The concept of Servant Leadership is timeless, although it was best defined by Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990). Greenleaf was a passionate researcher of management, development and education and felt that the traditional power-centered authoritarian leadership style was problematic. In his book, “The Power of Servant Leadership” he emphasized that human organizations are created to be far more than results or success or profits. Greenleaf believed that we exist to cooperate with others to achieve purposes far beyond ourselves, for the collective greater good.

The servant-leader is servant first. They live by a people-first mindset and believe that when team members feel personally and professionally fulfilled, they’re more effective and more likely to consistently produce great work. Due to a greater emphasis on employee satisfaction within a purpose driven collaborative culture, the servant leader tends to achieve higher levels of respect.

When I set out to write this piece, I decided to reach out to some of my former leaders, colleagues and subordinates at IR to get their perspectives on servant leadership and here is what they had to share with me.

Ingrid Joris, former VP and GM of HR Operational Services at IR – defines servant leadership as simply calling it “common sense leadership”. Ingrid says, “a servant leader should always be mindful of what actions they can take to create the conditions for their people to become successful – not the other way around.”

Kathy Cook, former VP of HR Global Processes & Analytics at IR describes servant leadership as flipping the organizational chart to put the leader on the bottom, serving their team and considering each team member as an individual. She says servant leadership requires leaders to really think through enabling their employees to do their jobs well. Enabling them by providing them with the right tools, removing barriers to success, training, coaching and effective communication.

Kathy served me up a great example that I’m happy to share here. She described a situation in which her analytics team had a big deliverable due to the SVP of HR and the CFO which tracked the employee headcount over the years to identify where IR had growth.

 
“We had a new analytics leader and I had been at the company for over 25 years. So, he had the analytics skills, and I had the history. It needed to be his project even though I started it before he joined us. He took it and dug in to the details, and my role became to coach him, help problem solve when there were large changes, get him connected to people around the world who could provide more detail and think through how to discuss it with our company’s leaders. He had to get it to the right people before and after leadership saw it to ensure people weren’t surprised (including us!). The difference is that he owned it, with support from me, and did a fantastic job.”

Kathy shared another example with me, “A leader in one of my first businesses called me one day and said that whenever he called my team (which was co-located), he often heard a lot of laughter in the background and he wasn’t calling about mistakes but rather to learn more or ask for more help. His observation was that we had a happy, engaged team and our team produced good business results.”

Servant leadership is but one of ten of the more common leadership styles and at any given time, you may find yourself benefiting from using several different styles depending on the dynamics of your situation. One of the ways servant leadership stands apart from other styles is that it can be equally applied to both personal and professional dynamics. Servant leadership in practice is about acting and both its uniqueness and effectiveness comes through in how the leader acts. Servant leaders are humble and their humility is their strength. People with humility do not think less about themselves. They just think about themselves less. If there was ever a time to put these values to effective use, it would certainly be now.

The pandemic challenges faced by organizations and working teams alike have created more opportunities to utilize the tenets of servant leadership to both grow stronger as well as achieve greater results. During a recent call with another former colleague at IR in Brazil – Fabrizzio Del Grande, I asked Fabrizzio if he could relay some examples of how IR’s servant leadership culture was effective during this pandemic. Fabrizzio explained that their people are now more mindful than ever before that servant leadership is both a personal and professional commitment. He says their people are more actively empowering others, promoting accountability that allows others to grow and learn, modeling and inspiring a shared vision and achieving organizational goals through humility.