Servant Leadership Application

University 

Leadership is not about power. It is about making a positive difference in other peoples’ lives.

Servant leadership is a type of leadership that has been proven to be successful. It emphasizes that one is there to serve, not dictate or lead by selfish gain. In the essay, I look at the history of leading a group of people and how the other ways are no longer working for society. I then continue to explore its principles and practices, and finally, how servant leadership can be applied in a modern-day business or company.

Good leaders have been around forever, but has there ever been a good description of how to be a good leader?

When reading about the practices of successful companies, one can see they all have a kind of thing in common. They are all about creating an environment where people feel free to contribute their best ideas and feel responsible for living up to a shared set of values. Thus, to become a good leader, one must be willing to serve, willing to sacrifice, and do so unconditionally. But, unfortunately, this is not a popular idea among those who lead companies. It is often misunderstood because, so few people are willing to embrace its underlying premise: leaders exist to guide and motivate their staff.

Above all, there is a lot of confusion around the term “leadership,” especially when it is narrowed to a simple presence of followers. For instance, many people might associate it with imposed power, with superiors who look down on their subordinates and see simple tools in them, with bosses who do not listen but have many orders to give.

Those perceptions were valid and served well, for instance, in the days of the industrial revolution and after the Second World War. However, as the global trend for individualism began, those definitions quickly became outdated. As we started noticing real people, they were renounced individuals behind the prior depersonalized façade of a worker. Various studies investigated and proved the correlation between workers’ productivity and job satisfaction, and companies reacted by trying to restructure their inside relationships to more friendly ones. Many of them even going as far as calling themselves “families.”

One global conclusion those shifts had inspired was that authoritarian leadership could not hold anymore. That future leadership had to be democratic, meaning that people would choose their leaders and willingly follow them, thus sharing the responsibility for all organization’s achievements and losses. This came with realizing the importance of those individuals and the importance of their well-being for the global success of projects and ventures. And so, the tables of leadership turned; the leaders were no longer served but became the ones to serve their subordinates.

So, to put it in a nutshell, servant leadership is a leadership philosophy that is all about serving the people. It prioritizes the employees’ needs instead of financial gain; it invests in them and helps them develop, strives to improve the employees’ well-being, and reinforces their personal growth. Therefore, a serving leader is serving those who are led, in contrast to dominating them. As a result, this approach reduces work stress and increases job satisfaction, consequently improving the outcomes and productivity of workers.

As servant leadership became a familiar term, it acquired some connotations that may have obscured its original meaning. Words have connotations, and people may read servants or leaders and immediately go one way or another. So a clear statement about what servant leadership is not: it’s not coercion; it’s not a way to gather power or manage subordinates; it’s not abdicating responsibility; it’s not a formula for mechanical behavior; it’s not trying to be everybody’s friend. It also has nothing to do with being ‘nice’ to people. Being a servant-leader is not the same as being self-effacing or submissive. It doesn’t mean being a doormat. It doesn’t mean ‘going along with the group.’ It’s just the opposite.

Servant leadership is a philosophy that helps us reach our full potential. It emphasizes the leader to make sure that the needs of followers are met and then to empower them to lead. And that is just the way a leader would serve their employees.

Character is an integral part of leadership. And indeed, not everyone would be comfortable and prepared well for a serving role, so it is worth discussing some personal character attributes that could make one an excellent fit for a leader’s position.

A team leader is bound to have many personal and interpersonal responsibilities. Some essential leadership qualities would include honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and a track record for doing what one says one will do. For others to trust one’s promises of future action, one must demonstrate that one understands the consequences of breaking such commitments. Therefore, they must be highly reliable in the making for a strong base of a team.

The second crucial personal character trait of a good leader is courage. Every good leader need courage. Without it, no person can achieve much. Conversely, a person without courage is a victim of circumstances. In particular, I’m referring to the kind of courage that enables a leader to make decisions that others think are dangerous. To spot opportunities that others believe are nonexistent. And to take risks that others consider foolhardy.

Good leaders must be willing to do uncomfortable things for the good of the group. Frequent panic is not necessarily courage, however. A good leader must also step outside the comfort zone when necessary without being paralyzed by fear.

