Debunking Management Myths

The authoritarian leadership style:

• The authoritarian style of leadership requires leaders to have total decision-making power and absolute control over their subordinates. Servant leadership upends the top-down power structure.

Similar leadership styles:

• Ethical leadership urges leaders to show respect for the values and dignity of their subordinates. Servant leadership's emphasis on taking responsibility for the needs and desires of others.
• Participative leadership style requires leaders to involve subordinates in setting goals, building teams and solving problems but keep the final decision-making in their own hands. Servant leadership includes some of these elements.

• Listening. A servant leader seeks to identify the will of a group and helps to clarify that will.
• Empathy. A servant leader assumes the good intentions of co-workers and does not reject them as people.
• Healing. Understand part of their leadership responsibility is to help make whole employees whose sense of self is precarious.
• Awareness.
• Persuasion. Servant leaders rely on persuasion not positional authority or coercion, to convince others.
• Conceptualization. Balancing between thinking big and managing everyday reality.
• Foresight. The ability to understand the past and see the present clearly to predict how the future will unfold.
• Stewardship. CEOs, staffs and trustees all have a responsibility to hold the institution "in trust" for the greater good of society.
• Commitment to the growth of people. Feel a responsibility to nurture the growth of employees.
• Building community. Find ways to build community in their institutions.

It puts people at the center. But it is definitely not user-driven: it does not listen to users, but makes proposals to them. Customers do not buy Apple's products because of utility or functionality.

Apple products are more meaningful to users. The products have great design - and identity. 

Is recognizing that people are human: they have rational, cultural, and emotional dimensions, and they appreciate the person who creates a meaning for them to embrace. For Jobs, design was not only beauty, but creating new meanings for users.

He also offered meaning to his employees - they worked hard on visionary projects, striving to meet targets and to satisfy their leader's maniacal attention to detail, because he infused them with a sense of mission: Apple had to leave a mark in the world of computing, improve people's lives, be bold and, of course, "think different."

1. Be a good listener. Try to determine what the desire of the group or individuals are. 
2. Practice empathy. Empathy allows you to get past surface issues and to discover what is going on.
3. Embrace concepts of healing. The servant leader recognizes the brokenness of people and looks for ways to make broken people well.
4. Be aware of the obvious and the subtle, both in your own life and in other’s lives.
5. Be persuasive. Use the power of persuasion to help people choose the right path as needed instead of demanding the path.
6. Be able to conceptualize. Servant leaders are big-picture thinkers, thinking of what their team needs to do to accomplish everything, not just the one thing in front of them.
7. Be a good steward. A steward is someone who holds onto something and keeps it in good condition for others who need it down the road.
8. Love the community.

Studies have shown that servant leadership and the empowerment and teamwork that accompay it trickle down. Higher level managers who turn from selfish leadership to selfless leadership end up creating lower-level managers and other employees who then do the same.