Introduction
Often leaders and people may feel inclined to place the blame or responsibility outside of themselves. Taking responsibility for one’s own actions and thinking presents as a major challenge, leading to additional problems in the long run. People have seen this before as their boss or manager shifts the blame to their employees rather than owning up to their own failures and it leads to instability within the company. Servant leaders are a different kind of leader. Leaders stemming from a fairly new philosophy and leadership style, they self-reflect and own up to their mistakes as any good leader should because they understand the need to work together and complete a goal. Servant leadership offers an alternative to the traditional forms of leadership: transactional and transformational and steps away from the often fatalistic mentality of stereotypical leadership roles. Although such leadership styles have their place in society, servant leadership may become the best way to develop effective and efficient leaders. This essay aims to provide a basis from which to understand what servant leadership is through case studies, comparison to traditional and transactional leadership styles and how it applies in Lifespan studies and Lifespan development.
By understanding the philosophy behind servant leadership, one can connect such a philosophy to the Lifespan framework and understand how various experiences can not only make an effective servant leader, but provide the foundation for leadership to rise within an individual. People need great leaders because most cannot or are unwilling to perform the necessary actions to complete major and complicated tasks. By implementing the philosophy of servant leadership, society may grow and expand in ways never before seen.
What is Servant Leadership?
Servant leadership exists as a leadership philosophy where the main objective of the leader is service. Different from other, more traditional leadership styles, servant leaders do not focus on the organization’s or the company’s success, but rather puts the needs of followers or employees first, helping them develop and perform to the best of their ability (Blanchard & Broadwell, 2018). By inverting the norm, servant leaders put followers and employees as a main priority. One can see this through a retail store setting. Ordinarily a manger would aim to get the highest sales goals regardless of what skills and abilities the sales associates in the store have, often adopting a transactional leadership style. By focusing on store goals, the manager misses golden opportunities to promote a better work environment and overall better store performance by refusing to communicate effectively with his subordinates and promoting and encouraging their development.
Communication is an important part of the servant leadership philosophy. Going back to the store example, if the manager communicates with each store employee, he can discover each of their strengths and weaknesses and assign tasks accordingly. For instance, employee A is a people person and is an excellent communicator but a poor understanding of the cash register. Employee B performs well ringing customers up, but is shy and does not enjoy talking to customers. They can work together and split sales in half allowing both to perform to their strengths while also providing better sales for the store. This is the kind of effectiveness servant leadership promotes through its extensive philosophy.
The founder of the servant leadership philosophy is Robert K. Greenleaf. According to Greenleaf, servant leaders must focus on, “Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants” (Spears & Lawrence, 2002, p. 24). Through shifting of mindsets from serving the company/organization to serving the needs of the employees/followers, both the company/organization and the employees/followers benefit. Because employees/followers improve and develop, it leads to higher work performance and productivity, and the company/organization gains profits and better reputation from such improvements. In fact, because servant leadership leads to better results, various top ranking organizations have adopted the style, leading to continued success (Flint, 2011). Companies like Google understand the need to address employee issues and make working at the company enjoyable. “Google seems to have a fundamental understanding of many servant leadership characteristics....
References
Bertocci, D. I. (2009). Leadership in Organizations: There is a Difference Between Leaders and Managers. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Blanchard, K., & Broadwell, R. (2018). Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Dierendonck, D. V., & Patterson, K. (2018). Practicing Servant Leadership: Developments in Implementation. Basingstoke, England: Springer.
Enyia, S. O. (2018). Servant Leadership. Page Publishing.
Flint, B. B. (2011). The Journey to Competitive Advantage Through Servant Leadership: Building the Company Every Person Dreams of Working for and Every President Has a Vision of Leading. Nashville, TN: WestBow Press.
Meacham, W. (2012, May 14). Definition and Explanation of Lifespan Development Psychology. Retrieved from https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/What-is-Lifespan-Development-Psychology-Exploring-Development-Through-Lifespan
PennState. (2016, June 26). What Google is Getting Right with Servant Leadership. Retrieved from https://sites.psu.edu/leadership/2016/06/26/what-google-is-getting-right-with-servant-leadership/
Spears, L. C., & Lawrence, M. (2002). Focus on Leadership: Servant-Leadership for the Twenty-First Century. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Servant Leadership Even though servant leadership is in most cases associated with the Bible and Jesus Christ it is quite compatible with most religions and theories of philosophy. This paper is a comparative study using Greenleaf's characteristics of servant leadership which is based on Christianity against other philosophy and other leadership theories. "…The great leader is seen as servant first…"-Robert K. Greenleaf. This is a fragment from a sentence in an essay
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