Christian Leadership Alliance
| 
Building a Team
Price: $12.50Member Price: $10.00
See more …
Does your ministry partner?
Take the poll
1 of 6
Serving Up
The Overlooked Half of Servant Leadership| posted 10/24/2007
"Servant leadership" is a buzzword both in Christian and secular circles. Almost all position descriptions—from hourly employees to the CEO—cite servant leadership as a valued characteristic and an important qualification for the job. It's a concept we readily accept, but is it possible we should give more thought to what it means and how it should influence our lives?
One aspect of servant leadership is commonly applied to every employee—that is, each person ought to be viewed as a leader within his or her realm of influence. Another prevalent principle is: Do whatever is necessary to empower and support those who report to you.
To be effective, then, managers are urged to perform duties that depict a servant-like attitude. This "serving down" notion suggests assisting subordinates by crawling under a desk to plug in a computer, staying to clean up after a major event, arriving early for a meeting to make coffee and tidy up the room, or coming in on the weekend to help process a mailing list.
Is it possible that by viewing servant leadership as serving down, we're overlooking and missing out on potentially the most important half of servant leadership—serving up?
The servant leadership concept can be traced back to 1970, when Robert Greenleaf published an article titled "The Servant as Leader." Greenleaf suggests that the sign of a true servant leader is the growth of the people being served. He went on to produce a book in 1983, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Writings on servant leadership now abound, from both Christian and secular perspectives, but that literature focuses exclusively on the leader's role in serving those who are under him or her.
In my years in leadership positions, I've observed a common tendency in the workplace to avoid or ignore the potential to serve our colleagues across or up. Rather, the tendency is to criticize people on our same level or above us. Symptomatic of this attitude are questions like: "Why can't they see what they're doing?" or statements like: "Doing it another way would make a world of difference and take almost no effort."
Attempts to change, criticize, or ostracize coworkers are unhealthy for them and us, and rarely result in improvements for the organization. Motives for criticism vary, but usually center around a desire to make ourselves look better by making others appear worse. Because such attitudes are not limited to management, serving up needs to be applied and is applicable to all employees in the workplace.
