Exemplifying Servant Leadership

When I trained teams on behavior-based safety across North America, a point we always covered was that you can’t see someone’s attitude or their emotions but we can get a solid read on their attitude and their emotions by observing their behavior. Today as Cindy and I provide Strategic Leadership Coaching for individuals from various organizations that we’ve done training for, we work with them to ensure they’re achieving the best possible results from the immediate action steps they commit to applying based on what they learned in the sessions with us. The first question I always ask them is what their team will be able to see them doing differently as they apply the steps they’ve outlined. In either case, the behaviors we choose provide the people around us with a clear picture of what we believe - our attitude and our emotions!

To this point, I’ve shared some background on the idea of servant leadership with hopes of providing a solid definition we can use as a foundation to work from moving forward. In the last post, I shared about a group of folks that I believe are truly Champions of Servant Leadership. With all that in mind, let’s take a look at some key characteristics we can each work to include in the approach we take to leading our teams on a daily basis.

I found an article from Ottawa University that detailed what they called 5 Proven Characteristics of a Servant Leader. Before we look at how you or I can take action on a few of those though, consider this quote by the author regarding the need for servant leaders:

“There is a mountain of statistical evidence linked to the proven effectiveness of leaders who have mastered the aforementioned traits. Yet, at the same time, so many managers are experiencing unprecedented leadership failures. The essence of servant leaders has more to do with who you are and how you treat others. The position or title is secondary.”

The five characteristics that particular article outlines are listening, appreciation, humility, trust, and caring. At face value, none of those seem all that complicated. But how would the teams we’re responsible for leading be able to see each of those things modeled in our daily behavior?

For the sake of time, let’s just look at a few simple things we can take action on to exemplify servant leadership... 

I was blessed to have a couple of different bosses over the years who were amazing examples of humility. Each of them had high expectations for me but they were incredibly quick to shine the light on me any time our department received praise or recognition for our work. I’d like to think I always did as much as I could to impact our overall results but they had every bit as much to do with what we achieved and rarely took any credit. That always made me want to work even hard for them!

Another characteristic listed in the Ottawa University article is trust; not just the importance of earning the trust of the team around us, but the importance of actively showing that we trust each of our team members! It states that “servant leaders give trust to others. They willingly take this risk for the people they serve.” Saying we trust someone is one thing but sticking our neck out to allow them the space to succeed or fail on their own exemplifies that trust…

The article also mentioned appreciation. While I agree that it’s an extremely important characteristic we should each be exemplifying as a servant leader, they offer a bit of a one-size-fits-all approach. The more I’ve learned about individual behavioral and communication styles, the more I understand the importance of being very intentional about showing appreciation in a way that matters most to the individual I’m interacting with!

And those different behavioral styles bring me back to what serving the people around us really looks like. Moving forward, we’ll work through how different that can be based on the person we’re interacting with and how that can change depending on the circumstances they’re dealing with at the time. Just like appreciation needs to be different, we can’t serve everyone the same way and expect it to be received equally across the board!