In a past article I used the definition of leadership as “influence”. That means we all are leaders, because we all influence others. Whether you are a manager leading a plant or division, a supervisor leading a team of operators, a technician with a great idea to share, a parent trying to mold young children, or a friend trying to convince others to help with a cross-town move, we all are put in a position where we attempt to influence and lead others. Positional leadership has the advantage of the resources and the “stick”, but people only follow to the extent you can influence them.
I also talked about the important responsibility that comes with your power of influence. You can influence in a positive way or you can lead others into bad behaviors and patterns that will hurt the team. Your motives for influencing play a huge part in your ability to influence now and in the future, and people will sniff out selfish motives and put their guard up.
That makes your style of leadership – your method of influence – critical to your ability to lead and influence. You likely have heard the term “servant leadership” over the last few years. Some will hear the term and light up, while others may scowl and dismiss it. We may have had experience with a “servant leader” that empowered us and brought out the best in our performance, or we may have seen a weak or “touchy-feely” leader who provided no real influence at all. So before you dismiss the idea, let me define it.
Servant leadership is first and foremost having others as your priority. It turns out the opposite of servant leadership isn’t command-and-control leadership, but rather “self-serving leadership”. Given the choice, I don’t know anyone who would follow a self-serving leader over a servant leader, yet we certainly have seen leaders who exhibit behaviors and make decisions that reveal that they are in it for themselves. They seek privilege and accolades, see people as tools and resources at their disposal, take too much credit for things that they had too little real impact on, and so forth. Self-serving leaders are not inspiring, and can influence only to the extent that they use their positional or resource power or hide their real motives.
In contrast to the self-serving leader, the role of the servant leader is really twofold. First, the servant leader is responsible for communicating the mission and vision. This role follows the traditional hierarchical organizational pyramid. The leader, at the top of the pyramid, sets the mission and vision for the team and needs to communicate that vision down through the organization. This is a critical function because you can’t reach your destination if you don’t know where you are going. This has to come from the leader, and the servant leader understands the importance of getting this right and getting it ingrained through the team and organization.
The second role for the servant leader, once vision has been set and communicated, is to turn that organizational pyramid upside down. Leaders don’t accomplish the vision, the whole team down through the organization does. By flipping the pyramid so that the leadership is on the bottom, the idea then becomes that the leaders serve the team to accomplish the vision. That services comes in the form of removing roadblocks and providing resources to reach the vision, providing guidance as needed to keep the team on track towards the vision, providing recognition and encouragement to stay energized, running interference as needed to eliminate things that detract from the mission and vision, etc.
It turns out that the two-fold role of the servant leader – communicating the mission and vision, and then flipping the pyramid to support those who will execute the mission and vision – requires a strength in leadership that few have or are willing to exercise. Mark Miller, an executive with Chick-fil-a, calls servant leadership the highest form of leadership, far from being a weaker or inferior method. A servant leader must be strong enough in conviction to drive the mission and vision into the organization or team and to clear the path and get the resources needed to be successful. The servant leader must also be strong enough in character to be willing to serve, understanding that they have more potential as a star-maker than they do as a star, and recognizing the critical importance of that serving role in allowing others to do the work.
While the idea of servant leadership may seem counter-cultural today in a time when self-glorification and narcissism, fed the platforms of social media and the false idea that the leader deserves all the credit, are becoming more dominant. Yet you don’t have to look far to find the failures of self-serving leaders in business and politics. Conversely, the servant-leadership model is seeing successful results that are making the business world take notice. It’s no coincidence that most of the top 10 Furtune Magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” are publicly practicing and promoting servant leadership, and some of the most admired leaders from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. to Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines), companies (Wegmans, Zappos, Whole Foods, Marriott, Nordstrom, Starbucks, etc.) and experts (Patrick Lencioni, Ken Blanchard, John Maxwell, etc.) all advocate using the servant-leadership model.
As you recognize your leadership potential as the ability to influence others and as you examine your motives to decide how you will choose to use that influence, consider the serve-first ideal. Your influence will soar as you show others your interest in the vision and team and as you demonstrate your desire for a better leadership.