Posts Tagged ‘Servant Leadership’

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There Are No Heroes In Business

July 29th, 2010

The greatest leaders realize hero worship has no place in business.  Long before I ever heard of Servant Leadership though, I learned this lesson from my grandfather, a Korean War veteran…

Army Helmet Upside Down

Real Heroes Wear Helmets

I had spent the year interning with a Fortune 500 company and visited my grandfather in Maine for a week before returning to Penn State. My priorities were not right yet. Money, fame and fortune were still the front of my mind. I dreamed of being the next Bill Gates or Donald Trump. So, as we sat on his front porch one cool summer evening, I casually made reference to a prominent executive at my employer as being, “my hero”.

“Nah! That’s no hero, Ben.” My grandfather cut me off, mid-sentence, in a thick Maine accent. He was not angry, but very serious. The conversation quickly turned from a casual chat to a very somber conversation. I had made a mistake and he needed to correct me. “Let me tell you what a real hero is…” » Read more: There Are No Heroes In Business

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Refuse to Compromise

July 22nd, 2010
Uncompromising Principles

What Can't You Compromise On?

The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.
- Seth Godin (Tribes)

In most definitions of leadership, an individual’s uncompromising character is a key attribute. In the above quote, Godin reveals an important clarification: he emphasizes that leaders must understand what they can not compromise on. After reading this from his Tribes book, I realized this was an important matter many leaders today do not fully appreciate. Instead, most leaders today determine what they want not, choose not or should not compromise on.  These positions are not strong enough for leaders that truly want to serve their organizations. For example:

1. Want Not to Compromise: “Wanting” is a matter of personal preference. Personal preference can be compromised and is therefore the lowest degree of commitment between wanting, choosing and knowing what one should do.

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Passion vs. Emotion in Leadership

July 14th, 2010

I’ve seen passion get a bad rap too often by being mislabeled as “emotion”. You’ve probably experienced it too. It may be in a budget meeting when funding is being debated and someone passionately voices their opinion. Or, it may be during cross-functional staffing assessments when one leader vehemently disagrees with another’s reflection on a person.

Passion

Whenever it occurs, passion reflects an individual’s commitment, strong opinions and dedication to their position. In other words, passion may be described as a person’s unwillingness to maintain their composure. With a particularly strong belief in the matter at hand, passion is often the byproduct of someone deeply engaged in serving their organization. Therefore, I believe passion is a great characteristic to have in your team members. » Read more: Passion vs. Emotion in Leadership

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Servant Leaders And Our Nation’s Independence

July 3rd, 2010
A Small Version of the Declaration of Independence

Source: Wikipedia

The Fourth of July in the United States of America is celebrated as the nation’s birthday – our Independence Day.  It was on the 4th of July, 1776 that the Continental Congress adopted our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The creation of this document, the adoption of it’s authority by our congress and the freedom of our nation that it represented would not have been possible without the great service of many leaders in our young nation’s history. Created, read and adopted in Philadelphia, the document set forth many servant leadership ideals. Included among these statements is one of the most famous in the English language, which would eventually be used by Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of slaves and the creation of Emancipation Proclamation: » Read more: Servant Leaders And Our Nation’s Independence

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Leadership as a Product Purhcased by Followers

June 29th, 2010

If your leadership were a business, would your employees be paying customers? The war for talent means your best employees ‘choice of employers is broadening. They have leadership options from which to buy and definitely conduct product comparisons. Whether it is the degree of late nights you ask of them, the extent of which “stuff” is allowed to roll down hill or amount of training received, your employees pay a price for your leadership product. Other leaders, either within your organization or elsewhere, offer different options at different price points. Therefore, leaders should ask themselves, “why do my employees pay for my leadership, why should they continue paying for it and how do I find more of the right customers for my leadership?” Based on this perspective of leadership as a product purchased by followers, below are three good practices I’ve seen for improving your leadership product.

