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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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Research consistently reveals:
- Servant leadership has a significant effect on employee commitment to a supervisor.
- Servant leadership and employee satisfaction are strongly correlated.
- 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.
- 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.
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- Servant leadership requires dedication to the concept. You can’t make people trust you overnight. It’s something you build.
- Servant leadership might take too much time for companies that need to be turned around quickly for financial or other reasons.
- Companies that rely on hierarchy and complex organization in order to function in their industry may not find the servant leadership model useful.
- 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.
A dictator barks out orders and does not take into account the wants and needs of others.
Servant leaders work tirelessly to develop their people and are focused on what they can do for others.