![]() Servant leaders do need to pay attention to the basics, such as ensuring that business goals are met, employees remain productive, customers receive quality products and outstanding service, and the bottom line continues to improve. Servant leaders don’t neglect the fundamentalsĮlements of conventional leadership are essential, of course, to successful business leadership. Their bottom line is providing the support that their team members need to succeed and grow. They offer flexibility and strive to reduce workers’ stress and find creative solutions to problems. Servant leaders ensure that workers feel safe experimenting and trying stretch assignments because errors or failures are treated as learning opportunities rather than being punished. They lead with authority rather than exercising power. Workers who experience servant leadership find that their managers focus on productivity and results, rather than on enforcing rules or monitoring workers. Servant leaders are self-aware and care about how team members perceive them. ![]() They are transparent and exhibit integrity. Servant leaders also embody characteristics that commonly appear in descriptions of any successful business leader: They are clear in their communications and expectations. ![]() Such a workplace is inclusive and equitable, and employees feel empowered to share their thoughts, ideas, and opinions without worry about being judged or punished for differing from the manager or their colleagues. These leaders’ openness to addressing the “whole person” moves the employee-manager away from a primarily transactional relationship.Ī servant leader strives to provide a work environment that offers safety-not only physical safety but also emotional and psychological safety. Servant leaders ask how people are doing-and not just how they’re progressing on work assignments. Characteristics of servant leadershipĪ key reason that servant leadership is enjoying a moment in the spotlight is its emphasis on empathy, which requires that leaders listen to and care about the people they are leading. Servant leadership emphasizes vision, direction, and goals, according to leadership expert Ken Blanchard. In a business context, the servant leader prioritizes employees’ growth and development. Greenleaf contrasts the service-based approach with “traditional leadership,” which “generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the ‘top of the pyramid.’” The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons?” Greenleaf wrote in “The Servant as Leader,” his 1970 essay. “The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. Greenleaf, refers to a leader whose inclination to serve is primary-rather than their aspiration to lead. This view of leadership emphasizes empathy, compassion, and authority it encompasses a view of the leader’s role that is almost a 180-degree turn from conventional or traditional notions of leadership rooted in hierarchy and power. A buzzy term that describes some elements of the emerging leadership paradigm is “servant leadership.” The nature of leadership is changing as employees demand greater autonomy and flexibility, expecting-and requiring-the ability to better balance and integrate life and work priorities and needs.
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