Serve to Lead: Your Transformational 21st Century Leadership System

by James Strock

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

person is but the product of their thoughts. What one thinks, one becomes. —Mahatma Gandhi

Every minute of every hour of every day of your life represents a decision.

Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period. —Tom Peters

We need to break away from the Industrial-Age psychology that labels people as expenses and cell phones as assets. Jobs should cater to our interests. Instead of telling people what they’re hired to do, we should ask them what they love to do. Then create a marriage between that passion and your needs. —Stephen Covey

There are three important aspects of consent in a twenty-first-century leadership relationship:

Leadership is about change. Change is mastered by invincible adaptability. Adaptability renders one able to serve in new and often unfamiliar circumstances. Leaders—both individuals and organizations—must adapt to remain effective.

The extraordinary dynamism of twenty-first-century leadership places all traditional organizations at risk. They must evolve to survive.

Everyone Can Lead, Because Everyone Can Serve. 2. The Most Valuable Resource of Any Enterprise is its People. 3. We Are in Transition from a Transaction-Based World to a Relationship-Based World. 4. Leadership is a Relationship Between Empowered, Consenting Adults. 5. Leadership is a Dynamic Relationship. 6. There is No Universal Leadership Style. 7. Leadership Roles Are Converging. 8. A Leader’s Unique Task is to Imagine and Advance a Vision. 9. Love is the Highest Level of Leadership Relationship.

Every moment of every hour of every day of your life, you’re serving someone.

As a leader, your goal is to create and nurture a relationship by focusing on how you can best serve.

Our work and working relationships, when most effective, are based on love.

The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. —Alvin Toffler

—Leadership failures often stem from confusion about who one is serving.

“Chemistry” may keep the relationship strong when it might otherwise seem irrational to maintain it. It’s one-of-a-kind. Those caught up in it grow together. They may become powerfully entangled, like sturdy vines. What they become, when joined, can’t be entirely foreseen. Nor can it be replicated.

Our relationship with our customers is one of love. The customers are not always right—but they always deserve respect. —Mike Faith, CEO, Headsets.com

A company that lives by the transaction, dies by the transaction. You should aim for a unique, durable relationship that customers value beyond any particular transaction.

The bottom line: in today’s relationship-based world, your single most important relationship is with your customers. To serve your customers effectively, you must serve your employees effectively. If your enterprise is going to serve your customers better than anyone else, you must serve your employees better than anyone else.

As Margaret Heffernan explains in How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success, “The culture you build for employees is the culture experienced by customers. They become mirror images of each other.”

—Break through the silos. Organizational functions should reflect customer demands, not enterprise convenience or preference. Beware, too, of silos of the mind.

There is a difference between leadership and management. The leader and the men who follow him represent one of the oldest, most natural and most effective of all human relationships. The manager and those he manages are a later product, with neither so romantic nor so inspiring a history. Leadership is of the spirit, compounded of personality and vision: its practice is an art. Management is of the mind, more a matter of science. Managers are necessary; leaders are essential.

Hour by hour, day by day, the primary way managers serve their customers is by serving their employees.

If you serve your employees well, everything else—from shareholder value to customer service—will fall into place. —Frank Blake Happy team members make happy customers. Our job as management is simply to make that a reality. —Walter Robb

—Managers are the stewards of internal and external relationships vital to organizational success.

Effective communicators utilize various techniques to maintain their focus on those they’re serving.

Unwillingness or incapacity to listen is a sure sign that someone is serving himself.

Attempts to stifle disagreement, dissent or negative feedback are sure signs that individuals and organizations are serving themselves.

Sociologist Lillian Rubin writes of the necessity of developing a “third ear.” This refers to the capacity to listen skillfully so as to hear not only what is being said, but what lies beneath what is being said.

The most effective communicators strive to make their lives a cavalcade of teachable moments.

Individuals and organizations which resist changing the format and substance of persuasive communications are, to that extent, serving themselves. If they fall into the trap of distorting reality to hold fast to outdated notions, they risk becoming impervious to truth itself. The resulting ineffectiveness of their persuasive communications can foreshadow a death spiral, a broader incapacity to serve.

How many people are trapped in their everyday habits: part numb, part frightened, part indifferent? To have a better life we must keep choosing how we’re living. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values Your values become your destiny. —Mahatma Gandhi

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. —Mahatma Gandhi

You can transform your life into a masterpiece of service, based on the decisions you make minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

—Select your inner circle with care. Your choice of those who populate your inner and outer lives is of defining significance.