Where Was The Leadership?

Servant leadership has been one of my favorite leadership approaches studied thus far next to transformational leadership and authentic leadership. However, when I first went into the lesson I found it a bit hard to wrap my head around the concept of servant leadership because I didn’t identify it with the conventional ideas of leadership such as order and charisma. “Serving others first?” “What kind of leader does that?”, are the type of questions I asked myself. To be honest, I at one point thought of servant leadership as the “pushover approach” and I really dislike saying that because I have many servant leadership characteristics myself. However, the more I thought about it, the more appealing this approach became to me as I started thinking about Mother Theresa, the Dali Lama, Martin Luther King, etc. Mostly, I began thinking about the coined term, “one act of kindness can change the world”. Then, prompted by a fellow student, Angela Darchuk, I began to wonder why this leadership isn’t prevalent in the workplace, and especially after conversing with her about it, I started digging around to find out why.

I found a very interesting article written by Jim Heskett of the Harvard Business School (2013). He discusses how “servant leadership is experienced so rarely because of trends in the leadership environment, the scarcity of human qualities required, demands that the practice places on the practitioner, and the very nature of the practice itself”. This is a little scary to think about. It doesn’t place much faith in human nature and seems like the task of implementation into the workplace may not come so easy. Northouse (2015) also points out how servant leadership first begins with a “natural feeling” to want to serve others first (p. 226). Thus if the idea of this type of leadership appears to be “going against the grain” of popular and more accepted leadership characteristics, I can see how this “natural feeling” may be hidden or stunted.

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However, we should not have little faith. The article also goes on to discuss that a group of organizational psychologists are attempting to measure the impact of servant leadership on leaders, not just those being lead. In a recent book by Grant as cited by Hesket (2013), he suggests that servant leaders are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not only feel better about themselves at the end of the day but are more productive as well. Furthermore, his thesis is that servant leaders are the beneficiaries of important contacts, information, and insights that make them more effective and productive at what they do and even though they spend a great deal of their time sharing what they learn and helping others through such things as career counseling, suggesting contacts, and recommending new ways of doing things. I believe (and this may be wishful thinking) that there is a massive amount of servant leaders in the workplace population and all we have to do is get past the stigma that this leadership approach is a sort of reverse pyramid. Servant leadership may very well be what society is lacking and could offer a solution to the flood of ethical dilemmas and the answer to the disturbingly common question of “where was the leadership”?

References

Hesket, J. (2013). Why Isn’t Servant Leadership More Prevalent? Harvard Business School. Retrieved from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-isnt-servant-leadership-more-prevalent

Northouse, Peter G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice. 7th ed. Sage Publications