, to transformational leadership development. We’ve gone from coaching, to performance coaching, to transformational coaching. It is as if we, in the world of leadership development, have become so anxious to sell our development programmes that we have lost the honesty in what we are selling. We think that the only way that a buyer will take us seriously is if we have the highest decibel hyperbole that’s going. Adding the word ‘transformation’, has become the trump card in the sales game of leadership development. What will really, really, really change you is Transformational Change. Plain old Change, is no longer strong enough.

What I fear is being offered into the leadership development space, is a cheap imitation of transformation, not the real thing; not an honest offering of transformation, because that wouldn’t sell so easily.  

So, in the spirit of honesty and transparency I want to suggest that any provider of transformational leadership development, whether seminars, coaching programmes, or away days, give this questionnaire to every participant who is being invited to attend.

Question 1. Do I really want to change, or merely improve how I look to others?

Question 2. Am I prepared to make the tough journey, to see a hard work miracle in my life?

Question 3. Am I up for doing the demanding, inner-work on myself?

Question 4. Will I ringfence years, not days or weeks, to this process?

Question 5. Have I got the courage to die within myself, a lot of times, to get the resulting resurrection?

Question 6. Do I really want to be a different person at the end of the process – motivations, drives, mindsets, attitudes, life-centre?

Attendees should likewise be sending a questionnaire to the facilitator, or coach – actually, more of an essay question in a few parts, than a multiple-choice question. 

“Describe for me in detail a time in your life when you underwent a real personal transformation (internally, not just changing jobs etc) Who were you before? Who did you become? How did it happen?  What was the process? Over what period of time?”

As the questions suggest, when we think of transformation we should not be thinking ‘dirty car – now clean car’, we should be thinking ‘caterpillar – now butterfly, via a complete melt down inside the chrysalis’.  

Firstly, transformation is not about things changing, it’s that we change.  For instance, our motivations might be transformed from being a driven person, to being empathic and that will have a real impact on how you do your work; so much so that it may cost you your job, because you are no longer seen as ‘tough enough’ on people. Transformation isn’t polishing our ego-trophies, it’s stripping them down and rebuilding them into something different. 

Secondly, transformation requires a pathway of deaths. Death is the absence of life.  We all seek our emotional life, our identity life, our self-esteem life, in a host of places that we think will give us what we need to thrive - people, things, attitudes and beliefs. All of that seems fine until transformation demands we look very honestly at whether our life source is real, or revealed to be one of a myriad of little lies that prop us up and keep us going each day.  

One of my lies is, “I makes things happen”. I lived off that belief for years and years. Until I confronted whether it was actually true, or just partially true. And what happens when I can’t make things happen? Confronting the reality in that statement caused me to face the truth and have to let it go, let it die. It sounds easy, but the reality of these little deaths is captured well by Richard Rohr[1], when he says that the ego will do almost anything rather than die to itself.  There is no ‘cheap’ transformation. German writer and statesman Goethe once said, “as long as you do not have experience of this dying and becoming, you are only a troubled guest on this earth”.  

Thirdly, transformation is hard work. Doing battle with these deeply rooted parts of ourselves is tough. We are going to have to do battle with our ego-addictions and the hardest work will be spotting and admitting to yourself that you even have these ego-addictions. Transformation, when you are in the thick of it, is not much fun, it’s scary at times and you cease to be the expert on yourself.   

Poet TS Eliot[2] studied the process of transformation as deeply as many and he described the journey like this. 

 “To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

No ecstasy, ignorance about what you thought you knew about yourself, dispossession, not being who, or where, you thought you were. A challenging journey indeed.  

Fourthly, transformation requires a ‘miracle’.  We have become so hooked on the message that there is nothing we can’t do, that it comes very hard when we are confronted by our own impossible attitudes or behaviours. A miracle is where you come up face to face with your own impossibilities and admit, like the first few steps of AA, that we can’t change ourselves. The miracle of transformation begins with being able to admit that we are full of mindsets, attitudes, addictive thoughts, that we can’t get rid of. Sitting with our impossibilities and seeing how something mysteriously shifts may not sound very scientific, or rational, but there isn’t a transformation expert who doesn’t identify the necessity of this process. These last two points are summed up wonderfully and honestly by the book, Character Transformation: The Hard Work Miracle[3] 

Finally, as the participants question to the facilitator suggests, we cannot possibly be facilitators of transformation without having made the difficult journey, at least once in our own lives. We can’t sell what we haven’t smoked. If we haven’t made the transformation journey, we will be a false guide. There is no quick route to transformation. There just isn’t. If some of the points I have written seem unfamiliar or far-fetched, then that will be your answer to the question as to whether you have made the journey. 

What is the reward for genuine transformation? The outcome is even more than just becoming a different kind of leader and is summed up well by Francis Weller, when he says, of real transformation,

 “This is the hard work of maturation. In the traditional language of apprenticeship, this would be called mastery. In the language of the soul, this is the work of becoming an elder……. becoming a source of nourishment for the community….a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community[4]”.

Genuine transformation is how leaders make a sustainable difference and leave a legacy. If we are really honest, this isn’t always what we want, or what our organisations want of us, but that’s what is on offer and it’s what the world needs of its leaders.

[1] Falling Upwards      Richard Rohr     SPCK       2012

[2] T S Eliot  The Four Quartets (East Coker)  Faber

[3] Character Transformation: The Hard Work Miracle    Stephen Johnson Norton 1985

[4] The Wild Edge Of Sorrow         Francis Weller     North Atlantic Books          2015