In this lesson we learned about servant leadership, a theory that took a while to graduate from an approach, yet continual research data helped it become a full theory. It focuses on how leaders use a desire to serve others to help their followers develop as leaders. These kinds of leaders are honest with their followers and genuine in their altruistic tendencies to help followers grow into servant leaders themselves and therefore meet organizational needs. It includes ten characteristics that servant leaders tend to have, for example, listening and empathy, as well as and input-process-output model to demonstrate servant leadership. The input represents antecedent conditions such as context, leader attributes, and follower receptivity. The process uses servant leader behaviors such as emotional healing and behaving ethically for leaders to provide service to followers. The output represents outcomes and end results for this leadership such as follower and organizational performance (Hamel, 2021).

One leadership situation in my life that reminds me of this theory is when I worked at a daycare and camp for the summer as camp counselor. The antecedent conditions of the situation are as followed – I was in charge of a group of 9–12-year-old girls all summer through meals, activities and more. This summer camp also had a program for children that were too old to be campers but too young to become counselors yet and called them counselors in training (CIT’s). In this situation I become a servant leader for many of these counselors in training as they took on more responsibilities and learned more about how to hold a position as a counselor. I would have some of them come with my group throughout the day and show them how I went about my day as a counselor as well as helping them finish their responsibilities as CITs. These are just a few examples of servant leader behaviors that I did at my job that summer. My servant leadership situation exemplifies the characteristics of empathy, awareness, foresight, building community, and commitment to the growth of people – specifically the counselors in training. The outcomes from this process were better performance out of the counselors in training since I was able to help them do their duties correctly and efficiently. The organizational outcomes from this is that they have CITs that know how to work correctly and efficiently therefore meeting organizational needs as well as providing the organization with possible candidates for counselors in the future summers that already know how to the position works and are good at it.

 

Reference:

Hamel, R. (2021). Lesson 11: Servant Leadership, 2021