...Servant Leadership: A Philosophy and Set of Practices Lori Kleeberg BSN, RN CMSRN Pfeiffer University Abstract Servant leadership is a distinct leadership concept and needs further studying. It is a unique leadership philosophy that places the followers as the top priority. The attitudes, dimensions, characteristics, and virtues of a servant leader in the discussed publications all have shared themes. Self-interest of the servant leader is not important and does not motivate this type of leader. The motivation of the servant leader focuses on the needs of others. Honesty and integrity are held in high regard with this leadership style. Communication and listening are key components in engaging those they serve. Teaching, delegation, and guiding are the method in which the servant leader develops and empowers their followers. Servant leadership is a concept that must be adopted by the organization as a whole to have the intended impact. Servant Leadership: A Philosophy and Set of Leadership Practices Servant leadership is both a modern leadership philosophy and a set of leadership practices. The term servant leadership was created by Greenleaf in "The Servant as Leader” in 1970. In Greenleaf’s publication, he defined servant leadership as “The servant-leader is servant first” (Greenleaf, 2002, p. 29). This type of leader has a natural desire to serve and aspire their followers to lead. (Greenleaf, 2002). This philosophy has gained much attention over...
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... SERVANT LEADERSHIP Servant leadership offers a of a kind point of view to the leadership writing as it is the one hypothesis that is focused on the leader as a servant; this goes past the attention on the association with the emphasis on the needs of adherents. As such, servant leadership is about the leader being servant first according to Page & Wong (2000).While the needs of the association are constantly show, servant leaders put resources into the needs of their supporters, empowering, engaging and supporting them, and delivering servant leaders at all levels of the association, which at last prompts authoritative achievement. Trompenaars and Voerman (2010), in the book Servant Leadership crosswise over Cultures, refer to illustrations from Indian society to demonstrate that servant leadership was rehearsed in antiquated India. This can be exhibited by the way some famous Indian leaders lead their kin. India is a captivating and different nation with numerous dialects, societies, ranks, and religions. India has been formed by different incredible leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, and Ambedkar. These leaders are good examples for leadership, and their remarkable leadership qualities have numerous similarities with the qualities proposed by the servant leadership philosophies. The accompanying are the standards of servant leadership as showed in the Indian social setting...
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...Servant Leadership Servant Leadership is not a leadership style but a state of being. The decision to embark on the mission of Servant Leadership cannot be relegated only to the office. If fully committed to being successful, a servant-leader will embrace all the components needed to be a servant and a leader in every aspect of their life. In this paper, I will explore the origins of Servant Leadership, how it can be implemented to build a successful “leader”, and how Servant Leadership effects employee satisfaction. I also found that Servant Leadership is often synonymous with some sort of religious foundation. Many of the articles I read likened Servant Leadership to religious models. I personally found it difficult to connect with this interpretation, even though I see the relationships, so I chose instead to make a broader “spiritual” connection that would appeal to the “non-believer”. By applying the principals of Servant Leadership to all aspects of one’s life, I believe, true satisfaction and success is possible. What is Servant Leadership? Robert Greenleaf coined the phrase Servant Leadership in his essay titled, The Servant as Leader, in 1970. He says that “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” (Greenleaf.). The word “servant” may conjure up visions of maids scrubbing floors or perhaps a “man of the cloth.” Webster’s dictionary...
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...his personality, writing style and philosophy of doing business, a major influence on my expectations and outlook on life. His effectiveness derives from a passionate belief in what is being accomplished at Zingerman’s, a deep love for all things food and the people that choose to come into whatever Zingerman’s business that come to eat Great Food. A charismatic and articulate speaker, he is passionate about the topics that he speaks about – usually food and customer service. A firm believer of Servant Leadership, a contemporary leadership style to Transformational Leadership that is propounded by Robert Greenleaf and practiced daily by Weinzweig and the other managing partners of ZCoB. Using a Leadership Style survey from Don Clark’s Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition website, Ari Weinzweig’s leadership style has been determined as primarily participative. This survey assesses three types of leadership – Authoritarian (autocratic), Participative (democratic), and Delegative (free reign). The premise is that the highest score is indicative of the style of leadership that is normally used. A score of 40 or more is a strong indicator of the normal style. The lowest score is indicative of the style least used. The accepted view is that the best leaders operate out of the participative (or democratic) mode and use the other modes as needed. Leaders, who want their employees to grow, use the participative style of leadership. As they grow into their jobs. ...
