Effective Leadership Practices, Part 2

During the past several weeks, we’ve been exploring servant leadership, a leadership philosophy whose fundamental basis is leaving a team or group better than you found them.  This week, we will continue our deeper dive into what servant leadership looks like by outlining two more key practices, as defined by Kent M. Keith (2008) in The Case of Servant Leadership.  (See this post for a discussion of the first two key practices.)

The third key practice is changing the pyramid. Robert Greenleaf founded servant leadership and he believed that the typical management hierarchy – usually communicated as a pyramid – was detrimental to the leader at the top of it.  Over many years of working at AT&T and consulting with other organizations, he came to understand the effects of power, namely its tendency to corrupt.  Some have called this “power poisoning” and it has been established in many studies.  He noted that most leaders aren’t genuinely questioned or even communicated with honestly, leading to information that is inaccurate and an inflated belief in their own effectiveness.  Greenleaf believed that the pyramid should be expanded at the top to accommodate more peers in the leadership role, to prevent the corrupting influence of isolation and “happy talk” from subordinates.  He believed that leaders should function as a “first among equals” in order to obtain more honest feedback and appropriate challenges to their ideas and functions.  The leader’s role within this idea is to listen, to set the vision and mission of the organization, then step back into the group structure to facilitate solutions and ideas. 

Keith (2008) notes the examples of faculty governance in higher education – in which faculty elect one of their own to head a department who then governs (typically) with a very light hand.  He also cites a company, The Schneider Corporation, that has created a “Primus Council” based on this servant leadership principle.  This group is composed of members from various parts of the company and “focuses on strategic planning and vision, furthering the company’s culture, the growth and development of the entire staff, and major organizational policies” (p. 41).  The Schneider Corporation has seen significant growth since adopting the servant leadership philosophy and practices.

The fourth key practice is developing your colleagues.  If you’ve read other parts of this series, you’ve read the basic tenet of servant leadership, as outlined by Robert Greenleaf:  “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?” (2008, p. 15).  Greenleaf’s quote gets to the heart of this practice, which is about whether you help your team improve and help them to become better people and professionals.  This practice does not mean that you take your eye off the goals of your organization or that you focus on improving your team to the exclusion of accomplishing things.  It’s about understanding that the investment you put into helping your team improve, whether it’s their ethics, their skills, or their interpersonal functioning, pays huge dividends as those colleagues improve their work and become more effective.  This has direct benefits to an organization in both the short- and long-terms.  A developmental approach improves work on a day-to-day basis and also improves loyalty and cohesiveness, which benefits the larger organization in the long-term.

What do you think about these leadership practices?  What benefits to this approach do you have and what concerns you about it?

Cited:

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Greenleaf, R. K. (2008).  The servant as leader. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.