The Servant Leader: How to Build a Creative Team, Develop Great Morale, and Improve Bottom-Line Performance

by James A. Autry

Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness, and a preoccupation with efficiency has proved, over and over again, to be the enemy of effectiveness.

the only way you can manifest your character, your personhood, and your spirit in the workplace is through your behavior.

A primary function of the servant leader is to assure that an organization’s people are imbued with a clear understanding of vision. Beyond that, the leader must help people relate that vision to their own vision in a way that directly aligns their work with the goals they want to accomplish and the goals of the organization.

All of us—whoever we are, whatever jobs we hold, and however we look—are more similar than dissimilar. Underneath it all, we have very similar hopes and fears, desires and ambitions. We love, we celebrate, we suffer loss, and we grieve.

Business is about people. Business is of, by, about, and for people. And it is ultimately how you are with those people that makes all the difference in whether or not your spirituality finds an expression within the context of your work.

The five ways of being are: be authentic, be vulnerable, be accepting, be present, and be useful.

Be the same person in every circumstance.

Hold to the same values in whatever role you have. Always be your real self.

Authenticity means much more than being technically truthful.

mentoring is also about helping people learn to be themselves. You do that by honoring what is good and unique about those you are mentoring, not by trying to bend them to your image.

Expressing anger honestly is very different from acting in anger. You can properly express anger, but you can’t act properly if you act in anger.

The art of acceptance does not imply that you accept everyone’s ideas without critical analysis, discussion, and judgment—only that you accept the ideas as valid for discussion and review, and that you focus on the ideas themselves, not on the person who presented them.

It also means that you accept and embrace disagreement as a human part of the process of work.

All can win; nobody has to lose. Authentic people never feel themselves to be losers; thus, they can never be losers. Others may call you a loser, but that’s only because they have some need to feel that they are winners—something they simply can’t do unless they can think of someone else as a loser.

The most important thing you can be as a leader is useful.

One of the primary functions of the manager/ leader is to assure that people get the resources they need to do the job. To be a leader who serves, you must think of yourself as—and indeed must be—their principal resource.

An organization’s “vision” should be conceived as the confluence of three interrelated but distinct aspects: purpose, mission, and values.

purpose describes the greater reason for a company’s or organization’s being in the world; mission describes what the company or organization does to fulfill its purpose; values describe how the people are together as they go about performing their mission in order to fulfill their purpose.

Without an understanding of purpose, an organization will become dysfunctional

the purpose of an organization helps people define the purpose of their own involvement and helps them align their own purpose with the organization’s purpose.

The purpose of an organization might evolve over the years, but if it changes quickly or radically, something’s wrong.

The mission question is simply, “What do we do?” By extension, it’s, “What do we do in order to fulfill our purpose?”

accomplishing goals is not the same as fulfilling either the organization’s or your personal purpose.

Without a framework of understood and shared values like those just listed, a company frequently will become a collection of individual fiefdoms (departments) in which management people are aggressive and competitive with one another, jealous of their prerogatives, paranoid about their positions, and generally distrustful of their employees. They operate with the attitude that, left to their own devices, the employees will always do the wrong thing.

But efficiency is not the same as effectiveness, and it is the latter to which servant leadership most concerns itself. If the people are led in a way that allows them all to be effective in their work, then efficiency follows. It does not work the other way around.

their reaction was the normal reaction to sudden change: fear. And their reaction was normal for anyone suddenly thrust into an unexpected position of responsibility: fear.

when tempted to tell, ask instead.

Try to think of the negative appraisal meeting as “the caring confrontation” in which, no matter what the response of the employee, you must demonstrate that you’re doing this because you care that the person is given as good a chance as possible to succeed.

After you ask these “Why” questions, it’s imperative that you wait silently for the answers.

Be sensitive to the fact that in criticizing the person’s work, you are often criticizing part of the definition of that person’s self-perception.

you should think of this meeting as a way to save the person’s job, not to take it;

productivity comes from commitment, not from control.

efficiency is often the enemy of effectiveness. What you desire is a result that will be effective in the long run, not efficient in the short run. So take the time to give everyone a voice in the plan.

If our job is to give people the resources they need and to assure the environment and conditions in which they can do their best work, then we should abandon the myth that all employees can be treated equally.

My feeling was that I was not in the law enforcement business, and while I felt we as citizens should cooperate and support law enforcement officials, we should not treat our employees as criminal suspects. Rather, we should treat them as people who need help.

Loyalty as a personal trait should most assuredly be enduring, but loyalty as behavior to fulfill a commitment can be episodic. This is a very important understanding in leading the new workers.

For the organization and its leaders, loyalty to employees means being honest and trusting, treating people as individuals and not as numbers, responding appropriately to special needs, providing resources, and, most important, acting with integrity.

If loyalty requires dishonesty or the violation of trust, it is not true loyalty in the context of the workplace.

You must be able to feel and exhibit affection and goodwill and, yes, loyalty toward the people you have to appraise negatively or even fire.

If you can’t prevent another person from being an angry participant in a discussion, thus cannot take the heat out of the room, then you must focus on your own behavior in the midst of the heat. You must advocate for your viewpoint without letting yourself become “the enemy” or seeing others as “the enemy.” I know it’s very difficult to remain calm, grounded, and centered when others around you are agitated, but this is another test of servant leadership and an important lesson to demonstrate to your people, because when they see you remaining calm in the midst of a heated discussion, they themselves are calmer, more centered, and more productive.

“I’m not questioning that,” I said, “but I also know a lot of people who are conscientious and hardworking but who don’t spent all that time at it. In a situation like this,” I continued, “I usually find one of two questions needs answering. One is, what’s wrong with Jerry? The other is, what’s wrong with the job? In other words, it makes me wonder if Jerry has a problem that keeps him from accomplishing his job in the time given, or on the other hand, if the job itself is structured so that it can’t be done during regular hours. If the former, we need to work with Jerry to help him become more proficient and productive. If the latter, then you need to do something about it.”

Encourage your employees to serve on committees and boards, to do hands-on service work, fund-raising, and so on. And give them the time off to attend the meetings and special events. All of these provide excellent opportunities for both professional and personal growth. And it goes without saying that your organization’s reputation in the community will be greatly enhanced.

The key is to always direct any discussion right back to the performance standards.