Skills of a Servant Leader

What is servant leadership ? This is a question that we used to ask in the corporate world and at non profit organizations.

Servant leader is one who emphasizes the good of followers over the self-interest of the leader. And according to Laub, servant leadership promotes development of people through:-

· Sharing of power

· Community building

· Practice of authenticity in leadership

· Provision of leadership for the good of followers, the total organization, and clients or customers of the organization

Servant leadership was first introduced by Greenleaf in 1977 when he wrote in his “ The Servant as Leader.“ He envisioned a servant leader as one who facilitates achievement of a shared vision via the personal development and empowerment of followers.


This concept of servant leadership emphasized the interests, development, and empowerment of followers in order to achieve a shared vision. Moreover, Greenleaf suggested a first-among-equals approach to leadership as “key to a servant leader’s greatness”.

Greenleaf further explained:

The servant leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve first. Then, conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant – first to make sure that other people’s highest-priority needs are being served. The best test and the most difficult to administer is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society ? Will they benefit or, at least, not be further deprived?


What do servant leaders do?

* devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members.
* focus on 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.

Looked at critically, however, we have to ask whether the idea of leader and employee as partners might not be better than the idea of leaders as servants. It's just as paternalistic to switch from controlling boss to nurturing boss. Treating employees as partners is even more respectful and valuing. Serving people's needs creates the image of being slavish or subservient, not a very positive image. In addition, leaders need to serve the needs of shareholders ahead of those of employees. Surely, it makes more sense to say simply that leaders should CONSIDER the needs of employees not be a servant to them. Shifting metaphors from leaders-as-autocrats to leaders-as-servants is going from one extreme to the other. Neither end of the spectrum is very revealing about how organizations function. The principles of servant leadership are admirable. It is the image of SERVANT with its slave-like connotation that is problematic and misleading.

Servant leaders possess three distinct values:-

Value of Integrity

Value of good servant leaders possesses high integrity. It is imperative in building interpersonal and organizational trust such that trust and credibility are best maintained through leaders’ actions that are consistent with the leaders’ espoused values. They walked the talk and their actions are consistent with their words.

Value of Competence

It helps to foster followers’ trust. Leaders that cannot elicit the trust of followers unless the followers have confidence in the leaders’ competence. Servant leadership needs to possess skills, knowledge and abilities that give them task competence among followers. A leader’s followers must believe their leader is capable and effective before the followers enlist in the leader’s cause. A leader needs to have both technical competence – ability to complete task for a business unit and leadership competence – the ability to challenge, inspire and enable followers, in order to be perceived as capable, credible and trustworthy. As a result, servant leaders attempt to exemplify competence in order to build and maintain the trust of their followers.

Value of Empathy

Servant leaders reinforce their communication and decision making with a deep commitment to listening intently to others. Through listening servant leaders seek to understand and empathize with others in order to identify and clarify the will of their group, as well as to seek insight from followers having significant insight into an issue.

Servant leaders visibly appreciate, encourage, value and care for their followers. They inspire courage and hope in their followers by living out convictions, giving encouragement and facilitating a positive outlook/ Such actions build relationships and reflect appropriate and unconditional care in the workplace fundamental personal values . A servant leader empathy reflects fundamental personal values that appreciate, honor, and esteem people. Leadership is not about controlling people, but is, instead about caring for people and being useful resources for people. Showing concern for followers and making their interests and needs a priority demonstrates empathy and elicits trusts.

Conclusion

For a servant leader to lead is to serve. Serve for the benefits of the team members, groom them, shape them and mould them to achieve the members’ goals and objectives. When the followers achieved the goal, the servant leader will celebrate the success with them. They match forward with the team members together. They achieve excellence using the model of “ Together we can ! “