Servant Leadership and Servant Leaders

In Philipians 2: 3-4 we read:

Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. The Message

Serving is praised as a virtue, yet it seems much more difficult to realize it in practice. Inspiration and goose bumps well up when stories are told of unselfish sacrifice and service for noble causes: in social service, in politics, in religion, and—why not—even in the military. However, there is a flip side. Our culture sometimes places the wrong emphasis when it rewards greed, aggrandized egos, and cut-throat approaches in climbing the corporate ladder. In a flattened world, we cannot afford to reward selfish ambitions. The service culture sees the success of customer, shareholder, employee, and partner as essential requirements to fulfillment. It is service oriented. In a service oriented enterprise, greed is not good.1 Success is a side effect, not the focus. Success is not just about finances; it is about how well others are served and elevated. A service oriented culture means our main function and purpose is found in serving others: helping them achieve their potential.

The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi is compelling:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

If organizations develop a culture of service, everyone benefits. Is this new? Haven’t commercial organizations been promising and delivering services for centuries? Yes, the notion of service orientation is not new. In fact, most commercials emphasize this customer and service oriented attribute of the company that is promoting the product. Reality, though, is something else. It is one thing to express service orientation in brochures and commercials, but it is quite another to actually be a service oriented company.

Some trends and cultural changes, however, are coming together at an increasing pace to give birth to this new type of service oriented enterprise. The focus of this section is the attributes of service orientation as a corporate culture, or as a virtue, so to speak.

Enterprises are about people, not about finances or making the revenue forecasts at all cost. Doesn’t this contradict and go against everything we have learned in a “go and get them” culture? It does, and it will. Many times executives try to cut corners to make the

In fact our Lord Jesus Christ illustrated the ultimate Servant Leadership through washing the feet of His disciples. He is the ultimate example …

In my book Service Oriented Enterprises, I identified Servant Leadership as the cornerstone attribute for successful enterprise transformation.