You're seeking to enhance your leadership skills. How can contract work in Servant Leadership benefit you?

With any role, you learn a lot about leadership. With a contract role, you get to experience leading different teams across different settings, across different industries even. This gives you in-depth understanding of the various leadership challenges and situations you are likely to face, which adds to your growth as a leader. Learning through experience is indeed a powerful form of learning.

Contract work in Servant Leadership helps you grow by exposing yourself to different environments and challenges. Each contract requires you to adapt and use your leadership skills in different situations. This constant variation pushes you out of your comfort zone, helping you refine your leadership style, strengthen resilience, and cultivate flexibility. Working on shorter-term engagements will make you more likely to receive feedback more often. This allows you to keep track of your growth, make real-time improvements, and better understand how to serve your team's needs in different situations. The dynamic nature of contract work encourages continuous learning, making you a more well-rounded leader.

In my view, Servant Leadership in contract work sharpens your empathy by allowing you to work with a wide range of people. As a leader, you need to quickly understand the concerns, motivations, and dynamics of new teams. This develops your ability to listen actively, appreciate different viewpoints, and make others feel valued—key aspects of empathy. Constantly working with different teams requires you to be in tune with their specific challenges, both professional and personal. These varied experiences help you become more empathetic in your approach, allowing you to build strong relationships and trust with team members more effectively, which is crucial for leadership success.

As you deal with many different people across a multitude of situations, you get to appreciate their perspectives. This helps you build your empathy as you work with people, understanding the challenges that they may be dealing with. Over time, this really boosts your impact as a leader.

I believe contract work also enhances your versatility as a leader. Each contract likely requires you to lead in different industries, teams, or project scopes, helping you diversify your skillset. You might encounter different leadership challenges—from managing remote teams to leading high-pressure innovation projects—which allows you to apply Servant Leadership principles in various settings. This versatility strengthens your problem-solving capabilities and adaptability, essential qualities for a leader. The more varied your experience, the more flexible and resourceful you become in finding solutions and supporting your team’s needs, making you a more competent and confident leader.

As you work across different organisations, you get to learn about the various environments. Understanding about multiple environments is a key skill to have, as you learn many different processes, ways of working. You can learn various best practices that you might be able to blend in for a later role. Importantly, you go through a steep learning curve, that really helps your growth as a leader.

There are rich networking opportunities in contract work, in my opinion. By working with different teams, companies, and industries, you have the chance to connect with a wide range of professionals. These connections can help expand your professional network, offering insights, mentorship, and even potential opportunities for future collaborations. Building these relationships not only enhances your professional reputation but also helps you gain fresh perspectives on leadership. Networking within contract environments exposes you to diverse leadership styles and practices, further enriching your understanding of Servant Leadership.

By working across many environments, teams, people and learning about different processes and approaches, you get to adapt your leadership approach to be able to serve people in each area effectively. This flexibility helps you connect really well with people and stakeholders in any role you work on.

Based on my interactions with many people who work in contract roles, they go through a lot of reflection during and after their role in terms of what went well,. what could've been better and what are some of the learnings they can use for the next role. This helps them draw key learnings from their past experience, and helps them prepare better for upcoming work. This is also a very effective practice that serves leaders as they collaborate with teams on key initiatives.