Senior sage leaders are drawn to those who “lead by example” – who exhibit the values they advocate on a daily basis. Authenticity is believed to be reflected in the leader’s actions: “You are what you do.” Authenticity is also made evident in the expectations that effective leaders have of other people: “I’m not going to ask you to do something that I am not willing to do myself.” Especially in the nonprofit world is the legitimacy of leadership built upon this commitment to authenticity.
Many years ago, James McGregor Burns framed this kind of authenticity by calling it
“transformational leadership” – and which he differentiated from “transactional leadership”. The transactional leader is a manager, and management, according to Burns, is not the same as leadership. By contrast, transformational leaders are people who have a vision and embody it in everyday actions. They “walk their talk” and gain the cooperation of others not by threatening or even rewarding, but by inspiring and showing the way through their decisions. The transformational leader gets people to work “outside their comfort zone,” in large part because these leaders themselves take risks and are constantly learning. For senior sage leaders this seems to be particularly important, given the unfortunate stereotype of the senior leader as someone who doesn’t take risks or who isn’t open to new learning.
The Grass Valley and Nevada City communities are particularly welcoming environments for transformational leadership. So many leaders in Twin Towns are Collins’ Type 5 leaders because their persistence is rewarded by tangible results being achieved. Furthermore, they tend to be modest because they are working in small nonprofit organizations that depend on volunteer efforts. It would be foolish for any senior sage leader to take all of the credit for organizational achievements; this might easily result in reduced effort and commitment on the part of colleagues who have been willing to work and expend energy without financial reward. If employed earlier in their lives by a large corporation, these men and women may have had their vision subsumed under the weight of bureaucratic and complex decision-making processes. Now they have the opportunity to be truly transformational—working persistently and humbly in much smaller organizations that are performing a vital community service.
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