THE IMPORTANCE OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP

There is a term that has existed in business vocabulary for some time now called “Servant Leadership”. This simply means that there are times when, as a leader, you approach leadership from the perspective of serving your team.??

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This is certainly an important mindset to have, but of course this is yet another example of the balancing act between the tension of being a strong and visionary leader versus displaying servanthood.??

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The fact of the matter is that you cannot spend every minute of every day serving your team. You are required by the business to manage and to lead. So how do you balance being firm and resolute, leading from the front, but also maintaining something of a servant approach? This is achieved by symbolic acts of servant leadership.??

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As an example, many years ago I was on a Board of Trustees for one of the local primary schools in our area. It was a leadership role, or more accurately a governance role, which required us to have ultimate responsibility for the strategic and fiscal performance of the school, with the principal and her leadership team being responsible for the operational performance. At one of the board meetings leading up to Christmas, I communicated to my fellow board members that I thought we should somehow show our appreciation to the staff and we settled upon the idea of funding an end of year breakfast where we celebrated the personalities that made the school the award-winning educational institution that it was.??

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I wasn’t quite sure that we would accurately convey our appreciation of the staff by simply writing out a cheque to pay for catering services. So, I suggested to the board that it might be a fitting gesture of our appreciation that we actually cooked breakfast and served the staff ourselves.??

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This idea was wholeheartedly received by my fellow board members, which was then followed by a lot of work including menu preparation, food planning and purchasing, food preparation on the day, and then finally serving staff.?

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This is an example of a symbolic act of servant leadership. We were just as much a board responsible for the governance of school whether we were serving breakfast or not, but the activity of actually catering for the breakfast ourselves showed how much we appreciated our teaching and ancillary staff through this act of service.?

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We did not have time as a board to be regularly serving breakfast to the staff- this was a symbolic gesture of servant leadership to show our appreciation, and to indicate that we weren’t ‘above them’ (we simply had a different role to execute to contribute to the performance of the school).?

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You do not have time to be constantly serving your staff, nor is it appropriate given the requirements of you from the business which include leading your team. However, your team will really value occasional, symbolic acts of servant leadership that express your value for the team, and also the fact that you are both a leader, and also a servant of the business and the team.?