Business man and woman fighting over cash1. Evaluate Competitor Products: Within your company and beyond, what are the most admired leaders offering as a part of their “product”? Look at the managers within your organization with the best 360 feedback scores. Also, look at some of the greatest leaders outside your company – those highlighted from Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For or similar studies. The leadership products offered from these competitors are ones you should consider adopting features from for your own leadership product offering.

2. Conduct a Market Study: When was the last time you conducted a survey of your team’s reflection on the quality of your leadership product? 360 Feedback is great, but consider going beyond the standard HR processes and policies. One of the greatest tools I’ve seen is an anonymous Q&A session. In this process, employees on the team submit their questions to a human resources representative. The HR representative filters the questions, rephrases them into their own words to ensure anonymity, then asks the leader these questions live, in an open dialog with the team. Why not conduct your own, similar, marketing study?

3. Invest in Research & Development: Over time, the best products evolve through investments in R&D. Your leadership product should be no different. To maintain the interest and support of your team, you should continuously improve your leadership skills. Invest time with mentors and perhaps even a professional coach. Devote time to personal development and reading the latest leadership books and industry periodicals. If you fail to evolve your leadership product over time, your competitors will become more attractive while your product remains stagnant.

Your leadership is a product purchased by your followers. The team invests time, effort and creativity into your organization, at least in part due to your leadership. Therefore, as you serve the organization, it’s employees, customers, investors and other stake holders, you owe it to them to develop your leadership product. Failure to continuously develop this product could be more costly than failures in your organization’s end product and services.

Questions: What other ways do you invest in your leadership Product? How does your leadership develop their product?

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Servant Leadership Stripped Down

June 17th, 2010

Leadership Stripped Down

There are so many “models” for servant leadership that I fear we may be creating confusion. For example, there is the Spears model of 10 attributes, the Frick and Sipe model of 7 pillars and of course, there is the “father” of servant leadership – Robert Greenleaf. Furthermore, there are countless religious references and philosophers that date back to 2000 BC. We need to simplify. We need a short, basic description that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s time for a Servant Leadership strip down – my proposed simplification of Servant Leadership.

At the heart of the matter, servant leadership is simply this: putting your stake holders before yourself and leading them through service to their needs. When in doubt if an action is servant led or not, simply ask this question: “How will this action impact all relevant stake holders?*” If it is not helping them, it is not serving them. If you’re not serving others, you’re not leading, you are self-serving.

And that, in my humble opinion, is servant leadership, stripped down to it’s most basic, fundamental principle. Still confused? Don’t worry, I’ll come up with yet another model to add to the complexity. Seriously though, for more information, you can review the Servant Leadership overview on this site.

* Yes, I realize this is similar to Greenleaf’s question that begins, “”The best test and difficult to administer, is…” I’m not trying to take credit for the idea – just supporting a simplification.

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Servant Leadership Lesson: Ben Carson at Chick-Fil-A Leadercast

June 15th, 2010

Note: This post is the sixth and last in a series of Servant Leadership Lessons from the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast 2010.

You know you’re in for a good presentation when the speaker starts off with a disclaimer that it is not his “intention to offend anyone, but if he does, too bad.” Ben Carson’s amazing story of success from meager beginnings to professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins is truly amazing. In fact, Carson received the prestigious presidential Medal of Freedom and there is even a movie about his life. Perhaps most inspiring of all, is that his legacy will not be one of fame and fortune, but one of serving others. His scholarship program now seeks to ensure that all 4th, 5th and 6th graders realize they can achieve just as much notoriety for academic success, as for a wicked jump shot. Highlights from Ben Carson’s presentation at the 2010 Chick-Fil-A Leadercast follow:

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Servant Leadership Lesson: John C. Maxwell at Chick-Fil-A Leadercast

June 9th, 2010

John C. MaxwellNote: This post is the fifth in a series of Servant Leadership Lessons from the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast 2010.

