Click here to return to Blog Post Intro
What does a leader do to support individuals, teams, and organizations? Jennings and Stahl-Wert like to describe successful leaders using the active term serving. The theory of servant leadership is vital, but it’s the actual Serving Leader who makes the critical difference.
The Serving Leader has a way of helping everyone else succeed. Almost before we’ve spotted a Serving Leader, we notice this symptom—people all around are flourishing. The Serving Leader unleashes the strengths, talents, and passions of those he or she serves. It works this way for a team of two, a business with a thousand employees, or a community of several million.
Serving Leaders:
1. Upend the Pyramid
Ignore conventional management thinking. Instead, put yourself at the bottom of the pyramid and unleash the energy, excitement, and talents of the team, the business, and the community.
You qualify to be first by putting other people first. Leaders are focused on business results, but at the same time, they are persistent in pointing out the individual contributions of each person (except himself). A defining characteristic of a Serving Leader is ego. They constantly get their ego out of the way and direct the credit to others.
The best results come from genuine teamwork. The leader turns the pyramid on its head in order to serve others. When a leader keeps personal ego in check—and builds the confidence and self-esteem of others—it is then possible for the team to work together.
2. Raise the Bar
Peter Drucker described General George C. Marshall this way, “With all of his political duties—holding together the entire civilian and military war effort—he spent half of his time on placing people, finding the right person for a particular job at a particular time.”
In order to serve many people, the Serving Leader must first pick a few leaders to serve, people who can meet the Serving Leader standard. Think about it, a Serving Leader who wants to create a powerful churn of productivity needs a team that can pull itself at the full service of others. These teams, in their own turn, will serve others by building them up, and the results will keep spiraling outward. It all starts with a Serving Leader who really raises the bar.
“Activity is no substitute for results.” Raise the bar is about two things:
- Being selective in choosing the leaders you’re going to work with
- Continually raising the expectations for performance
To serve many, you must serve the few. It’s about the multiplication of excellence. The best way to reach down to someone is to give them a challenging reason to reach up. People are people. Whatever their condition, you get greatness out of people by expecting it.
The Serving Leader undergirds and supports the members of the team and also establishes a challenging standard for everyone to reach.
3. Blaze the Trail
The Leader’s responsibilities are to: (1) Teach others the knowledge, skills, and strategies needed to succeed; and (2) Get obstacles out of their way, so they can make progress.
The more you teach your people not to need you, the greater your value. To protect your value, you must give it all away. If you want to do something that really changes someone’s life, the best thing you can do is make the person you’re trying to help a participant in the process.
Serving Leaders build teaching organizations to create excellence at every level. Leaders who teach become consistent in their own performance—leaders learn to introspect, to articulate their knowledge, and to improve consistency.
Trailblazers do more than teach. They push obstacles out of the way of the people they are serving. They obliterate red tape. The deep-six all the nonsense policies and sweep away the barriers that keep people from success. Their success lies in clearing the path for others to succeed.
4. Build on Strength
The Serving Leader’s job is to focus everyone on the team and in the organization and in the community on living out their strengths. When people are living out their day-to-day lives by exercising their strengths, they’re more productive and happier.
A high-performance team is put together with the greatest care and attention to how each person’s strengths can be used to the max and how the weaknesses will get covered by someone else on the team.
To address your weaknesses, focus on your strengths.
5. Run to Great Purpose
Serving Leaders are people in pursuit of a great purpose. Important enough to live for. Important enough to die for.
Nehemiah brought together the leaders of the city and gave them a purpose and a challenge, to restore Jerusalem to its former glory. Nehemiah divided the work according to families–families who were living adjacent to the damaged gates and walls—and then he upended the pyramid and put all his time in helping them succeed. Nehemiah’s role shifted again as a Serving Leader to providing physical and spiritual protection.
None of the incredible acceleration and creative teamwork and high productivity will happen unless you build your model on top of the foundation of great purpose. Get that clear first, and everything else will follow!
Run to Great Purpose is the first action of a Serving Leader. It’s the foundation. Everything else follows.
I like how the authors put it in the closing chapter, “Don’t steer clear of God in your own life. Serving Leadership requires a deep humility and a willingness to pour yourself into the good of others. I pray that you let yourself be nurtured for this by something larger than yourself.”