What Is Servant Management? Definition & Examples
Servant management is a management philosophy that prioritizes serving others and fostering their progress. It’s, in that sense, a non-egoistic strategy to transformational management; the servant chief actually places their employees and group above their very own standing and ego wants.
Service management goals to fulfill the wants of self, others, and techniques in moral and prosocial methods. It rests on management competence, character, and care (Shek et al., 2023).
Servant leaders actively take heed to, empathize with, and search to empower their staff members. They purpose to create an setting the place belief, collaboration, and private growth are the utmost priorities.
Servant management emphasizes morality and integrity and seeks to assist emotional, relational, and moral progress in followers. These leaders are dedicated to investing in private relationships with staff. They search to extend belief, loyalty, and dedication.
“Key qualities of servant leaders are humility, making certain followers’ growth, listening, sharing in decision-making, behaving ethically and selling a way of group. The thought is that when followers’ wants and well-being are prioritized, they’re able to obtain their targets, and this flows upward in order that the chief’s and the organizational targets are met in flip.”
Canavesi & Minelli, 2022, p. 414
After we consider highly effective servant leaders, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela might come to thoughts. All served their communities with super humility, compassion, and dignity.
We may additionally consider navy personnel who serve within the literal sense, though the navy is in fact a extremely hierarchical area, and servant management in civilian organizations relies on totally different fashions.
An instance of servant management in motion within the enterprise world is that of Herb Kelleher, the cofounder and former CEO of Southwest Airways. Kelleher prioritized his staff’ wellbeing, believing firmly that completely satisfied staff would result in glad clients and, as a consequence, to enterprise success.
As he put it, “Your staff come first. And should you deal with your staff proper, guess what? Your clients come again, and that makes your shareholders completely satisfied. Begin with staff and the remainder follows from that” (Hyken, 2018, para. 4).
Kelleher created a company tradition that turned identified for workers who took themselves evenly, however their jobs severely.
We will additionally recall Agile Scrum masters, whose key operate is solely to serve their groups as successfully as potential. Relying on the state of affairs at hand, Scrum masters use their smooth abilities to behave as servant leaders, facilitators, coaches, managers, mentors, academics, obstacle removers, and alter brokers.
Servant Management Idea by Robert Greenleaf
Robert Okay. Greenleaf is usually considered the pioneer of servant management. In 1970, he printed an essay on the subject, and in 1977, he printed an influential ebook known as Servant Management: A Journey Into the Nature of Legit Energy and Greatness.
On this ebook, he outlines a complete mannequin that encapsulates the core rules of servant management. Greenleaf’s (1977) concept emphasizes the next key parts:
- Listening
Servant leaders hear actively to their staff members and search to grasp their views and desires. - Empathy
They display empathy by caring deeply in regards to the wellbeing of their staff. - Therapeutic
Servant leaders purpose to facilitate each therapeutic and private progress of their staff members, at knowledgeable and private stage. - Self-awareness
They’re extremely conscious of their influence on others and the world round them. - Persuasion
As an alternative of counting on authority, servant leaders use the artwork of persuasion to information their staff members towards shared targets. - Conceptualization
They’ve the power to color vivid photos and talk compelling visions of a greater future to their staff. - Foresight
Servant leaders are future oriented and all the time take into account the long-term penalties of their selections and actions. - Stewardship
They take duty for the wellbeing of their groups and the wellbeing of their group as a complete. - Dedication to the expansion of others
Servant leaders are passionately devoted to serving to others develop and attain their full potential.
Greenleaf additionally emphasised that organizations in addition to people may very well be servant-leaders. He believed that servant-leader-organizations had the potential to vary the world.
In his second main essay, The Establishment as Servant, Greenleaf (as cited in Robert Okay. Greenleaf Middle for Servant Management, n.d., para. 6) wrote:
“That is my thesis: caring for individuals, the extra ready and the much less ready serving one another, is the rock upon which a great society is constructed. Whereas, till just lately, caring was largely individual to individual, now most of it’s mediated by way of establishments – usually giant, complicated, highly effective, impersonal; not all the time competent; typically corrupt.”
“If a greater society is to be constructed, one that’s extra simply and extra loving, one that gives better inventive alternative for its folks, then essentially the most open course is to lift each the capability to serve and the very efficiency as servant of present main establishments by new regenerative forces working inside them.”