Your Complete Guide to Servant Leadership

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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.

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.

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.

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.