Leadership in the 21st Century

Servant Leadership

In the rapidly changing corporate world of today, we need a dramatic change in the way businesses are conducted and organizations are managed. In the past, organizations were merely concerned with making profits and achieving targets and it was the job of the leader to ensure that all tasks are completed on time. As for as the real goal of the organizations is concerned, nothing has changed. However we notice a dramatic difference in the way organizations seek to increase revenues and achieve their ultimate goal of profit-maximization. This difference is the result of changes that we have encountered in leadership style over the years.

Larry Spears' Focus on Leadership, Servant-Leadership for the 21st Century is a highly informative collection of essays on the subject of changing leadership needs, techniques and styles. The book contains view of many management gurus on the theory of Servant Leadership that was first offered by Robert Greenleaf in 1970s

Since then servant leadership has been frequently discussed and analyzed with numerous management experts offering their own definitions of this type of leadership and presenting their unique interpretations of the term. While it has been around for three decades now, servant leadership gained prominence especially in 1990s when many companies underwent dramatic cultural changes and incorporated a different style of leadership to meet new challenges.

Servant leadership refers to the style of management where leader focuses on the well being of those under his supervision. Instead of getting the work done by any means possible, servant leader is required to first take into account the welfare of his staff and of all those who help him achieve the primary goal of the organization. Servant leadership stresses the importance of providing better service to those who contribute to the growth of an organization. The concept however goes well beyond the corporate world and can be incorporate in other fields like politics, education, law etc. Leadership style however appears to play the most significant role in corporate world where employees can no longer be treated as hired hands and are instead being recognized as human capital of the firm. One of the essays in the book is Greenleaf's "The Servant as Leader" which defines servant leadership in these words:

The servant-leader is servant first. Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.... The best test is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?"

Servant leadership works on principles opposite to the ones incorporated by traditional leadership style. In traditional leadership, a leader is required to 'control' his employees and exercises his authority frequently to get the tasks done. On the other hand, in servant leadership, a leader serves his employees by focusing on their well-being and addressing their grievances and this strategy helps in motivating the employees for achievement of various company goals.

In other words, servant leader and traditional leadership styles follow two completely different management models. Wilson (1998) explains: "The traditional management structural model is a pyramid: The base or broad aspect represents the lowest level or line employee; the point at the top usually represents a single, individual CEO. There is, however, a gradual transformation, especially in the realm of servant leadership, in which the pyramid is inverted. This results in the CEO being the single point at the bottom and the line level employees now at the top."

Servant leadership works on the principle that a leader is there to take care of his people. He is required to act like a king who builds his entire empire on the principles of trust and care. Servant leadership literature, for this reason, focuses on everything from Jesus and Bible to modern-day management theories to explain the significance of this kind of leadership. This is obvious from close reading of Spears' book and the essays it contains. Contributors like Steven Covey and Max Depree have focuses on the moral side of the issue while Ken Blanchard, Margaret Wheatley and Warren Bennis discuss the issue from purely management standpoint. In their own unique way, all contributors sought to highlight the flaws of traditional leadership and the positive effects of this new leadership style.

Depree in his essay suggests that servant leadership is a revolutionary concept, which paves way for moral and emotional growth of everyone working under a servant leader. In other words, he believes that in order to be a good leader, it is important to see "a sign of God's presence in our leadership." Similarly Steven Covey believes that everyone of follow the principles of servant leadership because this power concept can bring dramatic changes in our lives and in the lives of people around us. "Anyone can be a servant-leader. Any one of us can take initiative ourself; it doesn't require that we be appointed a leader, but it does require that we operate from moral authority. The spirit of servant-leadership is the spirit of moral authority."?