Servant Leadership: a Brief Overview

Servant Leadership: A Brief Overview (Collected from various sources and modified as I felt moved to do so. JR, 2013) Servant Leadership is a leadership philosophy first espoused by Robert Greenleaf in his 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader.” He states that servant leaders are servants first and leaders later. Such people have a natural inclination to serve, and such a conscious choice makes them aspire to lead. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional leaders who aspire to lead to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions The ten major characteristics of Servant Leadership are: listening, empathy, healing, relationships, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to human resource development, and commitment to building community. The major strength of servant leadership theory is its contribution to organizational development. The servant leader deviates from the traditional leadership style of dominating subordinates and telling them what to do, and rather empowers subordinates and inspires them to perform. The servant leader acts proactively to set the way, and inspire the others to follow. Such inspiration leads to collective efforts, the results of which turn out to be more than the sum of individual efforts. In the words of W. Edwards Deming, "the most valuable currency of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader's highest priority.” This is exactly what servant leadership tries to do. The servant leadership framework places great importance upon teamwork and relationship building. Each person in the team plays different roles at different times based upon their expertise rather than by their rank or title. Enabling each member to play a significant role generates an infectious energy that helps people and organizations fulfill their goals and mission, especially during periods of transformation. The major strength of the servant leadership style is its contribution to the all-round development of the other people. Servant leaders do not push goals onto other people. They rather take time and effort to help people understand their strengths, areas needing development, beliefs and values, and identify their potential and higher purpose that they could never attain on their own. The servant leader thereby helps others attain physical and intellectual vitality and fitness, allowing them to lead a balanced life. The servant leader always looks at the good in others and remains patient and forgiving. Servant leaders see things from others’ perspective, exhibit patience, and show empathy. Since such qualities are what most people seek from their leaders, servant leadership creates strong loyalty and inspiration that helps people and organizations develop and retain human assets. Servant leadership remains moored in social and ethical considerations and achieving power by fostering the development of values-based leadership. The servant leader includes whoever is necessary in the decision making process, and empowers them to act, making servant leadership a form of democratic leadership. Servant leadership’s values- based leadership helps organizations in the business environment where values, empowerment, and commitment play a big role in success.

1 Servant-leadership does not negate accountability or responsibility. The servant-leader’s role may at times require recommending correction or appropriate discipline, always taking into account the interests and heart of the offender and others and the good of all members. Servant-leaders must maintain the integrity of the community to its statement of faith, community standards, core values, and accepted strategic goals. Servant-leadership is not simply doing menial tasks, nor does it serve as a strategy to satisfy the leader’s own needs. Servant-leaders invest themselves in enabling others to do their best. They are willing to do humble tasks, but they always have in mind a larger vision. Servant-leadership is not a model for the weak or for losers. When the going gets tough or when difficult decisions have to be made, as is inevitable, the servant-leader needs to persist and be resilient. A serving attitude does not imply willingness to be abused by others or the toleration of exploitation by the institution. Servant-leaders collectively fulfill an important mission. They invest in others. They graciously accept others who serve them as well as those who lead them. What distinguishes them is not necessarily the particular decisions they make but their caring manner and their broad consultation in the process. Good leadership motivates and mobilizes others to accomplish a task or think with creativity, vision, integrity and skill for the benefit of all concerned. Servant-leadership serves others by investing in their development and well-being for the benefit of the common good. The extremes of self-serving, domineering leaders and true servant-leaders can be contrasted as follows: Self-serving Leadership Servant-hood Leadership

The leader’s objective is to be served. The leader’s objective is to serve.

Seeks first to be understood; then, to Seeks first to understand; then, to be understand. understood.

Considers self-image, advancement, and Values followers' potential and entitlements of own position primary. achievement; promotes them before self.

Sees and treats co-workers as inferiors Sees and treats co-workers with respect who usually do not participate in and as a team that works together to decision-making, nor are offered accomplish a task and make decisions important information. with shared information. Creates an atmosphere of dependence Creates an atmosphere in which others using power of position to manipulate are encouraged and power is used to and direct. serve others.

Rejects constructive criticism and takes Encourages input and feedback and the credit for results. shares credit for the results.

2 Uses expediency as the main criteria; Uses biblical and moral principles as the makes decisions in secret from one’s main criteria; makes decisions openly and own view of truth and wisdom. in consultation.

Is accountable only to superiors and Is accountable to a higher power and shuns personal evaluations as others and welcomes personal evaluations interference. as a means to improve performance.

