Effective Leadership Practices, Part 4

Periodically over the preceding weeks, I’ve summarized the effective practices of servant leadership as described by Kent M. Keith, in The Case for Servant Leadership.  Those practices include self-awareness, listening, changing the pyramid, developing your colleagues, coaching (not controlling) and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.  (If you’d like to review the posts, the links will take you back to each). The final effective leadership practice that Keith describes is foresight.  Foresight in this context is identical to what is more commonly called “vision” and I will use the terms interchangeably here.

Foresight is the ability to visualize the future, to anticipate the needs of your organization and industry, as well as to envision the impact you want to have.  In The Servant as Leader, Robert Greenleaf (the originator of servant leadership) speaks of foresight as the leadership skill.  He believed it was so important that he considered a lack of foresight to be an ethical failure because it prevents the leader to act for the good of his team or organization (Greenleaf, 2008).  Without it, he believed the leader is not leading, she’s reacting.  Leadership without vision and foresight is management. 

Greenleaf was not alone in seeing vision as the sine qua non of leadership. If you Google “vision and leadership” and you will receive a host of references, blog posts, books, and other exhortations of leaders to develop vision. 

So the natural next question is, how do you develop vision?  Kouzes and Posner (2009) note the importance of taking time out from pressing work matters to think and ask questions of yourself and your environments.  The leader must keep principles at the forefront, asking who do we want to be as an organization and as individuals?  What needs to change within the scope of our influence and what’s our role in bringing it about?  The visionary leader must listen to others and plug into her professional environment, seeking to constantly understand it (and predict it) better.  Finally, reflection is critical to vision.  None of the previous activities are worth the time if there isn’t a period of reflection in which they can all be synthesized. 

Do you agree with the idea that vision is the central characteristic of leadership?  Why or why not? 

How do you find time to withdraw and reflect on your own vision? 

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

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

Kouzes, J. M. & Posner, B. Z. (2009).  To lead, create a shared vision.  Harvard Business Review.  Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/01/to-lead-create-a-shared-vision/ar/1

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.