DO AS I AM

I want to continue my look at change theory with one more related issue: leadership.  As I indicated a while back, to institute the type of curricular change I have been advocating in this blog – that is, changing the content of our civics instruction from one guided by the natural rights construct to one guided by liberated federalism – the needed type of strategy to institute that change would be the normative-re-educative type.  A strategy that would fall under this type would be one that seeks to not only solicit outward compliance to some change mandate, but also would further strive to have those involved willing to participate in the planning and implementation of that change.  If one is after a profound change that is pervasive in its effects, then one needs to get at not only the related behaviors, but also the related knowledge, attitudes, norms, and values.  This level of change encompasses not only changed procedures, but changed procedures over time and therefore demands those involved to see and feel differently.  Serious change has the knack of bringing up emotional challenges and if one is expected to adopt another way of doing something, in order to have the necessary discipline to adopt a new way, one has to want to do it.  The change, therefore, is transformational – as opposed to transactional change.

If you are unfamiliar with this distinction, let me describe it.  When one does something at the behest of someone else in anticipation that one is to be rewarded or relieved of some punishment by so acting, we are talking about transactional change, a tit-for-tat arrangement or an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” agreement.  If we apply the concept of power to these types of changes, this relates to, in the first case, reward power or, in the second case, coercive power.  Each of these, in turn, has corresponding types of change strategies:  reward relates to empirical-rational strategies and coercion relates to power-coercive strategies (I’ve written of these in previous postings).  For most changes, one of these can fit the bill.  But most changes are not extensive; most take on a style that usually can be voiced as “wouldn’t it be better to do this before that” or something along those lines.  But from time to time, an organization will want to initiate a new way that something important is done; for example, teaching a civics content that has different priorities and moral perspective from what has been taught to date.  You can try to reward people to teach a different content or you might try to threaten some punishment if they don’t teach this other content, but if you want a teacher who is believable in what he/she teaches and is motivated to do a good job, then you need one who believes in what he/she is teaching.  Further, if that teacher and the other teachers involved with the shift in content are not of that frame of mind initially, then you are attempting transformational change – change that gets not only at behavior, but also at this level of priorities and motivations the new way entails.  One, then, is concerned with the normative aspects of how the person views the process, aims, and goals of the endeavor.

Now what convinces a person to want to change?  There are a few categories of such motivating forces.  These occur when, one, a person perceives the change as morally or otherwise legitimate; two, a person perceives the change as prudent – the more intelligent thing to do; or three, a person perceives the change as soliciting the positive response from someone with whom that person wants to be associated.  This last category can be motivated by love, friendship, envy, loyalty, or any emotion that leads the person to establish or maintain a close relationship with the targeted subject.

For each type of change, transactional based on reward power, transactional based on coercion, or transformational, one needs a different style of leadership.  In the upcoming postings, I want to address transformational leadership.  I will attempt to share ideas concerning its elements and attributes.  But to give you a sense of what is to come, let me just mention a couple of reputed transformational leaders as examples from our history:  FDR and Martin Luther King.