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... SERVANT LEADERSHIP Servant leadership offers a of a kind point of view to the leadership writing as it is the one hypothesis that is focused on the leader as a servant; this goes past the attention on the association with the emphasis on the needs of adherents. As such, servant leadership is about the leader being servant first according to Page & Wong (2000).While the needs of the association are constantly show, servant leaders put resources into the needs of their supporters, empowering, engaging and supporting them, and delivering servant leaders at all levels of the association, which at last prompts authoritative achievement. Trompenaars and Voerman (2010), in the book Servant Leadership crosswise over Cultures, refer to illustrations from Indian society to demonstrate that servant leadership was rehearsed in antiquated India. This can be exhibited by the way some famous Indian leaders lead their kin. India is a captivating and different nation with numerous dialects, societies, ranks, and religions. India has been formed by different incredible leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, and Ambedkar. These leaders are good examples for leadership, and their remarkable leadership qualities have numerous similarities with the qualities proposed by the servant leadership philosophies. The accompanying are the standards of servant leadership as showed in the Indian social setting...
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...ETHICS AND LEADERSHIP Strengths of Servant and Transformational Leadership Greenleaf indicated that a great leader is first a servant to those being served and whose desire it is to help others, i.e. employees, communities and customers as well as sharing decision making and power. This is to make sure that others needs are first being taken care of or considered before the leader. The servant leader helps to grow others and this could in-turn help them to become servants and grow others. This will also help to create a positive impact in societies as well as have a transforming influence to others. Larry Spears (2004) extracted ten (10) strengths of servant leadership from Greenleaf’s writings that is essential for servant leaders. 1. Firstly, leaders need to be good listeners. Listening will help leaders to identify the needs of followers and as well as to clarify the needs to ensure that followers needs are addressed accordingly. 2. Leaders need to show empathy to those being served. Empathy will show that the leader understands and feel for others. This helps followers to feel that their concerns are being recognized by the leader and that the leader will give attention to their concerns. 3. Healing is identified as a great strength of servant leaders in that they have the ability to restore hurt of others such as emotional or broken spirits. In cases such as this servant leaders take the opportunity to console followers. 4. The fourth...
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...What is Servant Leadership? “The servant leader is servant first, it begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” - an excerpted line from the essay of Robert K. Green leaf titled The Servant as Leader. In our society, a leader is often depicted as one who has the highest authority in exercising power. The one who halts at the top of the society’s pyramid. As defined in the Webster’s Dictionary; a leader is a person who leads. Leadership, on the other hand, is defined by the same source as the power or ability to lead other people. But what does it take to be a good leader? This is where we should understand the concept of servant leadership and how different it is with the traditional leadership. As seen from the excerpted line on the first part of this paper, to lead is congruent to serve. Leadership has a deep connection with service. Servant leadership displays a leader’s service to the people while traditional leadership, the people giving their services for the welfare of the leader. To be a good leader, one must make sure that the other’s needs should be served. A leader voices his/ her people what are the things they must do but a servant leader helps his/ her people on how to do things. You may have heard the quote of Maimonides’ “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” That clearly shows the difference of a traditional leader’s actions from a servant leader. Servant Leadership...
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...What Is Servant Leadership? Servant leadership is a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world. While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said: “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. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.” “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. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“ A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional...
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...this quote from the Christian New Testament (Authorized King James): “But ye [shall] not [be] so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve” . In Islam, the Prophet Muhammed was very much in favor of servant leadership. This is reflected by his leadership saying “the leader of a people is their servant”. This has led to John Adair, the worlds leading authority on leadership and leadership development to author a book entitled " The Leadership of Muhammed" by Kogan Page Limited. As he felt that the Prophet Muhammed is one of the most important historical figures that is misunderstood among people in the West. Yet he showed the seed of knowledge based civilization that helped create the European Renaissance. Greenleaf, in his classic essay, The Servant as Leader, described the servant-leader in this manner: 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. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature. The difference manifests itself in the...
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...Servant Leadership Lynda Kosh Indiana Wesleyan University BSM 580 MGT 441 – Philosophy of Corporate Culture Facilitator: Nick Ipock June 21, 2012 Leadership today takes many forms and has numerous definitions and styles. Servant Leadership, though not a new concept, is at the forefront of discussion from leaders and observers around the globe. The final paper for Philosophy of Corporate Culture focused on the steps necessary for successful change implementation. This paper will expand upon the idea of Servant Leadership and whether it will help or hurt change implementation within a given organization. Prior to any discussion about the qualities, actions, and implications of being a servant leader, we must first take a look at its modern day origin and definition. The phrase “Servant Leadership” was originally coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, he said: “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. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first; perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature” (Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2012)...
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...According to Johnson (2012), “The servant leadership model is based on the premise that leaders should put the needs of followers before their own needs” (p. 257). This form of leadership is important in education, especially higher education. Within a higher education environment, school knowledge is linked directly with the practical issues of interest. Where professors are not only impart knowledge, but also the sharing of experience, collaboration in joint projects and act as a bridge between students and the labor market. To ensure sustainable development, fairness and effectiveness of higher education, Servant Leadership concept was brought to the forefront. Servant leadership has been presented as a multidimensional construct (Ehrhart,...
