Leaders Wanted!
Mike Quick
Senior Director
Denver, CO
As an engineer building and leading teams across the world for a number of Fortune 100 companies in oil and gas and process manufacturing, I have always been interested in the concept of servant leadership, although the term has only been coined recently.
Living in Singapore for many years as well as my academic research and time as a co-instructor for Leadership in Organizations, a graduate level class offered by the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, helped solidify my thinking in this space.
How do you convince an organization or company to embrace servant leadership? What does it take for someone to be a servant leader? And what impact can this have on a company’s performance? This post offers an overview of this growing style of leadership in the US and beyond.
History and the present day show us the negative impact self-serving leaders have in our society and workplaces. Leaders are chosen for a variety of purposes and intents but principally for: adherence to a belief system; their perceived knowledge, skill, ability, past performance; or the belief they can achieve an outcome. Search any job board for the term leader, lead, leading, or leadership in the job description and you’ll find over 2 million postings (from all the sites) mentioning one or more of these words.
Unfortunately, organizations do not have consistent ways of assessing which leadership model is best for them. Oftentimes “fit” or “shared values” is the assessment criteria. Notably there is no empirical evidence an organization's culture will change simply with a new leader or new leadership, but that goal (made explicit or otherwise) is often expected in the form of performance improvement, seamless merger or acquisition integration, top line growth, or rebuilding trust.
Most organizations want to have an organizational culture with elements of each culture type: innovative, efficient, externally focused, and collaborative to name a few. How do organizations choose leaders that can thrive and lead when opposing skill sets are required? How does, for example, a leader foster innovation if process discipline/control is necessary? How does the leader grow organizational commitment when competition is disrupting the organization? What type of leadership can quickly move an organization in one direction or another? I believe servant led organizations can move more easily towards or away from a particular culture type as necessary.
Robert K. Greenleaf, widely credited as the modern founder of Servant Leadership, believed two very simple principles defined a leader; 1) Serve your followers, and they will view you, regardless of your title, position, or rank, as their leader and 2) Do those served grow as persons, becoming healthier, wiser, freer, and more likely themselves to become leaders.
The conscious choice to serve first is sharply different than the person who is leader first. How can we know when we have found a servant leader? One who can quickly move the organization to improve performance, integrate an acquisition, grow the top line, reduce costs, rebuild trust, or find the right strategic partner?
Look for these 5 characteristics and ask the following questions making sure all are present:
1. Interpersonal Support
-Does this person look for ways to make others successful?
-Do they listen carefully to others?
-Are there examples where this person has treated everyone with dignity and respect?
2. Building Community
-Do they value diversity and individual differences in the organization?
-Do they consider the effect of organizational decisions on the community?
-Do they actively encourage cooperation among employees?
-Have they demonstrated improving the communities where the organization operates?
3. Altruism
-Have they sacrificed personal benefit to meet employee needs? -Do they serve others willingly with no expectation of reward? -Do they place the interests of others before self-interest?
-Do they prefer serving others to being served by others?
4. Egalitarianism
-Do they encourage debate of their ideas?
-Have they invited constructive criticism?
-Are they curious, displaying an interest to learn from employees, regardless of level in the organization?
5. Moral Integrity
-Do people trust them?
-Do they freely admit mistakes?
-Have they promoted transparency and honesty throughout the organization? -Do they model the behavior they expect from others in the organization?
Let’s take a look at a company and CEO I admire and have followed for many years for their practice of servant leadership:
In 1979 Educational Data Systems Inc. EDSI - Workforce Development, Talent ...was started to help laid off auto workers. By 1994 EDSI was generating $500,000 in annual revenue and had one office with family members making up about half of the 15 employees. Because funding comes from government linked agencies, state and local governments, or
public/private partnerships, revenue is impacted by local economics, national politics, and budget reductions.
