Effective leaders can achieve better results in both their professional and personal lives by making a simple shift in their approach to leadership. The shift involves seeing one’s self not as a manager, but as a servant. Though it might sound counter intuitive, learning how to obey and follow, today’s business leaders can hold greater sway over those they’re positioned to lead. Clearly, We need to set clear expectations for excellence and let people know that they will be held accountable to those expectations. However, leaders who make serving and caring for the people they lead a higher priority than what they can get out of them typically end up getting better results than those who take the opposite approach.
Adopting a servant leadership approach can improve any business’s bottom line.
Achieving (a different kind of) success
Being a servant leader simply means that serving and caring for people is higher priority than profit. The servant leader knows that this change in priority is actually the best way to ensure long-term growth and profitability. Shifting the priority of your business away from profit means establishing different criteria for success. Success through the servant leadership lens, can be assessed by answering these three questions:
How much are the people I lead growing, both professionally and personally, as a result of being on my team?
How much do the people I lead enjoy coming to work each day?
How well am I empowering the people on my team to be servant leaders?
Building a strong culture
When we create a team culture where serving each other and the community around us is valued as more important than profit, we give the people we lead the gift of being part of an inspiring organization that people want to be a part of and don’t want to leave. This is why a relatively unknown company is able to attract roughly 18,000 people to apply for 35 positions, a hire rate of 0.2 percent. It’s also why turnover is around 1 percent, versus the industry average in the tech space of 22 percent.
Gaining purpose
Imagine that your purpose for coming to work isn’t just to be a manager and accomplish business objectives. Imagine that your main purpose for coming to work is to create a team of awesome human beings of high character, who are devoted to serving and caring for the people around them. This makes Mondays just as happy as Fridays. It makes coming to work something deeply meaningful and inspiring.
Improving customer service
When we model empathy, compassion and helpfulness, we create a culture that is likely to deliver world-class service to our customers. This is why companies work so hard to develop servant leaders who treat employees with such high levels of care.
Increasing innovation
When we create an atmosphere of safety, where people aren’t afraid to take risks and challenge the status quo, we create a culture that is highly conducive to innovation. This is why the most innovative companies like Google and SAS go to such lengths to care for employees and are also consistently rated as the best places to work.
