“Servant leaders, by definition, place the needs of their subordinates before their own needs and center their efforts on helping subordinates grow to reach their maximum potential and achieve optimal organizational and career success” (Liden et al. 2008, p. 163, citing Greenleaf, 1977). In my mind, the servant leader is someone that views herself as a resource to help employees achieve remarkable results, not the source, or oracle from which all leadership wisdom and direction must emanate.
New evidence shows that servant leadership enhances team performance by building trust with employees and by helping them to clarify stretch goals and the ways to achieve those goals. Both of these studies measured servant leadership by asking employees in the study 28 questions about their manager. In order to get very specific about what servant leadership is, here are 14 of those 28 questions (Liden et al. 2008):
1. My manager cares about my personal well-being
2. My manager can recognize when I’m down without asking me
3. My manager is involved in community activities
4. I am encouraged by my manager to volunteer in the community
5. My manager is able to think effectively through complex problems
6. My manager has a thorough understanding of our organization and its goals
7. My manager encourages me to handle important work decisions on my own
8. My manager gives me the freedom to handle difficult situations in the way I feel is best
9. My manager is interested in making sure that I achieve my career goals
10. My manager provides me with work experiences that enable me to develop new skills
11. My manager seems to care more about my success than his/her own
12. My manager puts my best interests ahead of his/her own
13. My manager is always honest
14. My manager would not compromise ethical principles in order to achieve success
Do you work for a servant leader? Are you a servant leader? Could you help those you’ve been given the privilege to lead develop servant leadership behaviors for themselves?
Becoming increasingly resourceful as a leader is a challenging objective in and of itself, not merely a means to an end. Help your people clearly understand what needs to be done and hold yourself accountable for developing them to the point where they are autonomous performers that only call on you and others when they need your help to obtain a resource they don’t control or need to acquire a new skill to take their performance to the next level.
Related Posts:
The Courage To Serve The Purposeful Leader
You Will Lead The Same Way You Follow, So Be Careful How You Follow
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Yet another great piece, Bret. Even in tough economic times, forcing people to do work for your personal gain will hurt you and your organization in the long run. It doesn’t matter the study, the overwhelming majority of the workforce is unhappy at work. This usually does not point to the work – it often reflects the culture. If you need to pour resources into just one element of your company this year – spend it on improving your culture and internal customer service and the ROI will be astounding.
We do a pretty good job building companies and finding goods/services that will sell. We do a terrible job growing leaders. And often people end up in positions of leadership because they did a good job in their previous position or “made their numbers”. Leadership is 10% ability and 90% life.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 7th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Welcome back, Kneale! As always your points are right on. I’m still shocked how many leaders don’t really care about being a good leader. Guess that’s one of the reasons why it fascinated folks like us. Thanks! Bret
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I wrote a similar article based on the love chapter in I Corinthians a while back. I then created a chart based on the different criteria and rated my boss. Here’s the link if you would like to check it out: http://21stcenturyappreciativeinquiry.com/innovations/great-leaders-love-to-motivate/
Best regards,
RJ Johnson
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 7th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Welcome, RJ. Thanks for sharing! Bret
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You know, I saw this link on Facebook via Ken Blanchard this weekend and wanted to reply but didn’t want to do so publicly on Facebook.
But I do not work for a servant leader, plain and simple. This makes me sad – and it is a non-servant-leaderness born not of selfishness necessarily, but of being benign (in my opinion).
That said, I personally have a long way to go toward being a servant leader; I was removed from the responsibility of supervising my unit and transferred, and no longer have direct supervision responsibilities. But I recognize that there are still ways in which I can lead AND I honestly think that it was my commitment to implementing servant-leadership characteristics that sort of did not mesh well with my organizational culture and, to a degree, led to this change in responsibilities.
Thank you for this piece; I am going to refer to it in my comments on LeadershipFreak today I think. http://www.leadershipfreak.wordpress.com.
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Bret L. Simmons Reply:
April 11th, 2011 at 11:12 am
Welcome, Paula! Thanks for sharing. Most of us don’t work for a servant leader, but we should never use that as an excuse for not holding ourselves accountable for becoming one for others. Thanks! Bret
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