A Cup of Leadership CaffeineSome leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders.

Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment.

These transactional leaders define victory in the form of quantity, not quality. They take pride in keeping things moving and they truly believe they are helping others navigate through their own busy days.

There are undoubtedly environments and situations where transactional leadership is essential.  For example, the operating room, fighting a fire and the battlefield are all settings where this type of leadership can mean the difference between life and death. However, even in these extreme cases, people have typically worked and succeeded and failed and learned together, and there are deep bonds that enable a second-to-second type of environment to work effectively.

Transactional Leadership is Costly:

The cost of leading from a purely transactional approach is the loss of ability to engage and truly understand people, situations and complex problems. There’s no depth to the exchanges, and relationships are superficial at best

Transactional leaders exhaust and frustrate their employees, engendering animosity or at least an overarching sense of malaise in the workplace.  Many front-line and first-time leaders fall into this convenient style-trap simply because they don’t know any better.

If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.

5 Ideas for Improving Your Engagement Effectiveness:

1. Stop and focus. While it may seem unnatural, you need to force yourself to stop what you are doing and focus all of your energy and attention on the individual(s) in front of you.  One former transactional manager described the process of literally having to take a second or two to clear her mind, orient herself in the present and focus exclusively on the current situation.  She found it particularly helpful to make certain that any of her electronic distractions were on silent and upside down, or better yet, out of site.

2. Ask clarifying questions & teach, don’t tell.  Instead of jumping to solutions, force yourself to ask questions to understand the broader context of the issue at hand.  While it might be easy for you to offer a solution after a few minutes of discussion, you are better served to help people arrive at a conclusion.  Leaders that engage understand the importance of this approach as a teaching tool.

3. Take time to follow-up. The issue exchange is not the end of transaction, but the beginning of a long-term relationship.  Reach out to someone that offered good ideas or showed initiative and say thanks and offer encouragement.

4. Recognize the great battles raging inside of everyone.  With thanks to Tom Peters for reminding us all of this, remember that everyone (and this means you too!) has a great battle raging inside.  This may be personal, professional or spiritual, but it is a mostly silent battle that is THE priority of the individual in front of you.  Look for signs, provide relief if you sense that is needed or just quietly respect the battle in the professional and courteous manner that you deal with the individual.

5. Change your definition of leadership success. Instead of focusing on valuing your ability to make snap decisions as fast as issues are presented, it’s time to completely rethink your definition of success.  True success as a leader occurs over time in the form of professional development for others, great and sustained results for the organization, innovation, and building an environment where people thrive.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There are always opportunities for you to improve your effectiveness at engaging with your team members and colleagues.  While you may sense that you are slowing down, sometimes, you need to slow down to allow everyone else to speed up.

Quit transacting and start engaging!