Servant Leader

Ken Blanchard

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781418561529
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Best-selling author of The One-Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard, along with Phil Hodges, offers guidance for how to become a successful modern-day servant leader modeled after Jesus Christ. Based on years of leadership study and proven leadership styles, Blanchard gives established and up-and-coming business leaders solid examples, tools, and methods for life-changing results in their leadership of others.

Servant Leader summarizes the Four Dimensions of Leadership:

• leadership assumptions and methods
• application and leadership behavior
• using the heart to overcome selfishmotives and barriers
• the habits of leaders

Readers looking to expand their effective leadership skills, to experience the transforming power of Blanchard's unconventional teachings, and to grow as leaders and as business executives will benefit greatly from Servant Leader.

THE HEART

TRANSFORMING YOUR MOTIVATION OR INTENTIONS,
YOUR LEADERSHIP CHARACTER

Self-Serving Leaders vs. Servant Leaders. As you consider the heart issues of leadership, a primary question you will continue to ask yourself is: “Am I a servant leader or a self-serving leader?” It is a question that, when answered with brutal honesty, will go to the core of your intention or motivation as a leader.

One of the quickest ways you can tell the difference between a servant leader and a self-serving leader is how they handle feedback, because one of the biggest fears that self-serving leaders have is to lose their position.

Self-serving leaders spend most of their time protecting their status. If you give them feedback, how do they usually respond? Negatively. They think your feedback means that you don’t want their leadership anymore.

Servant leaders, however, look at leadership as an act of service. They embrace and welcome feedback as a source of useful information on how they can provide better service.

Another way to tell a self-serving from a servant leader is how they approach succession planning.

Self-serving leaders who are addicted to power, recognition, and who are afraid of loss of position, are not likely to spend any time or effort in training their replacements.

EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP STARTS ON THE INSIDE. ARE YOU A SERVANT LEADER OR A SELF-SERVING LEADER?

THINKING AHEAD

Devotional on Successorship

“WELL DONE GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT!”

—MATTHEW 25:21

Those few words above sum up what we all would like to hear when final judgment is rendered for our efforts to make a difference. One aspect of a job well done as a servant leader is what we do to prepare others to carry on after our season of leadership is completed. Your personal succession planning efforts will speak volumes about your motives as a leader. It is likely that anyone leading from an ego involved in the promotion and protection of self is not going to spend much time training and developing their potential successor. Just as avoiding or discouraging honest feedback on a day- to-day basis is a mark of an ego-driven leader, so is failure to develop someone to take your place.

In the use of His time and efforts on earth, Jesus modeled sacrificial passion for ensuring that His followers were equipped to carry on the movement. He lived his legacy in intimate relationship with those He empowered by His words and example.

Leighton Ford in Transforming Leadership notes that “Long before modern managers, Jesus was busy preparing people for the future. He wasn’t aiming to pick a crown prince, but to create a successor generation. When the time came for Him to leave, He did not put in place a crash program of leadership development—the curriculum had been taught for three years in a living classroom.”

How are you doing in preparing others to take your place when the time comes? Do you consider them a threat or an investment in the future? Are you willing to share what you know and provide opportunities to learn and grow to those who will come after you? If not, why not? These are critical matters of the heart of a servant leader. A few minutes of brutal honesty regarding your motives as a leader are worth years of self-deception.

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead I call you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. — JOHN 15 : 15

Servant leaders, who consider their position as being on loan and as an act of service, look beyond their own season of leadership and prepare the next generation of leaders.

Jesus modeled the true servant leader by investing most of His time training and equipping the disciples for leadership when His earthly ministry was over.

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things because I am going to the Father. — JOHN 14 : 12 – 13

THE JOURNEY OF LIFE IS TO MOVE
TO A SERVING HEART,
REALIZE THAT LIFE IS ABOUT WHAT

Self-Serving or Servant Leader: Which are you? The reality is that we’re all self-serving to a degree because we came into this world with self-serving hearts. Is there anything more selfserving than a baby? A baby doesn’t come home from the hospital asking, “Can I help around the house?”

The journey of life is to move from a self-serving heart to a serving heart. You finally become an adult when you realize that life is about what you give, rather than what you get.

Every day leaders face hundreds of challenges to their intentions. Our adversary is waiting every day to get us to be ego-driven, to be self-serving. Every day we must realign our heart. You’ll never be able to say, “Now I’m a servant leader, and I’m never going to be selfserving.” We’re all going to be grabbed off course by our egos. Just ask yourself, “How am I going to be today? Am I going to be self-serving? Or am I going to be a servant?”

FROM A SELF-SERVING HEART
YOU FINALLY BECOME AN ADULT WHEN YOU
YOU GIVE, RATHER THAN WHAT YOU GET.

To successfully combat temptations to be self-serving we need to surrender daily our motives and actions to Christ as our guide and role model for how we should lead.

NO TEMPTATION HAS SEIZED YOU THAT IS NOT COMMON TO MAN. AND GOD IS FAITHFUL: HE WILL NOT LET YOU BE TEMPTED BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN BEAR. BUT WHEN YOU ARE TEMPTED, HE WILL ALSO PROVIDE A WAY OUT SO THAT YOU CAN STAND UP UNDER IT.

—I CORINTHIANS 10:13

CASE STUDY: Preparing to Lead.

At the beginning of His ministry, we see Jesus preparing to lead by acts of submission and testing of His character.

In Matthew 3:13–17 & 4:1–11 (NKJV) we read of two key interactions.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. ¹⁴And John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me?” ¹⁵But Jesus answered and said to him, “Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed Him. ¹⁶When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him. ¹⁷And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

In His interaction with John, Jesus demonstrated two very significant attributes of servant leadership. He validated and affirmed John in his ministry and submitted Himself to the same acts of surrender to doing the right thing that He would require of others. A servant leader never asks anyone to do something they wouldn’t be willing to do themselves.

¹Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. ²And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. ³Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”⁴But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” ⁵Then the devil took Him up into the holy ...