Moreover, there is moral courage, and there is intellectual courage. Leaders must have the moral courage to follow their principles, even when this might be personally inconvenient. Leaders must also have the intellectual courage to go with what they think is right, even if all the experts tell them otherwise.

Another essential personal character trait of a good leader would be curiosity. A leader should have a genuine interest that makes them capable of understanding the views of others. Curiosity also gives one a hunger to learn new things instead of relying on old ways of doing business.

Being curious means being interested in how things work or come to be. It is the opposite of being in denial about things that are going on around. Being curious requires an open mind, but not about everything. Good leaders need to avoid getting sidetracked by something that can be safely ignored. They won’t waste their time wondering whether ghosts exist, for example, and they won’t get riled up by every little conflict or change in direction at work.

But apart from that, a servant leader is someone who helps people. The best of those leaders are passionate about people. They’re intensely curious about everyone, from the receptionist to the customer-service rep, from the interns to the board members. Their responsibility is to be a thinker, a motivator, and a connector. A servant leader is best thought of as a person in the service of others, not a person with power over others. They matter because they motivate others to be better than they otherwise would be. And we need them because as a group, we are far less than the sum of our parts.

But what allows leaders to be of service to those they lead is a well-developed emotional intellect and empathy, which give one an ability to read their team members, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and apply that knowledge to effectively managing a team. Emotional intelligence is about noticing, caring, and expressing emotions in positive, non-harmful ways. At the same time, empathy is the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, and to do that effectively, one must be self-aware. This means understanding one’s strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and fears. The best leaders know themselves very well indeed.

So, all in all, being a good leader requires various skills and has different characteristics than just simply being a top performer. However, apart from the leader’s role, authentic leadership also implies having some particular management practices, which make up some of the essential elements of an influential organizational culture.

One of them is decision-making. There are only three positions people in companies can have. One can be a person who says, ‘here’s what we’re doing. That’s a position of authority. Or they can be a person who says, ‘I want things to happen.’ That’s a position of influence. A third position is a person who says, ‘tell me what’s going on.’ The first is decision making, the second is advocacy, and the third is information gathering. The companies striving to apply the democratic policies of service leadership would choose the latter in the list. That position lets everyone in the company be heard and feel valued and promotes teamwork and might provoke some creative out-of-the-box thinking solutions to arise in the discussion.

Gathering a cross-disciplinary team, however, might have just the same effect. A cross-disciplinary team has members from different departments with different skills and different kinds of expertise. Cross-disciplinary teams are hard to make and even harder to make work. One must change the way they hire and the way they think about work. However, assembling a cross-disciplinary is undoubtedly worth it. The conventional wisdom nowadays is that such teams are better than single-discipline teams because they can provide various takes on the same issue and produce novel solutions.

This structure should be used when critical activities are dependent on team members that belong to two or more disciplines. For instance, a designer might need the help of a software engineer to test and implement his work. In this case, if the designer had to wait for the engineer to have time to help him, there would be a delay in the completion of their task.

Provided the information above, though, one might still inquire how the team could be motivated and how the accountability for performance would be maintained with a servant leadership approach. Fortunately, this culture is a solution of its own. Motivation, for instance, works differently there. Thus, high-trust cultures like servant leadership should be ones where both internal and external stimulation can work well.

However, the most effective form of motivation is intrinsic motivation – doing something because it’s worthwhile and exciting. Servant leadership assumes that the most influential leaders best understand and meet the needs of their followers; that way, workers are inherently motivated by meaningful work. On the other hand, making money and ‘pushing paper’ are seen as secondary – or even a distraction from doing good things. In practice, many servant leaders also report that they offer rewards – money, promotions, etc., which could also serve as compelling external motivation.

As to accountability, it should be repeated that servant leaders don’t try to control, but they empower others to govern themselves. These leaders don’t set up a hierarchy of authority at the top and then hand them down. Instead, they build an organization in which people lead themselves. That way, the team must have a high degree of personal accountability for performance and becomes almost self-sustainable.

So, to conclude, servant leadership is the best and most effective leadership philosophy there can be. It’s about creating an environment where people become more than they were and sharing their success with them. The servant-leader puts their followers first, inspires and motivates them to achieve even greater things than he has expected of them. This is what makes it so promising in the long run.