Transformational Leadership: The 4 I's, Examples and How to Lead

In the mid-1990s, Julian Barling and two of his colleagues ran an experiment at a large Canadian bank. What they took was 20 branch managers and out of which 9 of them were picked randomly for a one-day transformational leadership workshop. This was followed by four one-on-one coaching sessions, while the other 11 got nothing.

Within a span of a few weeks, employees belonging to the trained managers were describing their bosses differently and their own commitment to the bank went up. While going through the study, something surprised me the most. Personal loan and credit card sales rose in the branches of those managers.

From this study one thing surfaces as an important aspect that transformational leadership is not a personality trait that only a few people are born with. The managers that were picked for the study were just ordinary branch managers. One workshop did not change them. What they did was change a few things they did every week which their teams noticed. This guide looks at the 4 I's as simple habits that managers can practice.

What Is Transformational Leadership?

Transformational leadership is a leadership style where a leader raises people's motivation and performance by giving them a shared purpose, challenging their thinking, setting a personal example and paying attention to each person's growth. James MacGregor Burns set out the idea in 1978, and in 1985 Bernard Bass turned it into a measurable model, which was later refined into the four I's.

Before Burns, James V. Downton used it in 1973 in Rebel Leadership, a study of revolutionary movements. However, it was Burns who gave it a more refined following. His book Leadership is mostly about presidents. The leaders he looked at led by exchange, trading jobs or favors for votes. Only a smaller section changed what their followers wanted in the first place and Burns called them transforming leaders.

Bernard Bass took this same idea out of politics and applied it to companies. His 1985 book, Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations, described three components and came up with a way to measure them. This was the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ).

But who fills it in? The people who report to the leader. And that's a detail worth holding on to. Hence, it is the team's opinion that counts the most. Later, Bass worked with Bruce Avolio and worked on adding a fourth component. By 1991, these four components came to be known as the four I's.

But the question is why does a fifty-year-old idea keep coming back? My best guess is automation. In Aon's 2026 Human Capital Trends Study, 84% of employers said human strengths will matter more as tasks get automated. Aon surveyed more than 2,300 business leaders. Leadership sat near the top of their skills list, ahead of anything digital. Of the main leadership styles, this is the one most built around those human skills.

The 4 I's of Transformational Leadership

The 4 I's are idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration. The table puts each one into a normal working week.

Component	What it means	What it looks like this week	What to recognize
Idealized influence	You act the way you ask others to act	You take on the shift nobody wants	A person who held to a value when it cost them time
Inspirational motivation	The direction is clear and people believe it	Monday's update opens with why the quarter's goal matters	Work that moved the shared goal, named in public
Intellectual stimulation	Challenge is welcome, including to your ideas	One meeting asks what the team should stop doing	The colleague who questioned a habit and tested an alternative
Individualized consideration	Each person gets coached toward their own growth	A full 1:1 spent on one teammate's next role	Progress on a skill someone chose to build

Source: Vantage Circle

1. Idealized Influence

Idealized influence is all about leading by example. This is the first parameter your team judges you on. It is done mostly by watching what you do when something is inconvenient.

Imagine a busy week when the team is launching something new and crucial for the organization. Someone from the team has to do double shifts if anything goes wrong. However, nobody wants to do it. So the manager steps in and takes the responsibility without letting anyone know about it. But the team somehow finds it out. After this, whenever such scenarios arise, the employees willingly help as she has set an example.

Sana's point lines up with what Gartner hears from HR. In a July 2024 Gartner survey of 625 HR leaders, 57% agreed that managers fail to enforce the culture their organization wants. I'd read that with one caveat. It's HR describing managers, and the managers weren't asked.

There is one small catch with the double shift scenario. Only the people on it saw it happen, not the entire organization. So how do you make it visible throughout the whole organization? With the help of Vantage Rewards, where each recognition post is tagged to a company value, and a value like ownership then turns up on the feed with a real person and a real date attached.

Source: Vantage Rewards

2. Inspirational Motivation

Inspirational motivation is all about giving the team a proper direction and guidance which they believe in. And in my experience, believing is where the majority of managers get stuck.

From what I have seen, a big company vision is often not enough. For example, if a company vision states something like "become the most trusted platform in our category", it inherently sounds good. But it does not convey any message to a customer support person on what to do with a problem she is fixing today. So a manager needs to turn this vision into a clear goal. It should be simple enough for every team member to remember it. Then the manager needs to repeat it every week, even if it feels boring. This is similar to the visionary management style, where a leader shares a picture of the future. The only difference is that here the goal is smaller and repeated more often.

