As we get  ready for the 2011 Union Delegate Conference scheduled for the end of March, I have been thinking  a great deal about definitions of transformational leadership, our theme for this year’s conference. My thinking has  not so much about leadership, but rather about the experience of everyday life, and how transformational leaders have the capacity to observe and internalize all the wondrous things that go on everyday--all the wondrous things that people do at work, at leisure, in caring for their families.

Transformational leaders possess the ability to talk with people about their own experience and how they see what needs to change in their lives. Based on those discussions, new ways of thinking and acting emerge as people talk about what they’ve learned in the world and how what they’ve learned can evolve.

Funny how life is, as I was thinking about what it means to be a transformational leader, I read an article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “The Tire Iron and the Tamale.”  Please, please read it! I guarantee that you will not do anything better today! Here’s how it starts:

The Tire Iron and the Tamale 

By Justin Horner

During this past year I’ve had three instances of car trouble: a blowout on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out-of-gas situation. They all happened while I was driving other people’s cars, which for some reason makes it worse on an emotional level. And on a practical level as well, what with the fact that I carry things like a jack and extra fuses in my own car, and know enough not to park on a steep incline with less than a gallon of fuel.

Each time, when these things happened, I was disgusted with the way people didn’t bother to help. I was stuck on the side of the freeway hoping my friend’s roadside service would show, just watching tow trucks cruise past me. The people at the gas stations where I asked for a gas can told me that they couldn’t lend them out “for safety reasons,” but that I could buy a really crappy one-gallon can, with no cap, for $15. It was enough to make me say stuff like “this country is going to hell in a hand basket,” which I actually said.

But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke any English.  (Read the full article)

If we really are serious about transformational leadership, the first thing we better do is sit by the side of the road and have a good cry. How often do we have experiences like Justin Horner described, as driver after driver passed him by? We live in an isolating, uncaring world. As we become more and more alienated, we tend to think that nothing can change, nothing can get better.

The story of the Mexican family who so selflessly helped Horner is part of the human experience that is far deeper than we realize. Selflessness exists everywhere. And selflessness is the essential element for a nation that claims to be founded on the concept of a social contract.

We won’t have a social contract ever again until we build that contract on caring for others.

That really is what people want to do. 

First, better have that cry. Re-energize your hope based on stories like this one, and become a transformational leader.