Post 6

Holy buckets, class blew my mind tonight. Honestly, between the readings and the conversation, it actually made my brain hurt. It made paying attention in my next class extremely difficult!

I've always preferred leadership theories that focused on the process of leadership, and not the "leader". I also believed that transformational leadership was "better" than transactional leadership. I think I may have mentioned this in class, how I had always conceived transactional leadership to have this quick-check convenience bend to it; an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine". That's how authors that promote transformational leadership talk about it, anyway.

But as we were talking about the differences between transactional and transformational, I started to think differently about the two. I drew connections between the narcissistic leader and the transformational, in that the transformational leader is expected to be the "hero" (I hate hero worship (maybe hate is too strong a word)), and come in with a vision, and lead people to it. I think that sets a lot of people up for failure. It places all the glory on the "leader", and the "followers" only get recognition if the "leader" gives it to them.

So, to see transactional leadership posed as a more process-oriented leadership style, I was all like "yeah!!". It reminds me of St. Exupery's The Little Prince. That book is chock-full of existentialism. One of my favorite messages from The Little Prince is that the journey is more important than the destination. That's why I prefer to focus on the process rather than the outcomes.

When you focus on the process, and more so how everyone is involved in the process, I think the outcomes will come naturally. That reminds me of a speech Matt gave us last year when we were all freaking out about the assessment project and papers and stuff. He basically told us to just focus on the learning, and the grades would come naturally. And yeah, he was right. But what do you do when you have a supervisor, or "leader" who is only focused on the outcomes?