Become A Servant Leader

One of the most powerful forms of leadership involves being a servant leader.? Being a great servant leader involves adopting a leadership style that focuses on serving the needs of others and fostering their growth and development. This approach can lead to highly motivated and engaged teams. Unfortunately, the concept of servant leadership can be poorly understood by those who are more familiar with traditional leadership models defined by autocratic or bureaucratic behaviors.

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Servant leaders seek to provide strong support to employees in the context of an overall vision for the team.? Employees are allowed to learn and grow while bringing their expertise and perspective to the table. Servant leaders use empathy, active listening, guidance, and sustained commitment to develop leadership qualities in members of their team. This commitment to the personal growth of others differentiates them from leaders who rule through fiat and distance.

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Learning the concepts of servant leadership can be easy but implementation can be far more complicated, especially for individuals new to leadership roles. Individuals may not have benefited from seeing servant leadership in action or fear that they will be perceived as a pushover or too willing to sacrifice their authority as a leader.? In the commentary below, I’ll note the important elements of servant leadership and discuss my own journey including the challenges to becoming a servant leader.

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Self-awareness

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We would all like to believe that we are self-aware, but the simple truth is that your strengths, weaknesses, and values will be interpreted by others and their version of reality needs to be factored into your thinking. There is an excellent exercise called personal branding where your experiences, skills and values define and differentiate you from others. Ask your colleagues to share the five single words that define you. Assemble these answers into a word cloud that notes the common themes. Ask yourself if these answers align with or differ from your own description.? Sometimes, I will use a variation of this approach where I will ask for five words to describe me when I am at my best and five words for when I am not at my best. A good way to identify behaviors associated with stress behavior and how to avoid actions associated with stress.

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Empathy

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Learn to understand the perspectives, feelings and needs of your team members as this helps you connect with them at a deeper level. Do not turn a blind eye toward their problems and issues even if those concerns are unrelated to the business. Kindness never goes out of style and is rewarded ten-fold by gratitude and loyalty. Focus on the well-being of your teammates and strive to create an environment where they feel supported.

A wise colleague of mine once told me that she saw her job as “Making people feel good about themselves and about the work they do”. She then remarked that if she can do both of those things together then the rest is easy.

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Pretty profound. Most of the time as leaders, we are trying do one or the other, but synergy is the key to success. How often do we consider how best to achieve this synergy of personal and professional pride?

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Active Listening and Learning

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Simply put, you learn more with your mouth shut and your ears open.?

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Give your full attention to others when they speak, showing that you value their perspectives and their contributions to the team. Ensure that all members of the team have a chance to contribute as this also fosters teamwork and inclusion. Avoid being the leader who is too busy to listen, fails to follow-up on inputs or decides who are the people they should be listening to in the moment. Some of the best ideas come from the least expected places and your job is to harvest those nuggets.

Two of my early areas for improvement as a young leader were 1) appreciating alternative perspectives and 2) asking enough questions.

Unfortunately, early in my leadership journey, I tended to view perspectives opposing my own as either coming from insufficient understanding or wrong motivations on the part of the person(s) delivering those thoughts. Ultimately, I realized that most people do not go out of their way to deliberately make life difficult for others (there are exceptions) and that instead, I should try to understand why we were both looking at the same information but drawing different conclusions. I did not have to agree with their assessment, but it was in my best interest (and that of the team) to try to understand why they had a different viewpoint. In truth, I learned valuable information but also had a better appreciation for the skills and knowledge of others and found that subsequent interactions were more productive.

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Similarly, another gap and one that I still struggle with to this day is the failure to ask enough questions. It is easy to assume that you have sufficient knowledge to drive a discussion or decision, but I always remind others to ask clarifying questions. I used to have a supervisor that when I made a statement, they would respond with “Say more”. Very annoying but I realized over time that they were getting me to amplify my points, learning more about my thought process and teaching me to be clear in my analysis. Super helpful.

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My biggest leadership mistakes have come from not asking enough questions. I often joke that my tombstone will read “If He Had Only Asked More Questions”.

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Empower Your Team

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So powerful yet so difficult at times. As the leader, you feel total accountability for your area of responsibility, but you cannot deliver that outcome by yourself. This can be very uncomfortable, especially in those situations where the stakes are high, or you are not totally confident in the abilities of your team.

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My leadership epiphany in this regard came when I took a leadership role of an organization where I was no longer the subject matter expert. Instead, I was heavily dependent on the skills and experience of team members and many unfamiliar collaborators. To make matters worse, as has oftentimes been the case with my leadership transitions, I was taking over a group in crisis mode where they were struggling to make progress, senior leadership was unhappy, and my job was to 1) figure out what going wrong and 2) decide how to fix the situation. To make matters worse, the conventional wisdom was that a big part of the problem was due to lack of strong performance by many of the team members. ?

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To say that I was stressed is an understatement. To use a naval analogy, the ship was sinking in the storm, the abilities of the sailors were in doubt and the new ship captain did not have his bearings. But there is a happy ending. I spent the first two months getting to know the team, listening, testing ideas, and building alliances outside the group. As I became familiar with each of the team members, I was able to empower them to take on responsibilities and to fly air cover with other senior leaders when the inevitable mistakes or misfires occurred starting out. You see, the only way you truly empower people is to let them try things and sometimes that means that perhaps they don’t get it right the first time. Part of the learning process.

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The lessons here are abundant.? Lack of clear direction and support for team members and poor management of stakeholder expectations in earlier times for starters. While there were some individuals who were in the wrong roles, most of the team were fully capable of performing at a high level with the right support. They just needed a reset, clear expectations, and some much-needed backup when the going got tough.

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Personally, I consider this role to be the most powerful growth experience of my leadership journey. For the first time, my listening/learning skills and ability to empower others were stretched and the outcomes were enabled by getting the best out of people as opposed to just doing the right science. Not being the technical expert forced me into a different gear and expanded my leadership toolbox. For the first time, I understood what it meant to be a servant leader.

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Mentorship and Stewardship

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Individuals whose focus is the people around them with commitment to the personal growth and development of each team member are on the journey to servant leadership. This will require a vision of how you are choosing to develop people and to what end – with their active collaboration. Clear and transparent communication relative to goals and progress can allow you and the other individuals to note progress, and how best to remove barriers. Lead by example, showing that you are seeking to improve yourself, not merely asking others to do so. Acknowledge your own journey with its ups and downs as a way of encouraging others, especially individuals struggling with change and its difficulties, and that such actions are not only possible but desirable. Build a vision in their minds of what could be, how you see their potential and empower them to see it in themselves. ?

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Patience and Continuous Improvement

Your journey to becoming an effective leader and especially a servant leader can slow, and sometimes full of painful lessons about what works versus not. Measure success by leveraging feedback and noting what works best for you and your team. Reflect on your learning and understand how best to utilize that knowledge. Flexibility is key as the needs of the team change, and you become more confident in your practice as a servant leader. ?