Servant leadership is something that occurs every day at my job. I work in an auto detailing shop teaching and assisting adults with cognitive disabilities on detailing cars. At my job, there are a couple people like me who would be considered the leaders. In this situation, the adults with cognitive disabilities are the followers.

At my work, I am constantly teaching and directing these adults. Each day I have about three people at a time that I am in charge of. I show them how each step of detailing a car is done. I evaluate them on each step and help them improve in areas that need work. My job is to have these adults detail a car to the company’s standards and that is what servant leaders do, they “serve others so that they can develop themselves and therefor perform to meet organization need” (PSU WC, 2019).

Our lesson mentioned that for servant leadership to work, the leaders have to treat their followers almost as partners (PSU WC, 2019). The way I do this at my work is by working alongside the employees and taking part in the detailing of the cars. This way I am more of an equal because I am doing the same job as my followers, I just stop what I am doing to help when needed.

Training the adults with cognitive disabilities is not always easy. There are times when I have to remind a worker multiple times how to do things, or times where I have to get them to focus more. My goal at my job is to get the workers to be able to do the best detailing job they can with the minimal amount of help. This is servant leadership because I am developing them to be more able to think for themselves and get them to get the work done on their own (PSU WC, 2019). When the employees eventually get the hang of things, then I am able to focus more on my parts of the detailing and get the cars finished faster.

 

 

 

References:

 

Pennsylvania State University World Campus. (2019). Lesson 11: ServantLeadership. Retrieved from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/canvas/fa19/21981–15196/content/11_lesson/printlesson.html