Servant Leadership

Abstract

The philosophical foundation of servant leadership existed thousands of years ago. Servant leadership is a unique style of leadership ideology which flows against the grain of self-interest human behavior. The nature of both work and the workplace has changed drastically (Billett, 2006). The focus of leadership needs to be shifted from process and outcome to people and the future. The new challenge for management and leadership education is threefold: (a) How to develop workers and unleash their creative potentials, (b) How to create a positive workplace that will attract and retain talented knowledge workers, and (c) How to reinforce innovations and risk-taking to adapt to an uncertain future. In today's thinking about effective, productive, and enduring organizations, we can reorganize, restructure, or reengineer our organization to be more effective but it will not be successful for very long, unless change is first built on the preeminence of human resources. People and process will always be more important than tasks and organizational structure in accomplishing goals and productivity. Effective systems and processes are only effective if the people who make them work are effective. Highly motivated and well-trained human resources provide the only assurance that any organization will be effective in accomplishing its goals. Servant-leaders motivate followers through investing in them and empowering them to do their best. In this paper, servant leadership is characterized by listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualizing, foresight, stewardship, commitment to growth, and community building (Spears, 2004).