Kurt Uhlir’s Guide to Raising Servant Leaders & Why It Matters

Employees are more likely to feel heard in a servant leadership setting. Putting the common good first is the central premise of the servant leadership philosophy. This kind of leader prioritizes their group and business. They don’t put their own objectives first. The objective of servant leadership is to fully engage the workforce in realizing a vision. Workers can then advance and learn while sharing their personal expertise and viewpoint.

The Best Way to Lead as a Servant

Promoting Teamwork and Employee Involvement

Making their colleagues feel like their voices and ideas matter is another skill that servant leaders excel at. When practicing servant leadership, your employees will know you value their input and care about what they have to say when you make an effort to encourage teamwork and offer suggestions for how to enhance the business. This can encourage your employees to work hard and generate better-quality work. Teamwork and employee involvement reduce work-related conflicts.

Assisting Your Teams Develop and Grow

Servant leaders are interested in developing their team members into great leaders and focusing on being excellent leaders. To help your employees grow their knowledge and abilities, you should encourage them to take part in employee development and continuing education programs. You can encourage team members to assume active leadership roles when working on group projects. They will be more receptive to recommendations to improve their work if they believe you are dedicated to their professional development.

Requesting Feedback

Servant leaders should constantly consider how they may advance their management style and benefit their team. When a team member suggests enhancing operations or advancing the business, please encourage them to share their thoughts. Strive to instill a sense of confidence in your team members so they know they can approach you with ideas at any time, and routinely solicit feedback from those who don’t ordinarily do so.

Explaining to Individuals Why their Work is Vital.

Employees typically feel more empowered and eager to put in more effort when they believe their work is crucial to the organization’s success. Please make an effort to explain to your team members why the work they do is crucial and how it directly contributes to the success of the business as a whole. Employees who feel that their work matters are likely to perform it properly. Show them their work matters.

Taking Personal Care of the Employees of Your Team

Being a servant leader also means demonstrating to your team members that you care about them personally. Be sympathetic and attempt to provide guidance when you can assist your staff in achieving a better work-life balance and better management of their personal stress. Your staff is more likely to enjoy working and providing high-caliber work when they feel valued as people, not just as employees.

Acting As an Example

An effective servant leader always sets an example for their group. It would help if you were prepared to carry out any task your team is asked to complete to be a servant leader. It encourages team members to be invested in their job and the organization when they see that you are prepared to put in the same amount of time and effort.

Principles of Servant Leadership

Is Self-Aware

Being conscious of oneself and one’s team is a trait of effective servant leaders. Self-awareness is the capacity to observe oneself, reflect thoroughly on one’s feelings and actions, and takes into account how one’s actions affect those around one. Self-aware servant leaders accept and learn from their own flaws. Leaders must understand the individual strengths and weaknesses of their teams to foster growth and learning. 

Heals

Good servant leaders recognize the value of resolving issues before moving on to new objectives and undertakings. For instance, a team argument may have caused a setback for your team’s performance during the previous quarter. The team must first be able to move past its grievances and reach a consensus to tackle this quarter’s new difficulties. Servant leaders ensure their team with the skills, resources, and support needed to accomplish their work well. 

Listens

Successful servant leaders don’t simply talk but listen to their team. They give each member a fair amount of time to speak before paying close attention to what is said and, possibly, what is not. They give others their undivided attention, pay attention to nonverbal cues from coworkers, refrain from cutting them off when speaking, and offer helpful criticism. Servant leaders identify areas for improvement by soliciting observations and opinions from the entire team.

Develops a Community

Inside their organizations, effective servant leaders foster participation and cooperation. Everyone on the team is encouraged to offer their thoughts and actively participate in the team’s activities as a community since they value everyone’s opinions. They offer engagement opportunities through social gatherings, workplace layout, or simply by starting meetings with business-related topics.

Commits to Growth

Successful servant leaders inspire growth in their employees. They are devoted to supporting the professional growth of their teams. By setting a good example and giving their team chances to advance, servant leaders enable their subordinates to become effective leaders. Also, they learn about the personal objectives of their staff members and assign tasks or increase their responsibilities to support those objectives.

Stewardship

Successful servant leaders recognize and comprehend the significance of their duties. Always convey to their team that they will uphold and protect the confidence and trust placed in them for the job. They put forth a lot of effort, show up on time, and are dependable as a custodian of the resources and goals of their firm. They set an example by acting in the ways they would like to see others act.

Sees the Future

Good servant leaders know the value of reflecting on prior failures and triumphs. They constructively assess recent decisions using the lessons they have learned. Learn to recognize what is happening right now, comprehend the effects of their choices, and then assist their colleagues in doing the same. They assess their existing condition and environment using methods like SWOT analysis, and they use SMART goals to make future plans.

