Blog III: A Leader is a Servant
A popular approach to modern leadership theory was one coined by Robert Greenleaf as servant leadership. Greenleaf defined servant leadership as:
“the natural feeling that one wants to serve, 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… is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to be servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?” (Greenleaf, 1970)
One may ask how a leader can be a servant and vice-verse since they seem to be two polar opposites? However, it’s in their contrast that is the beauty of servant leadership as it serves as the balance between the two opposing concepts. Servant leaders focus on putting followers first over their self-interests, empowering them, developing them to their full capacity, and are attentive to their concerns (Northouse, 2016). The leader’s aim is to ethically develop their followers to be leaders themselves and encourage them to spread the philosophy to their own peers, thus lessening the divide between leader and followers. Greenleaf goes further to explain that a servant leader should also be concerned about the less privileged and remove any social injustice exists around them.
A metaphor to symbolize this process is a tree with the leader who introduces the philosophy of servant leadership to a group representing the main trunk and his followers as the branches that sprout from the main trunk. As each follower internalizes the principles of servant leadership and spreads their influence to others, their branch further multiplies into several more branches and so forth; producing a healthy, vibrant, and beautiful tree which springs life to the environment it lives in.
As a striving leader, I myself aim to adopt the principles of servant leadership in my daily ethos. One of the principles, however, that I often have difficulty with is the listening. Listening, from a servant leadership context, is described as a learned discipline which involves hearing, being receptive to what others have to say, and acknowledging the viewpoint of other followers (Spears, 2002). I personally find this the most challenging to put into practice because when I speak with others, my mind often attempts to complete the sentences or thoughts of the people I speak with rather than letting them complete their idea. A servant leader communicates through so to improve my listening skills, I need to make a conscious effort of processing people’s thoughts as they present them rather than anticipating it for them.
Another principle which I think is crucial to adopting a servant leadership approach is community building. I consider building community as one of the biggest components to servant leadership because it allows followers to understand their overall purpose or role in the grand scheme of things. This is done by having followers feel a sense of connectedness with other followers and identify with something of greater importance than their own. An example I have to illustrate this is when I’m training new employees in the shelter team for the homeless community members in the Downtown Eastside. When training new staff members, I always communicate how our work affects the community and the lives of those we serve in an effort for staff to buy in early to the work that they do.
Now, a question I have for my readers is whether there are other strategies you can think of to improve my listening skills based on my tendency to process others’ thoughts before they conclude them?
References
Lide, R.C., Wayne, S.J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. Leadership Quarterly, 19, 161-177.
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: theory and practice (Seventh ed.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Spears, L.C. (2002). Tracing the past, present, and future of servant-leadership. In L.C. Spears & M. Lawrence (Eds.), Focus on leadership: Servant-leadership for the 21st century (pp. 1-16). New York: Wiley.
October 4, 2018 @ 8:04 am
Ruiz,
I appreciate your focus on building community by sharing a vision with your employees about how their work affects the community. I have found that returning to the “why” of what we are doing together can be so empowering and inspiring to team members. We will all encounter challenges (and days when we are off our game), but when we are able to remember why we are doing the work, it can be a powerful way to reignite our enthusiasm and efforts.
I have an unusual suggestion regarding a practical way to develop your listening skills: listen to podcasts. I am a huge fan of podcasts (combined with long walks), and I find that listening to podcasts (particularly those with two hosts who carry on a conversation) can be a challenging, yet invigorating way, to engage in the practice of listening (while at the same time giving me inspiration and intellectual stimulation). If you are naturally skilled at engaging in conversation, it can be very challenging to simply be quiet and listen, but with a podcast, you can’t talk back. (I suppose you could, however, they can’t hear you!) I have found this to be a helpful way to simply observe someone’s interesting perspective, resonate on it, and then communicated it later in conversation, a blog post, etc.
I’d be interested to know what you think!
— Leadership Prof
October 6, 2018 @ 1:56 am
Hi Catherine,
I appreciate your suggestion about listening to podcasts especially on long walks. It’s funny you mention this because I just took up this activity during the summer as I walked to and from work and I agree, I have found this to be tremendously stimulating! I love to hear about experts talk about their research or CEO’s talk about how they built successful businesses for example as I find these talks to be so influential to the way I think and process information. That being said, I also think this has actually contributed to my deficit of listening as I itch to apply and share with others the new information I learned that day instead of looking at what’s to be learned from the people I actually interact with. I suspect however, I might learn to have a deeper appreciation for listening to people’s thoughts after this course is over as reading my colleague’s blogs have helped me see the importance of letting people flesh out their ideas.
Thanks again for the practical advice!
-Ruiz
October 15, 2018 @ 12:29 pm
Very true — when your mind is bursting with ideas, it can make it more difficult to be silent and listen. I do agree that waiting as others flesh out ideas can be a powerful way to see just how much we can learn by waiting and listening.
— Leadership Prof