McKinsey's data suggests this is rarer than it should be. Only 25% of respondents in The State of Organizations 2023 said their leaders were engaged, passionate and inspiring. The survey covered more than 2,500 business leaders. Leaders describing other leaders, and still only one in four.

3. Intellectual Stimulation

Intellectual stimulation is when a manager encourages people to question how the team works. This has to include the manager's own decisions as well, or it doesn't really count.

One great way to do this is a 30-minute meeting once a month. Not more, not less. The meeting needs to have only one question: what should we stop doing? Each person brings one idea, which can vary from a report to an approval step that slows down every request by two days. Initially people may stay quiet as they want to see if the manager really means it. If the manager takes any action before the next meeting, then people will speak up much more.

From what I have seen over the years, most teams are never asked at all. In a 2026 Harvard Business Impact study of 742 senior and executive leaders, 62% said only some or very few employees helped shape their organization's transformation. The organizations that involved people widely were 2.3x more successful at it. I'd take the multiplier with some caution. Senior leaders were grading their own projects. The direction matches what I've seen, though.

4. Individualized Consideration

Individualized consideration is when a manager pays attention to each person, including what they want to learn and what they have achieved in recent times.

44% of organizations sit in the recognition blind spot, where neither leaders nor systems consistently make people feel seen, according to The Recognition Effect (Great Place To Work® India × Vantage Circle, 2025).

Making someone feel seen is often about small things, like when an employee told you about a goal and you remember and ask about it. Or when you thank someone and specify the work they did. Or when you talk about their growth and agree on their next step of employee development.

But the catch is that it gets difficult to remember these as the team grows. It is easier to miss someone without meaning to. And this is where a tool like Recognition Analytics in Vantage Rewards can help. This feature shows who on the team has been recognized within a time frame and who has been left out. But you need to be consistent with it. If you forget to check the tool, then you will miss out on recognizing your valuable people.

Transformational vs Transactional Leadership

Transactional leaders trade rewards for results. Transformational leaders try to change what people want to achieve in the first place. The table lists six differences.

Dimension	Transactional	Transformational
Focus	Meeting agreed targets	Raising what the team aims for
Motivation	Pay, bonuses and consequences	Purpose, growth and trust in the leader
Time frame	This sprint or quarter	The next year or more
Reward	Given by the manager for output	Shared, often between peers
Change	Keeps a working system stable	Reworks the system
Best for	Routine, safety-critical or deadline work	New problems and teams that have plateaued

It's tempting to read that table as a good style and a bad one. Bass didn't, and the research mostly backs him. Judge and Piccolo's 2004 meta-analysis reports "an overall validity of .44 for transformational leadership." Contingent reward, the plain "hit the target, get the bonus" behavior, came in at .39.

Close enough that I'd treat them as partners, and Bass did too. He thought the transformational part only works on top of a fair exchange. I've never seen an underpaid team get excited about a vision.

Characteristics of a Transformational Leader

Transformational leaders are consistent, clear about direction, curious and attentive to individuals. Adjectives are hard to spot in a meeting, though. These 6 behaviors are easier.

• They take the unpopular jobs themselves. The late shift and the difficult customer call tend to land with them first.
• They repeat the team's goal every week, in more or less the same words.
• They ask "what would you try?" before giving their own answer. Then they wait.
• When a junior colleague turns out to be right, they say so in front of the team.
• They know what each person wants next. Ask about anyone on the team and they can tell you without checking notes.
• Their praise has details in it, like a date or a customer's name.

Transformational Leadership Examples

The clearest examples are ordinary managers using one of the 4 I's on purpose. The four below are composites. None is a real person.

Engineering lead (idealized influence). She tells her team there will be no weekend deploys. Two weeks later a director asks for one on her own project, with a customer waiting, and she turns it down. Months later the rule is still in place.

Nurse manager (inspirational motivation). Every shift handover on her ward opens with the falls count for the month. All twelve nurses know the number and why it matters.

Retail store manager (intellectual stimulation). He runs a ten-minute huddle on Fridays and asks which rule slowed people down that week. By the end of the quarter two steps in the stockroom process are gone, including one he'd added himself the year before.

Support head (individualized consideration). She keeps a one-line note on what each agent wants to do next. One agent wants to move into QA, so her harder tickets now go out with a QA reviewer attached.

Two public examples are well documented. Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO in 2014, and in Hit Refresh (2017) he describes moving the company from a "know-it-all" culture to a "learn-it-all" one. He credits Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset for the idea, and London Business School wrote it up as a case study.

