The first principle of Servant Leadership I chose is putting followers first. \u201cPutting others first is the\u2026defining characteristic\u201d (Northouse, 2016, p. 234) of Servant Leadership. An example of putting followers first is when my team has an event we are organizing. These are long days, sometimes fifteen hours, and they are exhausting. Whenever I can, I send those I am leading home early while I stay late so they do not have to. I pre-work so that when we meet together I can help followers with the jobs that are not so glamorous, and I never ask them to do something I would not be willing to do myself.<\/p>\n
The second principle I chose is empowering followers. An example of empowering followers is when we are setting up for an event I have one of my staff set up the rooms we have people stay in. She decides who will stay where, how the rooms will be arranged and is responsible to reset them when we are done in the facility.<\/p>\n
The third principle I chose is conceptualizing. An example of conceptualizing is set by another leader I work with. He has been with the organization for around 30 years and he understands the process of leading young people, the challenges they face, and the values of our organization. He is not only capable of seeing the big picture of our location, but he is also called on to help with creative problem solving and innovation at an international level. He, along with a team of others, lead our location through a merger a few years ago that required a thorough understanding of the histories of each location, the needs of the people with each location, and the missions of each location.<\/p>\n
Of these three principles, the one that is the most difficult for me to live out in practice is the principle of empowering others. I know that this is a good thing and it is something I want to do. The challenge for me comes because of how deeply I value excellence. My standards for what constitutes excellence can be exceedingly high, so when others do not value excellence in the same way, it is very hard for me to empower them. Empowering others means that I have to give up control of things being done with excellence to my standards.<\/p>\n
How can a leader hold on to their values and instil these values to followers, while simultaneously letting go of control in order to empower those they are leading?<\/p>\n
References:<\/strong><\/p>\n Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice, Seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first principle of Servant Leadership I chose is putting followers first. \u201cPutting others first is the\u2026defining characteristic\u201d (Northouse, 2016, p. 234) of Servant Leadership. An example of putting followers first is when my team has an event we are… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":294,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ldrs500","category-unit-1"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/padnTM-2k","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/294"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}