Servant leadership seeks to coach and encourage both employees and management to grow their knowledge, skills and overall development of self, leading to more innovation, authority, trust and inclusiveness in the workplace.
There are many types of leadership, ranging from traditional to transformational which we’ll touch on later. For starters though, let’s look at servant leadership, its unique attributes and the philosophy behind it.
Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phrase ‘servant leadership’ in his essay first published in 1970. Here’s an excerpt from Greenleaf’s essay:
What Greenleaf alludes to here is the notion that servant leadership is not concerned with traditional motivations such as power or material wealth but rather with the betterment of themselves and those around them.
Greenleaf’s ideology was birthed from the book Journey To The East, which centred around the main character Leo, a servant who suddenly departed from his team causing the productivity and effectiveness of the team to dwindle. This emptiness felt by his team leads to the realisation that Leo was in fact a leader, not a servant as he was portrayed.
As Greenleaf’s leadership philosophy developed over the years, several management experts weighed in and contributed to servant leadership’s integrity, helping to build a more robust framework that could be more easily conveyed and transplanted into organisations.
Namely, Larry Spears, CEO and president of the Larry C.Spears Centre for Servant Leadership Inc. and former president and CEO of the Robert K.Greenleaf Centre for Servant Leadership.
Spears described these 10 attributes as the foundation of servant leadership:
What sounds simple enough in theory becomes much more skilful when you try to intensely focus on what you’re hearing.
More than just allowing a person to vent, active listening is the practice of absorbing what is being said, acknowledging it, paraphrasing it to show understanding and engagement whilst reserving judgement and advice.
90% of communication is non-verbal so listening applies to not only the words being spoken but the ones that aren’t and a person’s body language.
To elicit empathy, leaders must be willing to delve into the thoughts and feelings of their peers rather than shy away. Empathy helps leaders understand the unique conflicts and circumstances that are the drivers of undesirable (and desirable) behaviours. This deep understanding allows servant leaders to adapt and better serve their teams, organisation and the public.
Servant leadership places focus on the well-being of others and that’s what this attribute typifies. Helping co-workers to alleviate their pains and pressures and be made “whole”. Healing is a reciprocal practice whereby a leader’s strife is somewhat lightened through the acceptance of another’s.
Promoting a healthy work-life balance is a leading factor in helping to create a peaceful and emotionally stable work environment.
Self-awareness is the practice of looking internally to identify our strengths, weaknesses and shortcomings so that we can learn to develop them and better serve ourselves and those around us.
By probing into ourselves, we may not come up with all of the answers but having this curious mindset opens us up to see how we are contributing and what opportunities are being missed within the role of our teams and organisation as a whole.
Servant leaders gain the consensus of their teams through persuasive techniques rather than position and authority. Getting teams to collectively agree on objectives or workplace matters makes for a more cohesive and productive group.
Perhaps the most difficult element of this big-picture thinking is the discipline required in walking the tightrope between ambitious visions for an organisation's future and grounding them in the daily realities of the workplace.
Communicating conceptualised solutions to problems or arising issues with a team calls for the pairing of active listening and persuasion techniques.
To see what will likely work in the future, servant leaders will look to their past projects and performances. Through analysis, they can filter best practices and trends that will indicate which strategies will bear the best results. Spreading this practice among teams leads to better decision-making and innovation.
Stewardship refers to accountability. That leaders accept responsibility for the actions and performance of their teams under their guidance and direction. This entrusted responsibility and oversight stretches from the team to the organisation, to its impact on society as a whole.
Great leaders want to see their peers and co-workers succeed and create harmony in the workplace. To do this in the context of an organisation, it’s important for leaders to catalyse the professional development of their teams by allocating funding for training and alleviating personal barriers by making resources available and accessible.
This awareness causes the servant leader to seek out solutions for building community in the workplace. Much of this can be achieved through employing the principles laid out here, namely in how leaders show empathy, listen and encourage acceptance and tolerance between their team members, fostering a community of trust and synergy.
Servant leadership is not the only effective style, there are a handful of popular frameworks each with its own focus which we’ll compare now:
This is the top-down model most companies have used for decades. The people higher up pass down orders to the people below them. Nowadays this model is viewed as authoritarian and more organisations are changing their approach to leadership.
Democratic leadership seeks to involve multiple people in decision-making processes for a fair and inclusive workplace. The obvious challenges for this style taking on so many opinions and potentially slowing down decisions because of how many people are involved.
From the French for “let it be” this leadership style puts the decision-making power in the hands of the employees. The idea is to give autonomy to teams with minimal interference to enhance creativity and encourage leadership values.
Transformational leadership focuses on getting employees to want to change behaviours, improve and be led to help productivity and efficiency throughout an organisation. There are four factors in transformational leadership, referred to as the “four I’s”: Idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration.
Transnational leadership is focused on metrics such as performance and productivity. These leaders bring teams together to collaborate on common goals and the performance is either rewarded for success or punished for failure.
Servant leadership has grown more popular in recent years in an effort to redefine the typical hierarchies of old and meet the demands of modern-day emotional and mental stresses.
The communal aspect of servant leadership fosters trust, loyalty, collaboration and empowers employees to make decisions. These traits carry over to the treatment of the customers too, not just the internal teams.
But that’s not to say that any leadership style is right or wrong, it wholly depends on the infrastructure of the organisation and its goals.
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