One of my favorite quotes is by Mahatma Gandhi...
BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.
If we consider the messaging of this quote, I believe it can be translated in three ways:
1) You be the change, others will follow (win-win).
2) Don't expect change in others unless you are willing to change yourself (lose-win).
3) Do nothing and wait for others to change (lose-lose).
I labeled these in what we would call a win-win, win-lose, or lose-lose situation.
A win-win situation is advantageous to both parties.
A win-lose [or vice versa] situation is only advantageous to one party.
A lose-lose situation is not advantageous for either party.
I learned at an early age that I can't control what other people do, I can only control how I respond.
I truly believe that change starts with one individual person and hopefully he/she can influence others through verbal and non-verbal [actions] cues. While working in the early childhood development field, we used modeling in the classrooms to achieve the desired behavior we wanted to see in the children. We used verbal cues like, "tell them you are sad" to help with better communication skills and putting toys away to demonstrate the desired action of helping with clean up. Usually a rhythmic song accompanied the actions for motivation. The outcome was participation. There was always those who wouldn't participate, so we had to find another motivator for that child.
One of my favorite quotes in this field was, "children play to learn and learn to play."
If you don't know quotes by Gandhi then you probably haven't been studying political or spiritual leadership. I learned more about him by studying transformational leadership. In numerous textbooks from my doctoral classes, he was cited by many authors as a transformational leader.
James MacGregor Burns (1978) first introduced the concept of transforming leadership in his descriptive research on political leaders, but this term is now used in organizational psychology as well. According to Burns, transforming leadership is a process in which "leaders and followers help each other to advance to a higher level of morale and motivation". Burns related to the difficulty in differentiation between management and leadership and claimed that the differences are in characteristics and behaviors.
He established two concepts: "transforming leadership" and "transactional leadership". According to Burns, the transforming approach creates significant change in the life of people and organizations. It redesigns perceptions and values, and changes expectations and aspirations of employees. Unlike in the transactional approach, it is not based on a "give and take" relationship, but on the leader's personality, traits and ability to make a change through example, articulation of an energizing vision and challenging goals.
Transforming leaders are idealized in the sense that they are a moral exemplar of working towards the benefit of the team, organization and/or community. Burns theorized that transforming and transactional leadership were mutually exclusive styles. Transactional leaders usually do not strive for cultural change in the organization but they work in the existing culture while transformational leaders can try to change organizational culture (Langston.edu).
Whether you consider yourself a transformational or transactional leader, the key is still change. While Gandhi talked about personal change, his actions worked toward cultural change. For me, organizational change is the motivation to my continual personal transformation.
Is it yours?
Be the change you want to see in the world.
What She Said ~ Beverly
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