Four Attributes of Great Servant Leadership

For a while I've been thinking about leadership as a learned skill and the needs and requirements for great leadership. From my own perspective one of the most basic tenets of great leadership is the ability to balance the fulfilment of the organisation's vision with the fulfilment of the basic, as well as the more complex needs of those who work within the organisation. This has led me to the belief that a leader's intrinsic strength in visualising and sticking to joint goals, coupled with their capacity for (and ideally love of) satisfying the human needs of their people, is instrumental for leadership. In much of the reading that I've done, and in my consideration of my comfort levels as I question my own personal style of leadership, I've always felt most comfortable with the style of Servant Leadership, the modern movement for which being attributed to AT&T executive Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970, via his now seminal book The Servant as Leader - very well worth reading. Worth noting that the concept of Servant Leadership has been around for thousands of years, with references to the terminology and culture of servant leadership to be found in such diverse sources as the Gospel of Mark and the Tao Te Ching. In this piece I wanted to spend a little time talking about what I think are the four most important aspects of the servant leader (and why!).

Humility

First on the list, as it stylistically frames all of the other aspects. Humility in this context represents both the attitude and an acknowledgment by the servant leader that they are not omniscient and that their employees will have more knowledge and experience on specific topics than they do. This is, in my opinion, particularly important for servant leaders in companies dependent on knowledge workers (such as those I've always worked in), as there is high probability that employees will absolutely know more about their specialisation (and in fact be employed for their specific knowledge).

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by Simon Julian via SitePoint