What Is Servant Leadership? Everything You Need to Know

Posted on Jul 26, 2022 at 07:07 PM

The main concepts of leadership, including servant leadership, focus on leading the organisation’s people towards good outcomes, successful processes, and the best culture that serves the employees' wellbeing. However, the main difference between the traditional and servant leadership styles is that this focuses on the people’s feedback about the servant leaders’ vision, decisions, and impact on empowering others.

In this blog post, you are going to learn about the servant leadership philosophy, servant leaders' characteristics, and the secret steps to becoming a servant leader.

The Definition of Servant Leadership:

Servant leadership is a leadership style; the term primarily was said first by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970, as he identified servant leaders as leaders using the leadership position beyond leadership as a healing sense, moreover, feeling and caring to serve other employees' growth and generally putting these people’s interests first.

So, servant leadership is a philosophy and a management approach that rotate the hierarchy of an organisation 360° with a commitment that focuses on making the employees and their needs first on the leader’s priorities, as these leaders serve, support, and develop people by authority, not power.

5 Main Characteristics of Servant Leaders:

As a servant leader works to empower others, prioritises employees’ growth and places their needs first, with honour and integrity on hand at all times. There are different principles that a leader emphasises and seeks to serve his/her workers effectively:

1- Listening and Empathy:

A core base in servant leadership philosophy is that the leader needs to know his/her team members first to be able to give them more excellent help, and listening to his/her employees with an understanding of others' circumstances is essential to develop a longtime relation between the leader and all individuals.

2- Self-Awareness:

Knowing your people is vital to being a leader serving the team effectively; however, and this is cited by Greenleaf, a servant leader should be able to know and elevate his/her strong and weak points to find the best way to practice his/her creativity.

3- Work to Grow Their People:

A servant leader focuses on serving people then; part of doing that includes growth opportunities. This is a business management principle for entrepreneurs and large corporations to serve other employees with power that reflects success and better lead and results on all the company leads.

4- Persuasion:

A servant leadership philosophy’s primary concept revolves around leading, helping, and guiding others rather than just sharing their to-do list. A servant leader should have strong persuasion skills to inspire others’ behaviours.

5- Advanced Foresight:

As with any other leadership style, the servant leadership philosophy empowers collecting and analysing data with SWOT techniques and research to predict the business’s future performance with actual indicators to offer excellence and an effective growth strategy.

5 Steps to Apply Servant Leadership:

With great benefits to gain, you need to think of every step to turn your leadership management style into an ethical servant leadership philosophy instead of just executive styles to meet each project’s purpose:

1- Lead by Example:

Whoever you are in the company, structure a CEO, a chief manager, or a team player, to be a servant leader, you should be able and willing to do anything you expect others to do with compassion and humility.

2- Highlight People's Importance:

With servant leadership philosophy key rule is to place employees ahead of everything; you should say it out loud to empower employees and make them more attached to the company.

3- Encourage Collaboration and Engagement:

When you lead with servant leadership theory, your people will feel their high importance to the company, which means they will put their assigned responsibility on top, provide a new idea based on the corporate needs, and become more attached to its community.

4- Build a Personal Relationship:

To lead in a servant leadership mood, you must prioritise the followers' desires and personal and work-life problems to understand them and serve them effectively.

5- Get Feedback:

This may not be regular to other leaders, but as a servant leader, you need to know others' opinions on your management style, to know what is missing and work on it to be the best servant leader they could have without any problems.

Finally,

A servant leadership philosophy is a total mindset that places others first in the way to creating a robust and successful company.

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