Effective Leadership Practices, Part 3

 Intermittently over the past several weeks, we have been looking at effective leadership practices as outlined by Kent M. Keith in The Case for Servant Leadership.  Key practices have been self-awareness and listening, changing the pyramid and developing your colleagues, and this week we’ll explore coaching (not controlling) and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.

Servant leadership espoused a coaching approach to working with others long before it became popular.  The idea behind this tenet, as Keith (2008) notes, is that no one really controls anyone else.  As leaders we can motivate and inspire, we can remove barriers to self-direction, and on the negative side we can compel compliance by exerting threats or pleas, but ultimately people choose their own actions.  A leader who thinks she truly controls her team is delusional. If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you understand that the horse is much more powerful than the rider and the rider is only directing the horse because the horse chooses to be cooperative.  Leading a team is much the same. 

Displays of power and authority can get people to act, but they often produce the appearance of compliance and inspire large amounts of defiance instead.  Servant leaders coach.  They teach, they mentor, and they facilitate.  They understand that everything they do is done via relationships with those who are closer to the customer, the client, or the public that is served by the organization.  So, as Keith (2008, p. 48) states, “The issue for the servant-leader is not how to control others, but how to build strong, positive relationships with others.”  That is coaching, not controlling.

One of the ways they do that is the second effective leadership practice we will discuss today: unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.  Servant leaders remove the barriers to self-efficacy for others, allowing them to tap into their own internal motivation.  They also identify and grow the talents of their colleagues, they include their team members in decisions and major activities, like goal setting and evaluation, and they coach them along the way. 

This does not mean that they abdicate the responsibility to hold others accountable, or let a dysfunctional colleague dominate or alienate the team.  Servant leaders hold themselves responsible to the needs of their team colleagues, but they also work in service of the needs and goals of the organization.  When an individual hijacks that process through noncooperation or toxic behavior, the servant leader, like other types of leaders, takes remedial action to correct the situation, or terminates the employment if no other remedy works.  The servant leader does not allow one person’s dysfunctional choices to corrupt the development and work of others.

Through these methods – coaching and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others – the effective leader can leverage the talents and abilities of his team, fully engaging his colleagues to choose to do their best.

Cited:

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