What is Servant Leadership and How it Affects your Company?
Servant leadership is a concept which is not that well known to a lot of people or organizations. It is an ideology which many flourishing companies follow. The implementation of this concept is found to be successful by these companies because it works from an individual perspective. In other words, it tells the organization to concentrate on every individual as opposed to the original idea of concentrating only on some key members of the organization.
It also encourages active participation by lower level people in a company. In the long run, it encourages its employees to innovate and leads to an overall development of its leaders.
Now I keep on with explaining to you about how this belief system comes a long way to help the organizations to improve.
This idea of servant leadership is originally conceived by Robert Green leaf. He in his essay called The Servant as a Leader has introduced this concept just to make people understand the benefits of decentralization of organizational structure. It simply advises the leaders to step in the shoes of the employees and lend them his helping hand in the times of need. Instead of just telling the employees what is expected of them, he further explains to them what steps need to be taken to accomplish the pre- determined goals.
Furthermore, it encourages active participation by the employees to complete the work. According to this theory, the leader is a servant who gives prime importance to his team members' needs rather than concentrating on his own. Thus, he becomes a passionate leader who constantly supports his team and guide them to success. Gradually he builds a strong rapport with his employees, which help them achieve more as a team. Ultimately, these factors help the company to serve its stakeholders better.
It is true that an efficient leader should assume responsibility. Imagine a situation when you can share your burden with some people who believe in you? Awesome isn't it? Happiness is doubled when shared. Similarly, burdens or worries are halved when shared. When there are people who are ready to share your burden, you work faster and more efficiently. What happens ultimately. The organizations grow, to prosper because of this and that too rapidly.
A motivated employee does a better job than one who lacks motivation. It invigorates him to contribute better for his company and help him to innovate. Another aspect of this concept is to give active participation to the lower level employees in decision making. This has proved effective many times because they are the people who directly interact with the customers.
They know what customers expect from the company. For example, if there is some quality which the company's product lack, these field employees will be able to know since they interact with the customers directly. Thus, this concept helps the company to improve their products and serve the customers effectively.
As a result, the market share of the company improves. Shareholders get better returns. In short, we can say that the ideology of Servant Leadership helps the organization to serve all its stakeholders like employees, customers and the society as a whole. It helps the organization to gain the confidence of the society by better accomplishing the Corporate Social Responsibility.
