Servant Leadership traits

Servant leadership is a timeless concept and many world leaders have practices and promoted it in past.

                   About four decades ago, Robert Greenleaf voiced the concept in his published essay on servant leadership; highlighted the need of change of leadership style. He promoted servant leadership, researched and educated servant leadership in institutions and organizations.

             In servant leadership, a leader is servant first. Servant leader is a person with natural instinct to server others, have feeling to help, improve others first; that leads to aspire to lead.

             In recent times, newly elected prime minister of mighty democracy called himself as a chief servant of the nation; setting up an example in this century.

Quotes from history:

"the king shall consider as good, not what pleases himself but what pleases his subjects"    - Chanakya

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”     - Rabindranath Tagore

“The noblest question in the world is, What Good may I do in it?”    - Benjamin Franklin

Traits of Servant Leaders:

to serve first: Servant first and leader first are two extreme types. Feeling to serve first then aspire to lead is servant leader style. That is sharply different from leader first.

put others first: Make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. Focusing and measuring on, Do those served grow as persons? do they become healthier, wiser, freer, able to make decisions and improved to be servant? And is the least privileged from the society benefited?

first among equals: A servant leader does not consider him above those he leads. Rather, he is primus inter pares from Latin, meaning "first in among equals." That is, he sees those he leads as peers to teach and to learn from. He is willing to lead others in order to reach a goal, but he doesn't believe that being the leader makes him better than others.

team builder: The servant leader is a excellent team builder. Servant leader will be able to get maximum from the strengths of followers; and will not hesitate to follow as and when needed. Such a leader doesn't lead by decree. Instead, he or she leads by allowing everyone to do what they do well.

There are various leadership styles being practiced and it is subject of argument to declare any as best. 
But servant leadership certainly provides a descent approach that can be practiced in social and corporate world. 

With excessive dominance and fierce competition in present world, can true practitioners of servant leadership survive?

References -:

https://www.greenleaf.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership

Leadership in practice

Dedicated to all leaders i have been learning from -

Some of the meaningful things I have extracted from my little professional experience. Being part of critical, most escalated project is never easy, but we (team) came out of it, took the situation to some better level. Seniors, leads and team worked out with some excellent strategies to overcome anomalies, challenges to build a unit of success, achieve the tough target and make it possible.
5 key features of leadership in practice –

• Teams that gel well together, excel in performance:

In any industry if people working together have good bond they support each other.

If team is supports each other then there is very less chances of internal arguments, clashes which helps in increasing productivity.

Friendly environment and healthy competition encourage and motivates to contribute.

In our terms we say, “Together Everyone Achieves More”.

• Appreciate and not escalate:

True leaders support their teams and appreciate more rather than escalate.

Appreciating small things doesn’t cost much, but in consolidation it creates a huge impact and results are very much positive towards the organization interests.

• Escalation - hold your nerves and do the best you can:

When everyone is questioning over abilities and efforts of your team then giving up is never an option, only your best work is the answer to any situation. By taking positively escalations can be converted into appreciations, only by means of thorough professional and best approach towards the job.

• True leaders – create leaders not followers:

True leaders focus on encouraging teams to think beyond obvious, allows taking risks.

They believes inputs from every level has importance and don’t hesitate to accept faults.

A lead promotes the potential of individual and helps in achieving their goals along with project tasks.

It’s like that, if you give a fish to hungry man, you will be able to help him once; but if you teach him fishing, you have helped him for lifetime.

• People at ground makes the difference:

No matter how much rules and best practices we apply, it is vital to have passionate and committed people at the ground, who do the actual work.

Passionate people about their work doesn’t much bother on escalation and appreciation, they set their own bench mark of job satisfaction and perform at par.

Commitment towards anything is very important. It helps in meet deadlines without much forcing to people, reduce the follow-ups and shares the responsibility.
Heights and strength of any pyramid is depends on its base.
All these terms are by the people I have been around with. It’s never like we had smooth sailing project by having these practices but we have learn to adjust our sails according to winds and keep it on waves in storms.

Thank you,
GrittyFeed Blog