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Your Complete Guide to Servant Leadership
The servant-leader
Servant leadership is a very social leadership style.
While traditional leadership is about the accumulating, hoarding and exercising (which often degenerates into abusing) of power by the one at the “top of the pyramid,”servant leadership is about sharing power with your team, identifying, prioritising and meeting of others and helping people develop and perform as highly as possible.
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Servant leadership as a powerful management style
Research consistently reveals:
- Servant leadership has a significant effect on employee commitment to a supervisor.
- Servant leadership and employee satisfaction are strongly correlated.
10 traits of servant leaders
- Self-awareness. It helps to view situations from a holistic position rather than being self-centred.
- Empathy. People need to be accepted for their special one-of-a-kind spirits.
- Listening and reflecting upon what your team says is essential to the growth of the servant-leader.
- Healing. Many people walk around with a variety of hurts. Good servant-leaders endeavour to support those with whom they come in contact.
- Foresight. Seeks to understand the lessons from the past, the realities of the present, and the possible outcome of a decision for the future.
- Conceptualisation. Visualising the big picture and thinking beyond day-to-day realities.
- Relying on persuasion rather than hierarchical dominance.
- Stewardship. It requires a commitment to serving the needs of others first and taking responsibility for the actions and results of your team.
- Team growth. Commitment to the personal growth of every individual.
- Community building. Human beings have an innate need to belong to a “tribe” of some kind.
Practical ways to practise servant leadership
- Trust and respect. Treat everyone on your team as a whole person.
- Accountability. Hold yourself accountable knowing that no one is perfect.
- Listening. Actively solicit your team members’ participation, their ideas, and their feedback such that you can tailor your leadership approach to each one of them accordingly.
- Service to others. Encourage your team members, through your words and actions, to set aside self-serving behaviours in favour of serving others.
- Mentoring. Offer selfless mentorship.
- Persistence. Practise persistence with patience, realising that one or two conversations may not have the desired change in an employee’s assumptions or mindset.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy built on the belief that the most effective leaders strive to serve others, rather than accrue power or take control. The aforementioned others can include customers, partners, fellow employees and the community at large. The term was coined by management expert Robert K.
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Servant leadership
Is a leadership philosophy that is built on the belief that the most effective leaders strive to serve others, rather than accrue power or take control.
Servant leadership vs. other leadership styles
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.
Attributes of a servant leader
- 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.
Leadership, in the eyes of some people, is about wielding power. They are like a carpenter with only a hammer who sees everything as a nail. Whatever problems or challenges arise, this type of leader is confident that brute strength, force, and power will bring about a solution.
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Servant leader traits
- Isn’t concerned about acquiring or holding onto power.
- Isn’t focused on maintaining a certain reputation above all else.
- Isn’t obsessed with staying ahead of e...
How to become a Servant Leader
- Be a good listener. Try to determine what the desire of the group or individuals are.
- Practice empathy. Empathy allows you to get past surface issues and to discover what is going on.
- Embrace concepts of healing. The servant leader recognizes the brokenness of people and looks for ways to make broken people well.
- Be aware of the obvious and the subtle, both in your own life and in other’s lives.
- Be persuasive. Use the power of persuasion to help people choose the right path as needed instead of demanding the path.
- 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.
- 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.
- Love the community.
Servant Leadership Work
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.
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David is in charge of workplace diversity management at a global manufacturing company. He was recently assigned a seemingly basic task. "Focus on minorities," the executive sponsor of the initiative told him. "I'd like to see our numbers climb from 25 to 45 percent," he said.
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Diversity & Inclusion
There is a significant relationship between competitive profit gains and diversity.
Companies with gender, ethnic and racial diversity are at least 15 percent more likely to experience...
5 Lessons for Managing D&I
- Recognize the Shift in Global Understanding of D&I. Diverse thinkers come from a variety of different backgrounds.
- Build an Inclusive Environment. All people are encouraged to draw upon their unique experiences, perspectives and backgrounds to advance business goals.
- Use Multiple Practices and Measures. Have solutions in place to monitor and retain a talented and diverse workforce.
- Ensure Leaders Model Diversity and Inclusion. It sets the tone for the rest of the organization to follow suit.
Recognize the Connection Between Innovation and D&I. Diversity and inclusion increase innovation and reduce business risk.
Cognitive Diversity
The concept of cognitive diversity focuses on diversity of thinking and is composed of four dimensions:
- Perspectives. People represent situations in different ways
- Interpretations. Through diverse interpretations, teams can discover multiple resolutions.
- Heuristics. People resolve issues in different ways.
- Predictive models. Some analyze, and others look for a story. Both are useful for discovering workplace solutions.