Servant Leadership

Do you ever worry about the lack of real leaders around the world? From a British perspective, do you feel a bit glum when you think about the General Election in  May 2010 and try to identify the genuine leaders amongst the front benches of the major parties?

A lot of people confuse leadership with management, thinking that the two are synonymous. Nothing could be further from the truth and in this article we are going to draw clear distinctions between the two before looking at the specifics of servant leadership.

Putting it simply, leadership is about deciding the right things to do whilst management is about doing things in the right way. Management is particularly concerned with the efficient use of resources. Peter Drucker once wrote that most organisations are over-managed and under-led and this can be seen when examining bankruptcies. The courts are full of companies that were highly efficient at doing the wrong things!

This can also be seen in the uptake, or lack of uptake, of Social Media in organisations. Many managers prefer to optimise current work practices rather than embrace change. If those same organisations lack leadership with the vision to see that the game is changing, then they are unlikely to successfully integrate Social Media into their culture. They will be highly efficient players in a game that no longer exists – they may dislike change, but eventually they will come to realise that they will like being increasingly irrelevant even less!

Leadership is about doing the right things and this has two dimensions to it. Choosing the right activities to be involved in and also ‘doing the right thing’, in other words, choosing the morally right thing to do. And this is where servant leadership comes in. The title of ‘Leader’ is not something that someone awards to themselves. It is something that is recognised in the individual by other people. In the increasingly transparent world that is a result of Web 2.0 and 3.0, self-proclaimed leaders without the track record to back it up will have a very short shelf-life.

And other than with senior appointments in organisations (and even then I’d argue that most are managers rather than leaders), leadership will be something one does with people, not to them. In fact I’d go a stage further and suggest that Servant Leadership will often be characterised by what the Leader can do for her/his people. The very name suggests that servant leadership is concerned with issues such as “How can I Serve my Team?”

What are the qualities, skills and behaviours of Servant Leaders? To adapt one of my favourite pieces of writing, I suggest that in practical terms, Servant Leaders:

Are patient
Are kind.
Do not envy,
Do not boast,
Are not proud.
Are not rude,
Are not self-seeking,
Are not easily angered,
Do not keep no of wrongs.
Do not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
Will do the morally right thing rather than hide behind what is legal or expedient
Always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere.

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