Servant Leadership is one of the most popular leadership styles today. Robert Greenleaf established 10 principles that are at the heart of this style.
This leadership approach focuses on helping others succeed. It fosters strong team culture and supports a high level of employee engagement. It involves a focus on listening and empathetic leadership, stewardship and foresight.
Empathy
One of the core traits of a servant leader is empathy. This involves listening to team members and identifying their concerns. It also means empathizing with their feelings and assuming that they have good intentions. This allows you to better support them in their roles and improve the overall workplace experience.
Empathy can be used to promote servant leadership by cultivating a friendly environment where employees feel safe enough to express their concerns and ask questions. It can also be used to help team members heal from negative experiences in the workplace by prioritizing work-life balance and guiding them through the healing process.
Another way that empathy can be used to foster servant leadership is by ensuring that team members understand how their individual contributions are essential to the organization’s success. This can be done by acknowledging minor achievements and reminding them that their efforts are part of a bigger picture. This helps to motivate teams to put their best foot forward.
Listening
As a servant leader, you will need to have excellent active listening skills so that you can hear the voices of your team members. This will help you to understand their point of view, as well as provide support for your team if needed. It also allows you to be self-aware, so that you can recognize your own strengths and weaknesses to improve as a leader.
For example, if an employee is having a rough time personally, you can give them some extra support by listening to their concerns and providing them with resources they may need to get through the challenge. This shows that you care about them as people, rather than just a member of the team. It can also build a sense of community and trust within the team. This could include scheduling social Zoom meetings or in-person team-building activities to bring the company together. It may also include creating a culture of feedback, where team members can feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions with leadership.
Persuasion
As servant leaders, effective managers are skilled empathetic listeners who strive to understand the thoughts and perspectives of others. They also assume good intentions from their team members, which fosters a more collaborative work environment.
Servant leadership requires that you encourage your team to work together and share their opinions on how to improve workflow and overall business operations. This approach can boost your team’s morale and help them feel heard and recognized for their contributions.
Practicing servant leadership can be difficult, especially when you aren’t comfortable being vulnerable. However, the end goal is a more connected and people-focused culture that can drive productivity and increase employee engagement. Using persuasion rather than authority to make decisions can be one of the clearest distinctions between servant leadership and the traditional authoritarian model. Persuasion helps you build consensus and trust within your team, which ultimately leads to better decision-making. In this way, servant leadership is a model of positive influence that helps everyone succeed.
Stewardship
A strong sense of stewardship is an important characteristic for servant leadership. This means being able to support and nurture your team, which can help them feel at ease expressing themselves in the workplace. In turn, this can encourage them to do their best work and be themselves.
This leadership style also requires a commitment to the growth of your team members. You can use tools like organizational training and employee development programs to foster this growth.
Servant leaders are able to conceptualize, which is a big-picture perspective that allows them to strategize for the future and see their impact on an organization. This is a significant difference from the traditional leader who’s consumed by day-to-day realities and achieving short-term operational goals.