Servant Leadership As The Alternative To Toxic Business Culture

Toxic culture, toxic organisations, toxic bosses. Cult of one. Total dependency on one and only rock-star-CEO. Current crisis seems to go well beyond global economics, armed conflicts and monetary policies. It is a crisis of values, purpose and relations.

In the middle of all of that you try to build a company. Profitable business with strong culture and values based on community of people, clients and partners. You search for an inspiration, guidance, examples. But what comes back is a bitter list of things which are promoted:

• Better to be a unicorn without profit than small to medium business with sound economics
• Growing shareholder value is better than giving people stable environment for growth and work
• Creating non fungible but also non tangible assets is better than creating something tangible, useful, difficult

So what do you do? Go with the flow and ride the wave of easy money, vc pumped bubble economy, hustling and overnight success? Or, you get over the strange feeling of missing out while choosing the good old hard working approach?

In my business soul searching journey I came to the conclusion that ego-management is probably the most underdeveloped skill we have these days. It boils down to one revelation:

Don’t focus too much on yourself, serve others and good things will come back to you.

This is where servant leadership concept comes in handy.

Why Servant Leadership?

For me servant leadership goes beyond management philosophy. It covers:

• Serving people whom you work with - building a business is in big part a social responsibility for employees and their wellbeing. You can choose to go after the profit or... alternatively focus on serving the people you work with so that they can generate profit through their work and dedication. I will leave it to you to decide which approach has an exponential growth potential.
• Serving customers - customer is not a product nor the money making machine. It is an entity, organisation and eventually a person with her/his own needs, dreams and purposes. Support your customers, help them and care about them and you will see the difference between true partnership vs being just another vendor.
• Serving community - community is not related to communism (a mental mote for those who grew up in CEE region). Community is a good thing. Giving back to community is a good thing. Communities are invaluable assets for any type of business you want to build.
• Serving ecosystem - businesses are not build in vacuum. They impact and interact with the ecosystems around them. No matter if you focus on your immediate surrounding, town, country, region or entire planet - think about impact you are creating on economy, society, environment, well being, culture and sustainability. Make sure this impact is positive.
• Serving your family - work is not only about... work. It is also about the impact on your close ones, their well-being, quality of time you spend with them. Many organisations track Net Promoter Score for employees and customers. How about NPS for employees family members?
• Serving the purpose - making the purpose around your work bigger than yourself, your needs, your desires is the best strategy for others to join you on your quest, whatever it might be.

Becoming a servant leader either as an individuals or as an organisation is difficult. In Simon Sinek terms it’s rather an Infinite Game . There is no final goal. It is a never ending journey. There is always something to improve.

Servant leadership in organisations does not come from leadership team only. It is a cultural thing. It is a mindset distilled across organisation. Leadership team needs to show the direction, educate, support, promote and lead by example. But the true impact depends on how organization as a whole will embrace servant leadership philosophy.

Going Beyond Theory

In our attempt to better understand what it means to be a servant leader we have participated in experience-based training with unusual surrounding. We have embarked on a journey to explore the role of a shepherd - an archetype of a servant leader.

As the name suggests sheepherding involves sheep and herding. So off we went to the misty mountains of the southern Poland. Plan was to spend a few days in sun and rain (mostly rain) while learning from the source. We had our guide (the real shepherd) and his not so small "organization" consisting of around 300 sheep. We were learning by accompanying him from the early morning till the late afternoon. We were watching, trying, experimenting and the most importantly experiencing how our attitude and actions influence the herd. We have learned a lot. Even though few weeks have passed it seems like we are still processing it.

Our experience was enhanced with the theory served by Magdalena Kamińska from Center of Servant Leadership Poland. Big Call Our diverse team of 15+ people from across A4BEE absorbed the learnings and now we are bringing it back to the organization. But of course the journey does not stop here. We are well aware that serving is never-ending "job".

At A4BEE we have still a lot to do to serve our people, clients, partners, families and ecosystem even better. But we feel determined to continue the journey of Servant Leadership.