Clings to power and position. Is willing to step aside for someone more qualified.

In short, servant-leaders aspire to be great only in their service to others. They are committed to serving others with integrity; humility; sincere concern; a generous, forgiving and giving heart; and self-discipline. They relate to others by investing, empowering, caring for, and consulting others. They are willing to sacrifice personally for the well-being of others. Servant-leadership is effective in that it involves direction and not aimless wandering. It allows elements of vision and process to work hand in hand to accomplish great tasks with the support and involvement of followers. Servant-leadership cultivates:  visionary, positive thinking and conceptualizing to see the bigger picture;  responsibility for commitments and a hunger for improvement;  development of moral, value-based leadership methods;  physical and intellectual vitality and fitness;  capacity to achieve significant results;  service without expectation of any reward from those being served;  appreciation and recognition for the strengths and work of others; and  ability to lead a balanced life with enjoyment.

3 The servant-leadership process is accomplished through "walking the talk":  seeking the common good as a prime motivation;  seeing work as a partnership of service in community;  building a team spirit through shared and open decision-making;  developing a resilient and growing mind-set;  being a steward of people and resources;  having tolerance for peoples’ mistakes as a redemptive learning process;  providing for life-long learning; and  holding themselves and others accountable. Not all of these qualities will be found to the same degree in every servant-leader. True servant-leaders know their strengths and areas needing development and surround themselves with those who have complementary abilities. Servant-Leadership and Difficult Decisions Within the context of maintaining the integrity of the community's core values and beliefs, good servant leaders need a flexible style for handling different situations. In some cases confidentiality is legitimate and necessary for legal reasons or for the protection of others. Some consultative processes may have to be modified or suspended during crisis situations. Because servant-leaders often have the obligation to ensure that faculty, staff, co-workers, fellow committee and board members, family partners and companion volunteers fulfill their responsibilities, they may have to recommend guidance or some form of correction or even appropriate discipline, taking fully into account the interests and heart of the offender or others affected. Decisions may be required to protect the ones involved from being exploited by others. Servant-leaders make all decisions for the common good of the whole community. They may be required to act to maintain the integrity of the community’s mission and values, standards, and accepted personal and/or organizational strategic goals. To fail to act in such circumstances would negate the servant-leader’s responsibility. Servant-Leadership and Investing in Others Leaders facilitate and support. They make the organization's objectives happen through the efforts of others. They invest in others so that those others reach their fullest potential in accomplishing their desired life mission. This approach leads to greater understanding of and support for the eventual course of action. It also facilitates discovering and developing prospective leaders. Within an organization, as it expands, so must the number of leaders who organize teams or networks to work on many issues or components of its mission. A good way to build teams is by encouraging mutual service, involvement, and empowerment in order to attain the organization’s mission. Much more than enforced regulations, a commitment to common values and attitudes will propel the organization forward. Leaders serve and are accountable to those to whom they report, while at the same time investing in those who report to them or work with them. Process flows up and down and

4 across the organization in a way that captures the enthusiasm and loyalty of everyone. Through common expression throughout the community of the heart and mind of servant- leadership, people rise to levels that they could never reach on their own. For all these reasons, servant-leadership works best when everyone in the organization is committed to the concept and understands the serving role of all responsible leaders, whatever their title, position or responsibility may be. Dr. Jimmy Richardson

5 Servant Leadership

"The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?"

Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader, 1970

The following two sentences are part of the “belief” system of the Institute for Servant Leadership in Indianapolis, Indiana. What do you feel when you read them?

"Systems succeed because they cherish their members and speak the truth.

Systems fail because they exploit their members and practice concealment and deceit.”

Servant leadership is one of the most popular leadership models around today.

The servant leader serves the people he/she leads which implies that employees are an end in themselves rather than a means to an organizational purpose or bottom line.

6 So What Do Servant Leaders Do?

• Devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members. • Focus upon meeting the needs of those they lead. • Develop employees to bring out the best in them. • Coach others and encourage their self expression. • Facilitate personal growth in all who work with them. • Listen and build a sense of community.

Servant leaders are felt to be effective because the needs of followers are so looked after that they reach their full potential, hence perform at their best.

A strength of this way of looking at leadership is that it forces us away from self-serving, domineering leadership and makes those in charge think harder about how to respect, value and motivate people reporting to them.