John Maxwell has an amazing ability to connect with you – whether you are one member of an audience of 65,000+ (as we were this day) or one-on-one. This is appropriate, given that his latest book is entitled, “Everyone Communicates, Few Connect.” This was the main topic of his presentation – Connecting with Others. The best leaders serve their organizations in many ways, but one critical attribute is through their ability to connect. Highlights of Maxwell’s comments on serving and connecting follow:

  • “Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less.”
  • Definition of “Connecting: the ability to identify with and relate to people in such a way that it increases our ability to influence them.”
  • “Some of my best thinking is done by others.”

It’s Not About Us

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Servant Leadership Lesson: Ed Bastian & Jim Goodnight at Leadercast

June 7th, 2010

Note: This post is the fifth in a series of Servant Leadership Lessons from the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast 2010.

At the 2010 Chick-Fil-A Leadercast, Jim Collins interviewed Ed Bastian, president of Delta Airlines and Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS Institute. Both executives referenced servant leadership principles as key attributes in the success of their companies. As Collins framed it, this also presented an excellent dichotomy, with Delta the large, publicly held airline that went nearly bankrupt and SAS, the smaller, privately held company in the software industry. I found the session particularly interesting as well, given the very different personalities and leadership traits you find in these two individuals, as you will see from many of their comments:

Jim Goodnight SASJim Goodnight

Disclaimer: Jim Goodnight and his efforts at SAS Institute have been the source of much Servant Leadership material for many proponents. As a result, I confess there is a potential for bias in my comments.

  • One ways SAS supports its employees is by providing ‘additional income that is not taxed to employees’, such as free coffee, snacks, etc…
    • “It’s much better to keep the money and give it to your employees than send it to Washington – that just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
  • “We only have a 35 hour week… have had that since 1976”
  • They also have flexible start times, so some people start 7, 8, 9, etc.
  • “We’re a knowledge company. Everything we do comes out of the heads of people who work there. “
  • Jim Collins asked, how can you maintain a 35 hour work week when your competition in Silicon Valley are famous for 80 or 100 hour work weeks?
    • “The reason they’re working 80 or a 100 hours a week is because everything they did after 5 PM is pretty much mush. So when they come back in the morning, they spend a lot of time fixing that mush.”
    • “So, I feel it’s better to go home and be with your family than stay at the office making a lot of mistakes”
    • SAS Institute made a commitment to no layoffs.
      • “As a private company I don’t have to worry if my profits go up every year. “ He told everyone there would be no layoffs last year, but he told them they weren’t getting raises either. Still they seemed very happy with that.
      • “These are the kinds of times where it’s really important to understand your customer’s problems.”
      • Jim Collins had a great comment in his question build up here: “Some people think business can teach the social sector a lot. I hold a different view and think we can learn a lot from the social sector.”

What social sector issues do you feel passionate about / want to solve?

  • “We’ve got to find ways to keep kids in schools longer.”
  • “If business wants America to stay strong, we really need to step up and push government to do a better job in education.”
    • So many kids grow up with technology (cell phones, game systems, computers, etc.) and when they get to school they have to leave that at home…as a result they’re bored. I think that’s one reason so many drop out of school.

Any other advice / comments?

  • He didn’t like cubicles during his experience working a year on the Apollo project, so we (SAS) only have offices. As a result, there are long hallways and we needed to buy art to fill those hallways.
  • I find “the art tends to motivate people.”
  • High School Basketball coach was an important mentor to Goodnight:
    • “If we won, it was always our win” the coach recognized it as a team success.
    • “If we lost, he (the basketball coach) said ‘I didn’t have you prepared, it was my fault’.”
    • “That selflessness is something I always tried to pursue.”

