Transformative Leadership in Domestic Abuse Counseling

Introduction: Three Counseling Paradigms

In general, three fundamental paradigms have been applied to the counseling profession: a change-based approach, a leadership-based approach, and an advocacy approach. The change-based strategy stresses the need for clients to fundamentally alter their lives by "unfreezing" themselves and to create a series of defined goals to make changes "stick." The advocacy approach stresses the need for a counselor to act as an advocate for his or her client. However, a transformative leadership approach is perhaps the most fruitful strategy, particularly when dealing with victims of domestic abuse. Victims of abuse often exhibit profound change resistance, but counselors have only moral — rather than external, organizational — pressures to ensure the changes they are encouraging will endure.

While advocacy can be useful, it is ultimately the victim who must act as an advocate and witness for her own rights within the legal and social service system, by identifying what she is experiencing as abuse. The counselor must place him or herself in a transformative leadership role, encouraging the client to believe in a new vision for the future. Instead of encouraging the client to change by forcibly altering or controlling her behavior, as with the change-based theory, putting the client in the driver's seat of change is essential. Unlike the advocacy model — in which the counselor speaks for the client — transformative leadership requires mutual exchange and mutual action.

Why Transformative Leadership Surpasses Transactional Models

According to West et al. (2006), transformative leadership pertains "to a vision or outcome" versus a purely transactional exchange of tit-for-tat. An example of a transactional exchange in the business world is one in which a manager might offer a raise in exchange for increased productivity on the part of the worker. However, this approach is of limited utility over the long term in encouraging workers to remain at a company and sustain behavioral change. Workers with little organizational loyalty beyond a paycheck can be easily motivated to shift alliances and work for another company when offered a higher salary. Employees are more apt to invest themselves in a company that genuinely cares about them and upholds a higher vision and a sense of shared values, consistent with the transformative leadership model (Kuhnert & Lewis, 1987, p. 649).

Counselors must often challenge clients' current framework of assumptions about their lives and what constitutes acceptable behavior. This is particularly evident in cases of domestic violence, which require a woman to fundamentally alter her assumptions about love and self-respect. Transformative leadership encourages individuals to place holistic values ahead of the security of staying within personal comfort zones. Unlike more conventional change-based strategies — which involve initially instituting a monitoring system — transformative leadership models are based upon a shared vision. Overcoming change resistance is often the greatest obstacle to helping victims of domestic violence, as women may be willing to excuse the actions of an attacker because of their fears of beginning a new, independent life.

Challenging Assumptions in Domestic Violence Cases

Transformative leadership is grounded in the value of respect. A counselor must demonstrate that he or she respects the victim of abuse in order to enable the person to regain a sense of self-worth that the abuser has frequently tried to tear down. The counselor must still "lead" in the sense that the victim often is uncertain how to proceed with separating herself from an abuser, but the counselor must also underscore the fact that the victim still possesses internal and external resources from which she can draw.

Conclusion: Mutuality Over Transaction

In a transactional relationship, the give-and-take is finite and easily rendered into a simple equation — you give me your time, and I will give you a salary. Even in the business world, this model has been found fundamentally lacking, given that there is a limited degree to which repeated salary increases can build sustained workplace relationships. A counselor must demonstrate genuine care for the client as an individual and must have no ulterior motives in steering the victim away from her current situation. Ultimately, the client controls the choices made regarding her circumstances. It is the mutuality inherent in transformative leadership — rather than the finite calculus of a transactional exchange — that makes it the most effective and ethical model for counseling victims of domestic abuse.