Tip #110 Should Boards Embrace Servant-Leadership?
With this Tip for Effective Boards, we continue our re-presentation of the ten most popular Tips out of our first 100 Tips for Effective Boards. The following which was Tip 68 is recognized as our second most popular Tip. I have made minor modifications to the original Tip.
Of course, the decision to embrace servant-leadership is up to each board to make. Each board decides on its own values and on its expectations for management and for itself as a board. Policy Governance® boards (and other boards as well) express these values and expectations in their board policies.
In this Tips for Effective Boards, we’ll introduce the idea of servant-leadership.
Servant-Leadership is a powerful and inspiring concept articulated in recent years by Robert K. Greenleaf. It’s an intentionally odd and somewhat jarring title since we don’t generally see leadership and servanthood as being linked. (I’ve recently seen use of the term “service leadership” as an alternative term for Greenleaf’s idea. I personally prefer the term “servant-leadership” precisely because it can seem somewhat jarring and it more clearly refers to a distinct alternative to authoritarian leader-centered dictatorial leadership.)
We may tend to see effective leaders as being those who exert power over others and get them to carry out their dictates. Servant-leadership, on the other hand, is grounded in putting others first and seeing one’s leadership as a calling to serve those who are being led. Servant-leaders succeed when those they lead succeed. Servant-leaders strive to have a positive impact on all those with whom they interact. They are concerned about the well-being of all those they personally impact and they are concerned about all those their organizations impact.
Servant-leadership starts with the desire to serve others, not the desire to control. It puts serving others such as employees, customers, and the community as the number one priority.
In “The Servant as Leader,” the essay in which Greenleaf introduced the concept of servant-leadership, he wrote:
It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead…. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types…. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived? (Robert K. Greenleaf, “The Servant as Leader” in Servant Leadership: A journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. 25th Anniversary Edition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2002, p. 27)
Servant-leadership has been widely acclaimed by leadership experts such as Warren Bennis, Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard, Peter Senge, and others, including John Carver, the creator of the Policy Governance® model of board operations.
For additional information about servant-leadership, you may wish to check out the following Tips for Effective Boards (all available by clicking https://www.BoardsOnCourse.com/blog).
Tip #69: Characteristics of Servant-Leaders (together with Tip #70) re-presented as Tip #108: Seven Characteristics of Servant-Leaders.
Tip #71: How Your Board Can Embrace Servant-Leadership.
Tip #72: Sustain and Enhance Your Board’s Commitment to Servant-Leadership.
Tip #73: Sample Board Policy on Servant-Leadership.
If you are not familiar with the idea of servant-leadership, you may want to google “servant-leadership,” “Robert K. Greenleaf,” the “Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership,” or “The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership.”
Of course, you may also wish to check out Better Boards for a Better World: An Integrated Practice of Policy Governance® and Servant-Leadership which I co-authored with Larry Spears. (See below.)
To learn more about the Policy Governance® model, please click https://www.BoardsOnCourse.com/policy-governance.