Ed BastianEd Bastian Delta Airlines

  • Delta literally came within a few days of shutting the doors for good
  • “Number one thing we did to comeback was to reconnect with the people of Delta Airlines”
  • The Delta airlines founder had a quote: “’If you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of the customers’. And we’d forgotten about that.”
    • They had to reignite the spirit of Delta airlines to the employees
  • When the company sat on the brink of closure, they approached the employees.  However, they didn’t use Powerpoint presentations, but just spoke with them. They told the employees the facts and said they (leadership) had made mistakes.
  • At one point, well into their recovery, there was a takeover attempt by US Air that failed. That was a key moment in the turnaround for him and the leadership. They recognized the people said, “you’re not taking our airline away from us.”
  • One of his key pieces of advice to organizations facing tremendous adversity is: “There are more things inside our control than outside…develop a mindset of agility and decide if you’re going to play offense or defense.”
  • Other Advice for Leaders in the audience included:
    • “It’s our responsibility, as a corporate citizen of the community, to give back to the community.”
    • “Don’t focus on your career track so much as your own job…and you’ll progress much faster.”
    • As one of his mentors put it, “If you’re going to succeed in life, surround yourself with successful people.”
    • Hire someone smarter than you
    • Hire people that look different than you
    • “Be a perpetual optimist”

Jim Collins closed the panel discussion with a question to the audience:

  • Think about who has mentored or coached you.
  • Then consider, how do we pay that mentor back?

Mentor the next generation, of course.

More From Jim Goodnight

Website: http://www.sas.com/presscenter/bios/jgoodnight.html

More From Ed Bastian

Website: http://www.delta.com/about_delta/corporate_information/corporate_biographies/bastian/

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Servant Leadership Lesson: Mark Sanborn at Chick-Fil-A Leadercast

June 3rd, 2010

Mark Sanborn

Note: This post is the fourth in a series of Servant Leadership Lessons from the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast 2010

Mark Sanborn had many great phrases and memorable leadership quotes. In fact, Mark’s website includes the subheading, “Leadership doesn’t make a difference, it is the difference.” How true that is, at every level of the organization. His presentation focused on leaders as story builders, improvers and tellers. Below are highlights from Mark’s presentation:

Making a Better Story

  • “Leaders don’t just tell a better story, they make the story better.”
  • “We want leaders who can help us make our stories better than they would have been.”
  • “…Consider your life (to be) a non-fiction book on the shelf of the bookstore of the world.”
  • “Are you a better person because of your manager?”
    • The above is a question Sanborn asks employees of managers confidentially
    • Are you treating your employees like a WIP or WAC?
      • WIP= Work In Progress – how we often view ourselves
      • WAC=Works Already Completed – how we often look at others.
        • “Why do we treat them (those we meet) as foregone conclusions rather than a future possibility?”
        • “…it’s called Leadership not Controllership”
        • “The antidote to ‘stuck’ is hope.”
        • “You, as a leader, might have to resell people on their own value… You might have to renarrate their story…You might have misinterpreted your own story”
  • “Reenergize people by giving them hope… Hope is having something new try and be willing to try.
      • A future that is different than the one they currently occupy
      • “Refocus people from current struggles to future hopes.”
  • “Redefine Failure”
    • “Failure is something that happens to you, not something you are…Failures are indicators you are making progress”
    • “Your resume is current until the day you retire. Your legacy will live beyond you.”
    • “We as leaders need to pay attention to how our stories are affecting others.”

C.R.A.F.T. Model

  • Catch
    • Catch the other person’s story
    • Requires slowing down, make space to catch the other person’s story
  • Respond
    • Don’t reject the story
    • People have no reason to change until we accept them
  • Ask
    • Ask questions
    • What is your greatest hope here (at organization / business)?
  • Feel
    • Listen with your heart.
    • A cynic is a passionate person that doesn’t want to be disappointed with you.
  • Tell
    • Tell your Story
    • That’s where you find the connectivity
    • The focus is not on you or what you learned – but on how they can be better (their story can be better) because of what you learned in your story

I am grateful to Mark for his participation in the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast and especially enjoyed his CRAFT model. I see great alignment here with servant leadership principles.

More From Mark Sanborn

Website: http://www.marksanborn.com/
Latest Book: The Fred Factor
Free Download:

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