I am currently working with a large corporate company on facilitating and encouraging a “Servant Leadership” culture in the business through a series of bespoke workshops. It’s an interesting concept and approach. How do you reconcile leading from the top, and serving from below?
What Is Servant Leadership?
As a servant leader, you’re a “servant first”. This means you focus on the needs of others, especially team members, before you consider your own. A servant leader acknowledges other people’s perspectives and involves them in decisions. They give them the support they need to meet their work and personal goals. Servant leaders build a sense of community within the team.
This style represents the opposite of the traditional leadership model where the leader is seen as the centre point of the team, and employees support them to meet company goals.
Instead, servant leadership puts the employees and their needs as the main actors. Under this leadership philosophy, the more you invest in serving as a “scaffold” for your team, the more productive your team becomes.
Servant leadership works at two levels: it is the balance of top-down direction and bottom-up empowerment.
Top-down direction
The aspect of top-down direction involves setting the strategic vision for the company. It’s about communicating that to the team by providing priorities, expectations, and limitations. In addition, it requires clarity on overall direction and company values.
In essence, the servant leader provides a framework within which their team can flourish, rather than prescribing specific direction on each of their duties. Within that framework, the servant leader places themselves in service to their people, with a focus on setting the employees up to succeed at achieving the vision.
This is where the bottom-up empowerment aspect comes into play.
Bottom-up empowerment
This involves building up their teams’ confidence, decision-making ability, creativity, risk-taking, and collaboration skills. The leader motivates and inspires by encouraging ownership and extending supported trust. They’ll also ensure that the team has the necessary resources, budget, skills, and attention to make an impact.
In servant leadership, employees are empowered, but the leader doesn’t just disappear.
Rather, the servant leader understands how much and what type of support to give when facilitating growth. They involved when necessary and allow their teams to steer the ship where possible. More importantly, they know when to let their employees fail if there is a powerful lesson to be learned.
Servant leadership is not a leadership style or technique as such. Rather it’s a way of behaving that you adopt over the longer term. It should be used alongside styles like transformational leadership and can be integrated in a high-performance culture.
Whatever style of leadership you need to cultivate in your business, we can help.
