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Servant Leadership
An Invitation
I received an invitation to write another article for International Coaching News in their issue about Leadership. In preparation for this, I decided to look at my own preferences regarding leadership, and how I tend to favor a collaborative approach. I don’t enjoy being in command; rather, I much prefer to facilitate people in groups to find their own inner leaders and to bring that forth in a collaborative and mutually supportive way. I realized that this is a form of leadership that some people refer to as Servant Leadership. Here is an excerpt from that article:
The Prime Directive
As a decent coach who recognizes that you are a spiritual being participating in a transitory physical human experience, you do personal inner work in order to heal your old wounds and raise your level of consciousness. This inner work usually involves processes to tame or quiet your ego-mind and to allow your soul to emerge into the forefront of awareness as a source of authentic guidance. In other words, as someone who is truly dedicated to raising awareness and improving the world, your first priority is to do your own work as an example to the people you intend to support.
This process of “walking the talk” is a prime directive of all coaches, and—not surprisingly—it is also a prime directive of the most successful and inspiring leaders. After all, as most of us already know, like it or not, the way we show up in the world reflects what we believe about ourselves and how we are likely to interact with others. But more than that: our expressed behaviors are clear indicators of our expected leadership style.
Leader Styles
Numerous attempts have been made to come up with a more-or-less definitive categorization of leader styles. One of the most succinct and expressive models consists of only 5 categories:
- Authoritarian. The leader is in command, and directs all operations toward the fulfillment of a desired objective.
- Collaborative. The leader seeks to encourage participation through some form of democratic process that allows team members to help define and achieve the objectives.
- Delegative. The leader assign responsibility for specific task or sub-goals to individual team members, presumably based upon their competencies.
- Transactional. The leader uses a reward system to motivate team members to achieve specific goals in service to the main objective.
- Transformational. The leader holds the vision for the ultimate objective and inspires team members to enroll themselves into this vision and empowers them to bring it into reality.
Every leader style has benefits and drawbacks, and the consummate leader invariably engages many different styles as needed according to the circumstances at hand.
To find out more about this topic—and to support International Coaching News—please read the entire original article here.