Key Mental Shifts for Servant Leadership

- This is an audio course. No need to watch, just listen. Welcome to the latest addition to LinkedIn learning, podcasts. We've curated some of the best business podcasts and made them even easier to listen to. Each episode is split into sections, use the links in the contents area to skip to whichever section you like. We're always looking for new ways to help you learn. And we'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks for listening. - You talk a lot about servant leadership. Can you share how exactly do you define that and how is that differ from the norm? - Well, kind of the standard definition of servant leadership is if you imagine a pyramid and most organizations are structured with a C-suite at the top of the pyramid, and then below them are VPs, below them are directors, below them are mid-level managers, and then all of your frontline people, right? Fill out the base of the pyramid. And the basic idea of servant leadership is that instead of viewing the hierarchy like that, where you've got these very senior people on the top and everyone in the organization is serving them and their agenda, it's actually upside down. So the senior people view their job as serving all the people that they lead and counterintuitively, another way of putting this is the way that I like to put it's making love the top priority. In fact, I just did a TEDx talk and that was the title, why the best leaders make love their top priority. And there's an abundance of evidence demonstrating why this is so, but you can summarize it very simply. I mean, it's kind of common sense. The idea is, if you make profit the top priority, you as a leader you're either going to consciously or unconsciously neglect employees in a systematic way. And when employees are consistently neglected, they're going to becoming increasingly disengaged over time. And as a result, customer service is going to decline, product quality is going to decline and innovation is very unlikely to occur. In other words, the organization is eventually going to fail to serve the customer. In fact, they might be failing immediately. Whereas if you flip that, and so to me a servant leader or someone who makes a love the top priority, the filter that they use for every decision is how is this going to impact the long-term well-being of the people that I lead that I take care of? And if the answer is it's going to have a negative impact, then it's eliminated as an option. And counterintuitively what happens when you do this, is when people know that the leadership genuinely cares about them and is more concerned about their longterm well-being than they are on their next bonus. Then what happens is people take very good care of the customers, right? Through customer service, through better quality, through being more free to innovate, 'cause they're not in a culture of fear. And as a result, the customer is very well-served. And of course the key to any organization, whether it's for-profit, non-profit, education, is having customers that are happy and loyal. And that's the way that's a sheet over the longterm.