In order to be a servant leader, one needs the following qualities:

Listening Healing Empathy Awareness Persuasion Conceptualization Foresight Stewardship Growth Community Builder

Kent Keith, author of The Case for Servant Leadership and the current CEO of the Greenleaf Center, states that servant leadership is ethical, practical, and meaningful. He identifies seven key practices of servant leaders:

1. self-awareness 2. listening 3. changing the pyramid

7 4. developing your colleagues 5. coaching instead of controlling 6. unleashing the energy and intelligence of others 7. foresight

Exercise

List some of the characteristics of people from your past who have positively impacted you. This can be parents, siblings, teachers, spiritual leaders, close friends, etc.

______

The list above is representative of the words people often use when they think back to people who have positively influenced them at some point in their past. The list can become quite large, which gives us an idea of just how powerful our influence can be upon other people. Can we, as leaders, influence the people with whom we work in some of the same ways? The answer is a resounding yes, but we must always be thinking of ways to make this happen. Thinking of positives at work can go a long way towards establishing and maintaining a positive, uplifting environment for the people at any organization. Each one of us is responsible for seeing that such an environment is established. We are also responsible for creating new leaders to take our place, leaders who know more and are more capable than we are. What a daunting, yet intriguing task!

9 Leadership is about relationships! When working with and through people, there are two dynamics involved: relationships and tasks.

The key: accomplish tasks while building relationships!

Leadership appears to be the art of influencing others to want to do what you as the leader are already convinced needs to be done.

Leadership is also the skill of influencing people to work enthusiastically toward goals identified as being for the common good.

Servant leadership is about being a servant to others, including those who report to us. It is not so much about what we do as what we are and how we live. Servant leadership is partition-less, which means that we should be the same person at work as we are at home and at church and at the ball game in the community. How do we live up to such a challenge?

One thing we need to always be doing in our relationships with others. We should always ask as we encounter others: “What can I do, right now, to make life better for this person I see?” And once you answer that question, then you do it!

10 Humility, Not High Self-Esteem Key

By John Rosemond, Clarion Ledger, (Jackson, MS), Saturday, March 24, 2012

Q: While I understand researchers have found that high self-esteem is not what it was cracked up to be, I want my kids to approach the challenges of life with confidence in their abilities. There has to be a reconciliation point here. What is it?

A: Excellent question! First, researchers have indeed found that high self- esteem doesn’t live up to its hype. In fact, it is not a desirable characteristic at all. The general finding has been that people with high regard for themselves have equally low regard for others. Yes, they feel really good about themselves, but they tend to be seriously lacking in sensitivity to anyone else.

The desirable trait is humility. That was known thousands of years ago, proving once again that there is nothing new under the sun. Humble people pay attention to others, look for opportunities to serve, and are modest when it comes to their accomplishments. People with high self-esteem want attention, expect others to do things for them, and tend to crow about their achievements.

Where confidence is concerned, there is no evidence to suggest that humble and confident are incompatible. By all accounts, George Washington was a very humble man who was more than a tad uncomfortable in the spotlight. Yet without the unwavering confidence he brought to his mission, the United States of America might not exist.

Researchers have discovered that people with high self-esteem tend to overestimate their abilities. As a result, they don’t cope well when life deals them a bad hand or their performance doesn’t live up to their self-expectations. For those reasons, they are highly prone to depression. Because they believe anything they do is deserving of reward, they also tend to underperform. Ironic, since high self-esteem was promoted as the key to happiness and academic success.

As has been known for millennia, the key to a sense of personal satisfaction (not the same as happiness, by the way) and the feeling that one has made and is making an important contribution (not the same as the contemporary concept of success, by the way) is hard work and a solid platform of good values – the centerpiece of which is high regard for others. Note that the primary beneficiary in that equation is one’s fellow traveler, not oneself. In short, the key to the good life is putting others first.

11 Society is strengthened and culture is moved forward by the efforts of people who think of others before they think of themselves, not by people who think they are the cat’s meow. In that regard, one of the most foreboding things about contemporary American culture is that today’s young people regard the narcissistic, self-promoting celebrity as more of a role model than George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

That, in fact, may be our ultimate undoing.

