Servant Leadership
Servant Leadership is roughly defined as taking care of your employees first with the expectation that they will follow your lead and take care of the customers and citizens your organization serves. This isn’t a new concept. I remember reading a best-selling leadership and organization book entitled The Customer Comes Second, which was published soon after 9/11. Rosenbluth Travel was headquartered in one of the Twin Towers, and Hal Rosenbluth wrote about how they were able to re-build the company by focusing on the employees.
Actually, Servant Leadership has been around since the New Testament and teachings of Islam. In layman’s terms, it’s pretty simple, and, what should be, obvious: listening to employees, and treating them as equals and with respect.
Cowardly leadership
Cowardly leadership, in stark contrast, is defined as the absence of traditional leadership qualities, focusing instead on power, authority, and operating from a position of perceived expertise despite the absence of same. Cowardly leaders almost universally proclaim their omniscient intelligence in a number of ways, but always with an ultimate message: “I’m in charge, you’re not, I know more and am the expert because of the position I hold, and you’re not.”
Respect
Respect. It’s a word that comes up again and again in both Servant Leadership, and cowardly leadership.
In the first example, it’s a leading indicator. In the second, it’s visibly, clearly absent. Respect is understanding that Front-line employees are just as important, if not more important, than the C-Suite suits. Or the Mayor. Or the appointed yes-men that often accompany a Mayor and other elected officials.
As Emma Johnson wrote in How To: Become a Servant Leader in www.success.com, Herb Kelleher, Chairman Emeritus of Southwest Airlines felt that the flight attendants were the most important employees in the company because they had the largest impact on customer service, treating the chief executive and the custodian with the same degree of deference, friendliness, and assumption that they both are competent in what they do.
Putting It In Practice
It’s difficult to be a Servant Leader. Yielding power in order to gain knowledge from the organization is not an inherently easy decision for a Type-A leader. But in the long run, it’s not just the ethical and moral decision to make, it’s the smart one.
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