Hubert Joly became CEO of Best Buy in 2012. In The Heart of Business (2021) he describes spending his first days in a store in St. Cloud, Minnesota, talking to frontline staff. His turnaround plan, Renew Blue, went to investors eight weeks after he joined, as he later told McKinsey in an interview.

Benefits and Limits of Transformational Leadership

Research links transformational leadership to higher follower motivation, job satisfaction and rated leader effectiveness. It also has limits that most guides leave out.

The main evidence is still Judge and Piccolo's meta-analysis, which pooled 626 correlations from 87 sources for the Journal of Applied Psychology. The result held up in longitudinal and multisource studies too, and that's rarer in leadership research than it sounds.

Recognition is the everyday channel for two of the four I's, and Vantage Circle's own research points the same way.

91% of employees in high-recognition cultures feel motivated, compared with 73% in emerging-recognition cultures, an 18-point gap, according to The Recognition Effect (Great Place To Work® India × Vantage Circle, 2025).

Source: The Recognition Effect 2025

That's an association from a study of 5.7M+ employees. High-recognition cultures and motivated employees show up together in the data. Which one drives the other, the study can't say.

Now the limits. It can depend on one person. If the team's energy drops every time the manager goes on leave, the habits never spread past her.

People also get tired of change. Gartner researchers reported in Harvard Business Review in 2023 that employee willingness to support enterprise change fell from 74% in 2016 to 43% in 2022. A manager who launches something new every quarter is drawing on that same shrinking goodwill.

The concept itself is loosely defined. Daan van Knippenberg and Sim Sitkin made that case in the *Academy of Management Annals* in 2013. Their argument was that the theory lacks a clear definition and mixes up leadership behavior with its outcomes. They recommended dropping the label entirely. I think that goes too far, but since reading them I've been more careful with any single "transformational leadership score".

And some moments simply need direction. During a 2 a.m. outage, the team needs one person giving clear instructions.

How to Practice Transformational Leadership as a Manager

Pick one of the 4 I's each month, practice one visible behavior for it every week, and then ask your team whether they noticed.

This is where Barling's bank study is useful again. His managers got one workshop plus four coaching sessions, and the change was measured by what their teams saw. Most leadership programs aren't built that way, and companies know it. Only 25% of companies believe their leadership development delivers high value. That's from The Josh Bersin Company's 2023 study of corporate leadership programs.

Start with idealized influence in month one. Choose a single behavior, such as taking on the shift nobody wants, and repeat it for four weeks without announcing it. Move to inspirational motivation in month two and keep the first habit going. After four months, run the check below.

I went back and forth on whether four questions are enough. Longer surveys tend to get abandoned halfway. Four it is. The full MLQ is a licensed instrument and much longer. This check only borrows its core idea, that the team does the rating.

Answers need to be anonymous, or most people will give you a 4. Vantage Pulse keeps names off responses and shows results by department. Your team's score sits next to the wider department's.

Source: Vantage Pulse

If question two scores low, work on the goal before anything else. The four scores also give you a baseline for manager effectiveness. Mid-reorganization? Read up on change leadership before you run the check.

Conclusion

Barling's branch managers didn't turn into different people after a one-day workshop. They changed a few weekly habits. Their teams noticed, and the branch numbers moved after that.

That's a reasonable model for any manager. Don't try all four I's at once. Take on the shift nobody wants this month and say nothing about it. Run the check in month four. When a score surprises you, recognize the next person who shows that behavior.

FAQs About Transformational Leadership

What are the key characteristics of transformational leadership?

Consistency is the main one. Transformational leaders act on the values they ask for and keep repeating one clear direction, and they're open to being challenged on their own ideas.

What are the four I's of transformational leadership?

Idealized influence comes first, and it means leading by example. Inspirational motivation is about a direction people believe in. The other two are intellectual stimulation, where the leader invites challenge, and individualized consideration, where they coach each person.

What are the benefits of transformational leadership?

Higher motivation and job satisfaction, according to most of the research. Judge and Piccolo's 2004 meta-analysis found an overall validity of .44 across 87 sources.

How does transformational leadership differ from other leadership styles?

It focuses on changing what people want. Transactional leadership trades rewards for results. Servant leadership starts from the team's needs, and situational leadership adapts to how ready each person is.

Who developed the transformational leadership theory?

James MacGregor Burns, in his 1978 book Leadership. Downton had used the term in 1973, and Bernard Bass developed it for organizations in 1985 and created the MLQ to measure it.