By 2007 EDSI had grown to $16M in annual revenue with 200 representatives across 16 offices in 3 states. Kevin Schnieders (see EDSI Leaders ) became CEO in the midst of the Great Recession with many Americans facing severe economic hardship and governments making budget cuts. Today EDSI operates 70 offices in 9 states with over 900 representatives and generates $75M in annual revenue. They help over 100,000 people annually that are displaced or disadvantaged to find meaningful work.
Kevin adopted the title of Chief Servant Leader (in addition to CEO) in 2008 and set about incorporating the servant leadership model into EDSI’s business practices.
According to Kevin: "I feel my purpose is to help put people in front of a better mirror. I want them to see themselves on their best day.”
In day to day interactions, Kevin and the other servant leaders at EDSI incorporate the characteristics of servant leadership using a simple acronym- NAQ.
N = Meeting the NEEDS of your people.
A = Holding people ACCOUNTABLE, after you’ve given them everything they need to be great. (According to Kevin if you do it properly, they hold themselves accountable.) Q = Ask amazing open-ended QUESTIONS.
From my perspective, I could have really used Kevin’s NAQ while working for a large multinational company tasked with product rationalization across each of their national markets. The company was founded and grew based on each country creating a brand and developing products unique for their country. We were tasked with reducing the number of products globally (from over 100,000 to less than 10,000) and change national brands to global brands. These were big cultural changes for organizations in each country. We were changing their unique identity and asking them to give up what they believed was their competitive advantage with respect to the markets they served. Looking back, using NAQ could have built trust faster for a way to go to market never done previously. Understanding customer impacts, regulatory requirements, and manufacturing constraints early would have created more common ground from which to effectively communicate, listen, and meet the individual county needs while achieving the project's objectives.
Another good example was when I was tasked to build self-directed work teams for another multinational company. It was all about improving organizational effectiveness, reducing costs, and being more customer focused. We had to have the fundamentals of servant leadership in place and leaders needed to adapt servant leadership. The countries we were working in had cultures so different from one another and responded to this concept in a variety of ways. The principles of servant leadership however, were a common denominator across the cultures and
people could see that. I hadn’t formally learned about servant leadership at the time, but came to understand and experience it’s unique and transformative power.
Interestingly, Chinese culture historically has been clan/collaborative with a focus on relationships and values. However today, corporate China is currently not in this space. Over the past 30 years, Chinese companies have grown and evolved into a “we will not be taken advantage of” attitude and “how can we get what we need from this resource or investment.” Because of the tremendous financial and human resources China is exporting to many countries in the world, countries like Singapore, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand are changing too. Culturally, in my view, the Chinese multinationals are becoming more like American companies were in the 60s, 70s and 80s, during the peak of US influence.
Personally, I never viewed servant leadership as a journey, rather as a way of being or mindset. To be an effective servant leader you need an environment around you that’s led by a servant leader at the top or has others behaving according to the 5 characteristics mentioned previously. If you’re not surrounded by this, being a servant leader is going to be a challenge.
So how do we grow, reinvent, or transform an organization or company beyond what we have ever imagined? How can we touch the lives of millions of people in a positive and meaningful way like Kevin has? It’s simple, find a servant leader.
If you would like more information on Organizational Culture or Servant Leadership contact me at mike@laconsult.net or Kevin Schnieders at kevin@edsisolutions.com.
You can also check out:
Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve ... - Amazon.com The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their ... - Amazon.com Unquittable: Finding & Keeping the Talent You Need: Bitterle, Jim ...
References:
Cameron, K.S. and Quinn, R. E. “Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework” 3rd Ed. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2011.
Greenleaf, R. K. 1970/1991, Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.“The Servant as Leader”.
Lavine, M., Graphic “Paradoxical Leadership and the Competing Values Framework”, Learning Innovations Laboratory, Harvard Graduate School of Education, October 2015.
Quick, M.J., 2018, “Servant Leadership and the Competing Values Framework”
Reed, L.L., Vidaver-Cohen, D., & Caldwell, S.R., “A New Scale to Measure Executive Servant Leadership: Development, Analysis and Implications for Research”. Journal of Business Ethics, July 2011.