How to Practice Servant Leadership

Where do leaders sit in your organization—on the top or at the bottom?

Up until the last five or ten years, many organizations followed a traditional hierarchy with the leader on the top of the pyramid telling everyone what to do.

But now we’re seeing an inversion where the leader is at the bottom propping everyone else up.

Successful leaders are servants who take care of their people and care about them. They stand alongside their employees to support and coach them.

Practicing servant leadership comes down to one core principle: believe your job is to make other people more successful than you.

When that is your focus every day you come to work, it changes your thoughts and actions. You think about your role differently because you realize your job isn’t just about you—it’s about supporting, coaching, and lifting the people around you. And it doesn’t stop when they find success. You want them to be more successful than you. That’s the definition of true servant leadership.

Here are five practical ways to put servant leadership into action:

• Discover the stressors in your employees’ lives. What is causing them stress and frustration? It could be anything from having to regularly stay late to having a long commute. Serve them by finding ways to remove those stressors.
• Show appreciation and recognition for employees. Even a small acknowledgement of a job well done can go far in serving employees and making them feel valued. Appreciation can be as simple as a handshake and personal thank you. It doesn’t have to be big as long as it is heartfelt and personal.
• Understand employees as individuals, not just as workers. Your employees are actual people who come to work every day, not just job titles or cogs in the company machine. As the line blurs between work and personal life, leaders must really understand their employees.
• Understand moments that matter in the lives of your employees. Find out about those big moments—first day on the job, first promotion, first house, birth of a baby, etc.—and do something to create a meaningful experience. Serve your employees in their moments of need and their moments of happiness.
• Remove employees’ obstacles. What’s standing in their path to success? It could be office politics or a policy that adds unnecessary red tape. Do all you can to remove those obstacles to make it easier for employees to do their jobs well.

I put together a video which talks about this in more detail. Please check it out below and if you want more content like this you can subscribe to my Youtube channel.

When you come to work every day ready to serve, it is evident in your conversations and actions. Leaders set the tone by serving their employees. When you are a servant leader, it encourages employees to serve each other and creates a supportive and collaborative culture.

Servant leadership is the future of successful, people-centric leaders. And it all comes down to one mindset—to make people more successful than you.

_______________________________________________________________________________

1. Subscribe to The Future of Work Podcast where I interview business leaders around the world each week.

2. Grab a copy of The Future Leader which has been endorsed by the CEOs of MasterCard, Best Buy, Oracle, Audi, Unilever, Domino’s Pizza, Ritz Carlton, Kaiser, and Marshall Goldsmith. It explores the most essential skills and mindsets for future leaders.

3. If you are or want to be an entrepreneur then my wife and I just launched a brand new podcast on how to Be Your Own Boss, called the BYOB Podcast where we share what we did and how we did it. You can subscribe to that here.