Servant Leadership

Servant leadership is a time-honoured term suggesting that a leader's primary role is to serve others. In his seminal 1970's paper The Servant as Leader, Robert Greenleaf wrote: "The servant leader is servant first…It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead…(vs. one who is leader first…) …The best tests, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons…(and become) more likely themselves to become servants?"

Now, a group of organisational psychologists have been attempting to measure the impact of servant leadership. In their book, Give and Take, Adam Grant and his colleagues have found that servant leaders are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not only feel better about themselves but are more productive as well.

Further, servant leaders don't waste time deciding to whom to give and in what order. They give to everyone in their organisations. Grant concludes that giving can be exhausting but also self-replenishing. He makes it a practice to give to everyone until he detects a habitual "taker" that can be eliminated from his "gift list".

Servant leadership is only one approach to leading, and it isn't for everyone. But if servant leadership is as effective as Grant's research shows, then why isn't it more prevalent?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 6 Factors of System 3 Thinking for Making Wise Decisions!

Image
Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on system 1 and system 2 thinking in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” .  The idea that much of our thinking and decision-making is subconscious, and automatic (system 1), as opposed to rational and deliberate (system 2). But he missed the observation by Japanese theorists, Professor Emeritus Ikujiro Nonaka at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University, and Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi, of the Management Practice in the Strategy Unit of Harvard Business School that there is a third system . We typically rely on system 1 thinking because it’s automatic, fast, and experience-based. We use our innate or gut feel to quickly arrive at a decision that “feels right”. System 2 thinking is logical, rational, and fact-based. We use system 2 when we need to slow down and analyse the i
Read more

Patience, young grasshopper!

Image
"Patience, young grasshopper" is a quote from the 1970's Kung Fu TV series starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Cain. His teacher, Master Po called him "grasshopper" as a child, emphasising patience as the ultimate martial arts skill. But we live in an era of high-speed, same-day, cutting-edge, first-to-market, fast-food, get-it-now, snap-judgement. If we're told we have to wait, we get irritated. If we can't come up with the right answer right away, we get upset. if someone or something gets in our way, we get angry. Why is patience considered one of the most powerful martial arts practices? Because patience is the antidote to anger, and anger represents the most terrible and destructive manifestation of self-driven desire. When we're angry with someone, we're estranged form them and from the true core of our being. We end up losing the very thing we believe we're fighting for. Patience is a discipline. It takes practice to over
Read more

The Allen Curve

Image
The  Allen curve  was discovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas J. Allen in the late 1970s.   It represents the likelihood that any two people in the same office will communicate. For example, a  person is 10 times more likely to communicate with a colleague who sits at a neighbouring desk than with someone whop sits more than 50 metres away. Related research has discovered that t he highest performing employees – those with the most useful new ideas – were the ones who consistently engaged in the most interactions. “High performers consulted with anywhere from 4 to 9 organisational colleagues (on a given project), whereas low performers contacted 1 or 2 colleagues at most". Increasing the number of colleagues with whom an employee consults contributes independently to performance; people have more new ideas when they talk with more people. In another study, t he best traders were the most connected, and people who carried on more Instant
Read more