Why Servant Leadership Matters

The idea of a great corporate leader has undergone tremendous change and evolution over time. Today’s best leaders are frequently more vulnerable than earlier leaders, being less authoritarian and more sympathetic. Due to its success in leading and managing teams, servant leadership is a relatively new idea that many leaders are adopting. Here are some reasons why it matters. 

Serving As a Leader Develops Other Leaders.

At its most basic level, a leader’s responsibility is to develop other leaders. To multiply growth and effect, you must work in service of others to achieve that. According to the leadership ideology known as “servant leadership,” a leader’s main objective is to serve. That encapsulates what the heart of leadership is.

It Promotes Creativity and Strategic Thinking

A servant leader does not always need to be in command and is willing to follow. Others are inspired to follow them because they are moral and civic-minded. Being a servant leader does not entail submission. Servant leadership is essential for any large organization to adopt to succeed since it fosters strategic thinking, innovation, and the development of others.

Workers Can Become the Greatest Versions of Themselves

Providing stewardship to the team is the goal of servant leadership. A leader that demonstrates this trait has vision, a keen sense of empathy, and engages in active listening. Persuasion rather than power is more important. A servant leader actively coaches team members to become their best selves and upholds the team’s best interests as a fundamental value.

Front-Line Personnel Provide Customers with Better Project Care

The ultimate kind of leadership is servant leadership. Everything revolves around genuinely caring about people and serving others rather than yourself. Leaders who are servants cherish and enhance others. Employees demonstrate servant leadership to their clients when their managers do the same. Large businesses must understand this since staff, not executives, deal with customers daily.

Individuals are Motivated to Assume Individual Responsibility

A leader that practices servant leadership treats all of their subordinates with respect and serves them by giving them autonomy. Every business can benefit from the approach since it encourages employees to take charge of their destinies and become leaders. Companies that value servant leadership typically have a great workplace culture and dedicated employees.

Little Deeds of Compassion Spread Widely

Indeed, servant leaders in any organization shouldn’t have to display their badges and boast about being servant leaders. Little leadership actions go a lot further than words in a big company. At this level, servant leaders should act ethically and empathetically at every opportunity. Little gestures of consideration and listening quickly caught on.

Everyone Benefits from Successes.

To be truly servant leaders, policies and practices must uphold the same commitments to people, principles, and the larger good. No matter their rank or job title, if everyone in the organization views themselves as a servant, they are all “living leadership.” When everyone puts in their fair share, everyone can benefit from the successes. 

Everyone Picks Up Supportiveness Skills

Serving others before oneself in a humble manner without concern for one’s position, prestige, ego, or expectations of the type of job a leader “should” be performing is known as servant leadership. The only goal of a true servant leader is to meet each individual’s need in whatever manner it manifests itself by going to their followers and asking, “What he/she can do to support the team members in every moment?”

Aids in an Organization’s Agility

Agility and servant leadership go well together. Agile virtually never function without leaders who are committed to enabling team members. Organizations can only achieve true business agility if everyone on the team is focused on the vision underlying the priorities. You need the empowerment that servant leaders foster to get there and bottom-up autonomy.  The leader takes on the responsibilities of a project manager, a product owner, or a scrum master in agile companies. They are concerned with fostering an environment that inspires individuals to produce genuine value. The team leader encourages them to be more independent and free to work on original and unexpected ideas rather than providing the team with precise instructions on what they should do. Because of this, servant leadership is critical. A manager who is fixated on micromanaging or abusing their position of power and authority for personal gain will completely negate the advantages agility offers.

Teams Can Do Amazing Things Together

Simply said, servant leadership is the recognition by a leader that their role is one of service. When the leader recognizes that it is about collaborating with others to achieve great things as a team rather than just directing or controlling people, this model can be helpful. Servant leaders know that accomplishing the current goal is more crucial than their success. A team can achieve a lot more success.

Servant leaders need to be transparent. The ability of individuals carrying out the work to assume ownership is feasible when goals, progress, and results are transparent. People can speak up and set better expectations if a goal isn’t feasible or made clear enough. Identify when the plan has to be changed to move closer to the desired results when actual progress toward a goal is acknowledged. People can assess their performance and identify areas for improvement when the results are transparent. They will be able to use what they have learned to produce better outcomes in the future. You ought to establish interim objectives. You might have annual or quarterly targets, for instance. Those who value accountability are willing to hold one another accountable. This is not about assigning blame or putting anyone in the wrong. It has to do with people wanting to excel as a group. This motivation enables individuals to engage in constructive disputes, commit to team decisions, and hold one another accountable for carrying them out and upholding a high standard.