I found an interesting article on the lack of female presence in the field of servant leadership. While lacking empirical data, the anecdotal references do stir up some thought. Will a woman who holds true to the teachings of servant leadership be perceived in the same way a man will? Are there aspects of servant leadership that serve as a balance to the biological presence that men carry?
Level 5 Leadership
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/servant-leadership.htm
The article above makes refernce to level 5 leadership. This is a style of leadership that Jim Collins wrote about. I believe becoming a better servant leader is synonymous with getting closer to becoming a level 5 leader.
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/level-five-leadership.html
10 Quick Reads
I found a great resource site with ten articles on servant leadership, take a look!
http://www.triumphstrategicconsulting.com/2017/07/26/servant-leader/
HR Perspective
I found an interesting article on SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) detailing servant leadership.
Diving into the article a bit, I loved a few things. Actively aligning employees with the company mission and helping them find a sense of purpose is a critical piece of the servant style.
I loved the business success stories of companies being led by CEOs that adopted the servant style.
There are two takeaways that I will be implementing from this article; getting closer to 25% of my time being spent on developing leaders, and expanding on the skill of asking great questions.
Actions for Progress
After watching this video, I took away a few key points. The four tenants of servant leadership, what followers experience while in this leadership model, and steps to take to develop servant leadership skills.
While working to become a better servant leader, you should be;
- Authentic
- Vulnerable
- Accepting
- Present
- Useful
Find ways to grow in these areas!
Lean?
A concept that has caught fire in the last couple decades is lean. Lean in short is the process of eliminating waste. This concept has represented billions in savings across corporations. I believe that servant leadership can lend itself to lean processes by consistently listening. Listening is one of the core principles of servant leadership. Check out this article, and draw attention to the segment about listening to your customer.
Click to access Servant-Leadership-and-Free-Enterprise-2010.pdf
Listening from the top down will enable a company to stay closely connected with the voice of their customer. Knowing what your team needs, and your customer wants, has the potential to prevent waste from happening in the first place.
Carrot vs. Stick – Retire the Approach
Click to access Beyond-Carrots-and-Sticks-Servant-Leaders-Enhance-Performance.pdf
When we think about enacting servant leadership into our business, we must think about the concepts and practices it should replace.
The carrot and the stick as motivational tactics is a tried and true formula for producing results. Servant leadership blows that away, and here’s why. The carrot and/or stick provide extrinsic motivation. Inspiring your coworkers and your team provides levels of intrinsic motivation. Internal motivation has a significantly greater impact and power than any external motivators.
Leaders have to ask themselves, and have a great answer at that the following questions; how are you helping your team grow? How are you inspiring them? How are you engaging them into the company’s mission?
Let’s work on this together.
Scale-ability
I want to take a look at some real data regarding servant leadership. It would be a shame if all these ideas associated with this leadership “theology” were only good on paper, and not in practice.
In this article, the results are strong. Five out of the top ten best companies to work for employ servant leadership. Some of these companies are global industry leaders! This leads us to believe that it works in business today.
Another thing to note, is the size of these companies. From small to large, this theory works.
Flipping the Organizational Chart
Images like these are becoming more prevalent in organizational theory. The concept is one that falls right in line with servant leadership. I first experienced this with a supervisor I had about three years ago. In one of our first meetings he said, “my primary responsibility is to make your job easier, if I accomplish that, I am doing my job well.
I’ve thought the feedback was very unique and it has stuck with me since that meeting. The visual representation of that statement is an upside down organizational chart.
If the CEO finds ways to make his C suite/Chief Officers job easier than before, they will perform better. If those officers then in turn make their directors jobs easier, they will perform better. This trickles down however many layers there are in the organization and ensures your customer will be treated the right way.
What are your thoughts? Is this seeing the world through too much of a filtered lens? Does this only look good on paper and not make a difference in organizational behavior?
Tell me why!
Growing Profits through Service
People before profit. Ian Fuhr shares this novel concept in this video. The premise is that if you treat your employees right, they will in turn treat your customers right. Historically, the customer is always number one. Servant Leadership principles challenge this thinking. Think of it this way, the hardest working company owner only has so many hours in a working day. But if he or she treats all 10 of his/her employees right, they’re getting 10 times as many dedicated hours of service to their customers. Extrapolate this out across global organizations and you see the exponential potential here.
“Servant Leadership is about creating an environment where people motivate themselves.”
Servant Leadership Analysis 