12 Start with Humility (Merwyn A. Hayes and Michael D. Comer)

Craig Weatherup – former Chairman and CEO of Pepsi Cola Company (member of Boards of Starbucks and Macys)

Alex Gregory – President and CEO of YKK Corporation of America (producer of over 7 billion zippers a year)

Frederick Franks, Jr. – retired four-star General (served as commander of US Army VII Corps, leader of Desert Storm Main Ground Attack, and Commanding General, Army Training and Doctrine Command

Linda Combs – former Controller, Office of Management and Budget, United States of America (responsible for $3 trillion of audits each year)

Jim Thompson – former CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards (national regulatory body of medical doctors)

Newsweek magazine: called these leaders the “Quiet CEOs” and reported that “old fashion traits like integrity and character are trumping a knack for getting headlines.”

The Chief Executive Leadership Institute at Yale University reports a “new generation (of leaders) is unfolding. First there was the postwar ‘soldier-diplomat CEO’ followed by the silent generation…the 1990’s bred celebrity CEO’s and now we have a backlash, the ‘service generation.’”

Humility is one of the most important attributes of leadership, because it helps connect the leader to followers through their common bond of humanity. Leaders who have humility build trust, and trust is the essence of leadership. Of course leadership requires more than just humility – it also requires vision, competence, communication, courage, and many other traits. These traits are important, but understanding humanity and reacting with humility can directly affect trust. And trust is essential to successful leadership.

Humility often gets a bad name. It is affiliated with humiliation, a lack of confidence, or the proverbial door mat – where anyone can walk all over you. All you have to do is talk to our five humble leaders for more than a few minutes and you will see that this is not at all the case.

The humility definition in this book comes from the ancient Greeks. The original Greek word tapeinovB literally means “not rising far from the ground.” The original meaning of the English word “humble” refers to the Latin word humus which, like the ancient Greek, also means “of the ground or earth”. The word has incorrectly evolved to mean having a low estimate of one’s importance, worthiness, or merits; marked by the absence of self-assertion or self-exaltation.

13 Unfortunately most of the emphasis of the definition has been placed on absence of self-assertion, not on absence of self-exaltation. Because of this emphasis, humility and leadership have often been seen as opposites. How can one be an effective leader and exercise humility?

Humility as a leadership virtue does not mean lack of asserting one’s self. Rather, it relates to how one asserts oneself, and where one places one’s focus – whether it is on the leader’s accomplishments or on the team’s accomplishments.

General Franks: “To lead is to serve. The spotlight should be on the led and not the leader.”

What humility is… What humility is not…

- Humanness - Not weakness - Vulnerability - Not lack of confidence - Ability to keep one’s - Not low self-esteem accomplishments in perspective - Not absence of ego - The soil that grows effective leaders - Not a lack of assertiveness, ambition or speaking out

Excess Ego

Ego is good. It is an important part of leadership. It helps bring confidence, is assertive in getting results, helps marketing efforts, and drives change.

Excess is bad. Arrogance, omniscience, and constant verbal reminders of one’s omniscience usually do not inspire followers or develop trust.

A Fortune magazine article puts it this way:

Abundant self- regard is an affliction that has killed many a corporate career. It can make a CEO deaf: Think Doug Ivester tuning out his board of directors at Coke. And blind: Think Lucent’s Rich McGinn, oblivious to the signs of his ouster until the very end. And dumb: Think Jill Barads. A few years ago Barad exhorted her staff to create a “CEO Barbie” even as Mattel’s sales and marketing people argued that most little girls don’t know what a CEO is. Barad insisted that the doll wear a pink Chanel suit with gold buttons just like hers and be accessorized with a bumblebee pin like the one she always wore. CEO Barbie got the boot. So did Barad.

From “Get Over Yourself,” by Patricia Sellers, Ahman Diba, and Ellen Florian, Fortune, April 30, 2001, Vol. 143, Issue 9.

14 The Waiter Rule: (Swanson – Raytheon) – “Anyone who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person. (This rule never fails).”

The Humility Dynamic

+ Results = in

Shell Oil Company’s Clive Mather (early 2000’s): One of the dangers of seniority is that it reinforces ego. There are too many high-profile role models portrayed in the media who are egocentric and insular. Leadership is not about that. And it’s not about ruling through others and about oneself. At the heart of leadership is profound humility. It is leading at the heart, not the head, of the organization.

Roche Pharmaceutical executive Bill Burns, quoted in Harvard Business Review, put it this way:

“You have to keep your feet on the ground when others want to put you on a pedestal. After a while on a pedestal, you stop hearing the truth. It’s filtered by the henchmen, and they read you so well they know what you want to hear. You end up as the queen bee in the hive, with no relationships with the worker bees. My wife and secretary are fully empowered, if they ever see me getting a bit uppity, to give me a thumping great hit over the head!”