PART ONE
SERVANT LEADERSHIP
In this part, Ken Blanchard takes the lead with a focus on his lifelong passion of servant leadership as an influence process in which leaders help their people accomplish goals.
Much of my work in the past was focused on leadership behavior and how to improve leadership style and methods. My colleagues and I attempted to change leaders from the outside. But in recent years, we have found that effective leadership is an inside job. It is a question of the heart. Itâs all about a leaderâs character and intention.
Why are you leading? Is it to serve or to be served? Answering this question truthfully is so important that I co-edited a book with Renee Broadwell entitled Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results. In it, forty-five key leaders in our field, including Simon Sinek, BrenĂ© Brown, and Marshall Goldsmith, share their points of view about servant leadership. The essence of that book is you canât fake being a servant leader.
The most persistent barrier to being a servant leader is a heart motivated by self-interest that looks at the world as a âgive a little, take a lotâ proposition. Self-serving leaders put their own agenda, safety, status, and gratification ahead of others who are impacted by the leadersâ thoughts and actions.
The shift from self-serving leadership to leadership that serves others is motivated by a change of heart. If leaders donât get their heart right, they will never become servant leaders. A misguided heart will color their thinking, impact their behavior, and cause them to begin every day by asking âWhatâs in it for me today?â Thatâs certainly not servant leadership.
In this part, you will learn more about servant leadership and the power it has to make the world a better place by focusing on the greater good.
âKen
The Essence of Servant Leadership
Organizational leaders often have an either/or attitude toward results and people. For example, leaders who focus only on results may have trouble creating great relationships with their people and leaders who focus mainly on relationships may have trouble getting desired results.
Yet you can get both great results and great relationships if you understand the two parts of servant leadership:
âą The leadership aspect focuses on vision, direction, and resultsâwhere you as a leader hope to take your people. Leaders should involve others in setting direction and determining desired results, but if people donât know where theyâre headed or what theyâre meant to accomplish, the fault lies with the leader.
âą The servant aspect focuses on working side by side in relationship with your people. Once the vision and direction are clear, the leaderâs role shifts to serviceâhelping people accomplish the agreed-upon goals.
MAKING COMMON SENSE COMMON PRACTICE
This one-two punch of the aspects of servant leadership enables you to create both great results and great relationships:
1. Let your people know what theyâre being asked to do by setting the vision and direction with their help. In other words, vision and direction, while the responsibility of the leader, is not a top-down process.
2. During implementation, assure your people you are there to serve, not to be served. Your responsibility is to help them accomplish their goals through training, feedback, listening, and communication.
Itâs important for servant leaders to establish this both/and mindset toward results and relationships.
When I explain what a compelling vision is to some leaders in organizations, they either give me a blank look or say something like âIâm sure we have one on the wall somewhere.â So what is a compelling vision?
According to my book with Jesse Stoner, Full Steam Ahead! Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Work and Your Life, a compelling vision includes three elements: your purpose (what business you are in), your picture of the future (where you are going) and your values (what will guide your journey).
A compelling vision is alive and well in companies that are leaders in their field, such as Disney, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, Wegmans, and Starbucks.
MAKING COMMON SENSE COMMON PRACTICE
Hereâs how you can incorporate the three elements of a compelling vision in your organization:
âą Make sure the people in your organization know what business they are in. For example, when Walt Disney started his theme parks, he said, âWe are in the happiness business.â
âą Confirm that your people know where they are goingâwhat good results would look like. At Disney, the picture of the future is that all guests of the parks would have the same smile on their faces when leaving as when they entered.
âą Find out if the people in your organization are clear on what values will guide their journey. Disneyâs first value is safety. Its next values are courtesy and âthe show,â which is about everyone playing their parts perfectly, whether they are a ticket taker or Mickey Mouse. Disneyâs final value is efficiencyâhaving a well-run, profitable organization.
If you can share your compelling vision as clearly as Disney does, congratulations! You have just made common sense common practice.
Most organizations and leaders get into trouble during the implementation phase of servant leadership if the traditional hierarchical pyramid is used. When that happens, whom do people think they work for? The people above them. The minute you think you work for the person above you, you assume that personâyour bossâis responsible and your job is to be responsive to your bossâs whims or wishes. âBoss watchingâ can become a popular sport where people get promoted based on their upward-influencing skills. As a result, all the energy of the organization moves up the hierarchy, away from customers and the frontline folks who are closest to the action.
Servant leaders know how to correct this situation by philosophically turning the pyramid upside down when it comes to implementation. Now the customer contact people and the customers are at the top of the organization, and everyone in the leadership hierarchy works for them. This one change makes a major difference in who is responsible and who is responsive.
MAKING COMMON SENSE COMMON PRACTICE
To make servant leadership come alive, implementation is key:
âą Communicate to your people that you work for them, not the other way around. Your job is to serve, not to evaluate.
âą Empower your people by letting them bring their brains to work. In this way, they become responsibleâable to respondâto their internal and external customers. Your job is to be responsive to them, helping them accomplish their goals.
This creates a very different environment for implementation and makes it clear to everyone who is responsible and to whom.
Secrets of the One Minute Manager
Leadership is about going somewhere. If you and your people donât know where youâre going, your leadership doesnât matter. Although most managers agree with the importance of setting goals, many do not take the time to clearly develop goals with their team members and write them down. As a result, people tend to get caught in an activity trap where they are busy doing tasksâbut not necessarily the right tasks.
To manage your teamâs performance, have one-on-one meetings with your people to establish observable and measurable goals around their key areas of responsibility. Then you and they will have clear performance indicators to help determine whether they are making progress or need coaching to improve.
MAKING COMMON SENSE COMMON PRACTICE
To focus on what is important, set SMART goals with your people. âSMARTâ is a tried-and-true acronym for the most important factors in setting quality goals:
âą SpecificâA goal should be clear about what needs improvement and what good performance looks like.
âą MotivatingâPeople want to know that what they do makes a difference.
âą AttainableâPeople like challenging goals that stretch them but are not impossible.
âą RelevantâA goal should make a difference in overall performance.
âą TrackableâA record-keeping system is necessary to regularly measure performance.
Effective performance management always begins with clear, observable, measurable goals.
When I ask people in organizations around the world how they know whether they are doing a good job, the number one response is âNobody has yelled at me lately. No ...