| Sally Percy
You would be forgiven for thinking that servant leadership is a new idea. The concept sounds very 21stcentury because it aligns with our technology-driven era where individuals are empowered to connect with influential people and organizations in a way that wasn’t possible in the past.
In fact, though, the term ‘servant leadership’ was coined nearly 50 years ago in an essay by U.S. management writer Robert K. Greenleaf. Put simply, the principle behind a servant leader is that someone leads because they want to serve others rather than because they see leadership as a way to attain material possessions. A servant leader is primarily focused on the needs of others and on helping their people to develop or grow, seeing this as the route to organizational success.
While servant leadership has always been an appealing concept, its relevance is much more obvious today as a result of people’s evolving expectations about work and the purpose of the organizations that they work for.
In the past, workers might have been prepared to accept the notion that they were but a small cog in a big wheel that delivered fat profits to a privileged few. Often this was on the basis that they may have had no other choice in any case and adopting this approach to their career did at least offer a reasonable amount of job security and the potential of a comfortable lifestyle in retirement.
Today, however, people have a lot more choice about how, when and where they work. Job security and final salary pensions are starting to look like quaint historical fads associated with a precious few decades of the 20thcentury. Furthermore, the pressing environmental and social problems that the world faces, and our own very human desire to find meaning in our work, are leading more of us to put more store by the purpose of the organizations that we work for.
At the same time, the global skills shortage, ever-increasing expectations from customers and technological advances that make it easy for skilled freelancers to tout their services to the highest bidder, mean that organizations need to be very focused on employee satisfaction if they are to attract and retain the staff that will make them successful in future.
“The world of work has changed drastically in the last few years,” says Matt Weston, managing director at Robert Half UK. “Employee expectations have evolved, the pace of work has picked up and automation is changing processes – inside and out. This evolution to the world of work requires corresponding changes in leadership style, favoring a more human-centric approach.”
That is where servant leadership comes in. “Servant leadership favors a people-centric approach rather than a process-centric approach,” explains Weston. The approach ensures that the worker has the opportunity for growth, productivity and workplace satisfaction, with the understanding that this will have a positive impact on their relationships with customers and on the performance of the organization as a whole.”
Legendary Indian independence campaigner Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is generally considered to be a great example of a servant leader. Some of the best-known proponents of servant leadership in business today include Tony Hsieh, founder of online shoe and clothing company Zappos, Howard Behar, former president of coffee chain Starbucks, and Melissa Reiff, CEO of specialty retail chain The Container Store.
So what does it take to become a servant leader? Weston offers some basic tips for those looking to adopt this approach:
- Remember that the core ethos of the servant leadership style is the wellbeing and the development of people. So replace monthly progress meetings with an ongoing performance management framework that covers work-life balance along with the delivery of tasks.
- Use weekly one-to-one meetings as a forum to discuss career progression, lessons learnt from mistakes and shortcomings, and to exchange valuable feedback. Employees perform best when they feel as though they’re making valuable contributions, so regular check-ins are instrumental for keeping performance on track.
- Use specialist software for people-centric insights. This year, analyst and research firm founder, Josh Bersin, predicted that employee feedback software would become widely used within workplaces. Employers have various options for regularly rolling out quick-fire employee pulse surveys to assess workplace culture and increase transparency.
- Celebrate top performers with incentives that show them that their contributions are valued. Today’s workers often value non-financial incentives, so team lunches, small perks such as discounts or birthday lie-ins, or additional days off are all welcome rewards.
Sally Percy is a freelance business journalist and editor. She is also author ofReach the Top in Finance: The Ambitious Accountant’s Guide to Career Success.