How Servant Leadership Empower Organizations

Empowerment is a management practice that involves assigning responsibilities, authority and decision-making power to employees and holding them accountable for results. It involves giving out information, rewards and power to employees in a bid to help them take the necessary initiative and make decisions to solve business problems and improve service, performance and ultimately the bottom line of the organization- profit or wealth.

Servant leadership is at the heart of empowered workforce in any organization as the leader in serving employees vests in them the necessary skills, competence, resources, authority, opportunity and motivation required to accomplish organizational goals to the satisfaction of all. He helps employees identify their own unique aptitudes and abilities and thereafter train them to enhance these abilities and develop their aptitudes.

Many organizations are going from visible success to real failure in a twinkle because the management principles, practices and business model that made them successful before is now failing them. The new and emerging challenges in the present day marketplace could no longer be matched with management ideologies of the past and effort must be made to adopt new management methodologies if they must remain competitive. Keeping away from obsolete practices will require attributes of being collaborative and empowering, supporting and engaging with employees. Managers must be open to new ways of thinking to be less autocratic, to listen and engage with employees. In essence the servant leader exists to serve those in the organization and bring out the best in them all in order to empower the organization.

Servant leadership serves as a catalyst for positive change and it is fast becoming a global corporate reality which has slowly but steadily gained followership over the past 40 years and has continued to present new opportunities for human motivation and development within a culture of consensus building and shared responsibility. This Leadership style is also increasingly becoming popular in both private and public organizations in Nigeria and other countries today as it helps to develop trust between the leader and the led. It is therefore so crucial for organizations to integrate these themes into their leadership to maintain a consistently fresh organization. According to Lord Acton, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. To be on top of the organization’s pyramid as a lone-chief can be abnormal and corrupting. In addressing the pitfall of this absolute leadership, Tom Gallagher says none of us is perfect by ourselves and all of us need the help and correcting influence of close colleagues. Alternatively, Servant leaders do not wield any form of absolute powers; rather they address adaptive challenges, resolve conflict collaboratively, enhance communication, invite people to participate, build synergistic teams, plan strategically, and develop the leadership potential in others. In doing so, they continue to build relationships that develop informal capabilities and integrate organizational roles into individuals in a way that will be accepted by all the team members.

For those seeking to lead in the most effective way, the autocratic or paternalistic forms of leadership that characterize most owner-managed organizations structured around one individual where every other person must feel the leader’s pulse before committing to any decision may have their place in hierarchically governed systems which has been found to be ineffective in leading the modern workplace of today. This is a direct opposite of servant leadership which has become the way to go in our more networked world. Many notable leaders, writers and thinkers of our day and age have been influenced by servant leadership. The late President of Nigeria, Umaru Musa Yaradua who died on May 5, 2010 at the age of 58 has been renowned to be an apostle of servant leadership and was responsible for popularizing the concept of servant leadership in Nigeria. He became a believer of the servant leadership model as he emphasized leadership as a divine duty and a great sacrifice and service to humanity. Although his seven point agenda was well thought through and transparent, there were other factors that did not allow his leadership ideology to translate into meaningful development for the nation. One of these is the corrupt nature of the people he surrounded himself with which affected the quality of advice he received and decisions he made during his administration. This means that for servant leadership to thrive, candor is ultimately an important virtue.

Larry Spears who has served as the head of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership for over 22years now has extracted 10 characteristics of servant-leadership which I will expand and use in the coming days to explain how this leadership model can be used to empower organizations to become highly productive and performing enterprises. These are: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment and building community.