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...Servant Leadership Why is it someone can achieve things that seem to defy all the odds? Why is it George Washington, a Virginia farmer with a love for the military became the “Father of our Country” ? An honorable, virtuous, adventuresome, solider who fought for independence from the British. Why him? Why is it that Mahatma Gandhi was the architect of civil disobedience that influenced the world? A struggling, shy, student who had tremendous difficulty speaking in public. Gandhi was unsuccessful as a lawyer in Bombay. He found his calling working for the downtrodden Indian minority in South Africa. Why him? Why is it Mother Teresa, a convent school teacher dedicated to her student’s education became a Noble Prize humanitarian? Her clinics now care for tens of thousands. Why her? Why is it that Jesus, (whether one believes he is just a man or truly the Son of God), became the most influential person who ever lived? Born in a barn to poor parents; Jesus relied on friends and strangers for food and shelter. He changed the culture of the world. Why him? There is something else at play here, Servant leadership. Servant leaders show proof of their character through behavior. They display the common practices of model leadership by modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act and encouraging the heart (Kouzes & Posner, 2007). Leadership is about service, stewardship, and shepherding those; at...
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...MGT 5133: Management of Organizational Behavior The Servant Leader 2/16/2016 I. Introduction This essay will describe the true meaning of servant leadership. How the servant leader is inspired and performed his/her job within the health care organization? The paper will also inform readers of how each individual can unleash the servant within described by Larry Spears in his book “Reflections on Leadership.” Everyone has a deep need for serving, sometimes adults find it very difficult to unleash this desire to serve. Having worked in a large Hospital for over five years, it is easy to see why many people get frustrated and depart the health care industry. There are many complicated situations that happen working in healthcare. Throughout the majority of these situations between registered nurses, patient care technicians, and some doctors; there are solutions for dealing with most of those problems. Compassion, empathy, trustworthiness, faithfulness, respect, honesty, integrity, and rapport are all words that will be used frequently within the body of the paper. In my personal quest to better understand how to work well with people in a highly stressful environment as in healthcare, I begin to do my own research on process improvement and better systems that works in the hospitals. I turned my mind to various leadership books on healthcare and process improvements in the hospital setting. Some of the books I read was tremendously inspiring, interesting...
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...Choosing an Ethical Villain for Iron Man 3 Grand Canyon University: MGT-605 05/22/2016 Choosing an Ethical Villain for Iron Man 3 The purpose of this paper is to discuss the controversial decisions taken by the production company Marvel Studios in the movie Iron Man 3 and to evaluate the effectiveness of the leadership techniques used, in terms of powerbases, influence tactics, and leadership style by CEO, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter. This paper will also evaluate the potential outcome of the situation from a servant leadership perspective. Ethical Situation Shane Black, the director and co-writer of Iron Man 3, in an interview with Uproxx, has revealed that he was forced to change the entire original Iron Man 3 script in order to swap the gender of the film’s villain from female to male after pressure from the production company Marvel, which feared female toy merchandise would not sell as well as the male version (Ryan, 2016). From the interview, it sounds like Rebecca Hall could have been the real villain behind Aldrich Killian instead of what we saw on the big screen. Changes like this happen during rewrites all the time, but hearing that this decision was made simply because it would impact toy sales is shocking. This is the ugly side of having a franchise that pulls in millions of dollars in revenue from merchandise. Black points out the decision must have been made by Ike who has already been called out several times for his lack of diversity, in terms of gender...
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...Running head: SERVANT LEADERSHIP Servant Leadership Servant leaders have contributed many great and sympathetic attributes in modern society today. In order for an organization to make today in a world where the economy is in a down spiral, servant leadership is a must. A servant leader acknowledges the sacrifice of his followers, and then he assures them that there will be a better tomorrow. He also creates a sense of urgency with his followers. The servant leader is very active, versus being passive on the backburner. A servant leader refuses to be denied, because as a true servant leader he is concerned about his followers. Servant leadership is often associated with the Bible and religion. The idea of servant leadership originated from Robert Greenleaf although it can be dated back to ancient time. It is well used among various religion beliefs; Mother Theresa and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. area two of the more popular religious icons and they were both great servant leaders (Ebener, 2011). Less consideration is given to the care of others because it is because it moved from personal involvement to something that is mediated by large corporations (2011). Mother Teresa was a head strong individual whom exhibited a wealth of values that far surpassed most people in our lifetime. She was known for her honesty, respectability, and commitment. She is loyal and dedicated to the people she serves. Mother Teresa was considered a true Saint and she far...
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