The servant leader
A recent survey conducted by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) of 5,000 employees...
...indicated only 7 per cent rated their boss as ‘empowering’ and only 10 per cent even found their leader ‘accessible.’
The study of leadership – ranging from the style of dead generals (Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Sun Zhu being popular business school starting points), through to Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence has not, until comparatively recently, looked at the unique and specific leadership requirements
of the voluntary sector.
So the first of this season’s Charity Talks put on by the Centre for Charity Effectiveness on ‘Transforming your charity – servant leadership’ has hit the spot. Stroke Association CEO Jon Barrick (see Caritas, issue 5, April 2008, page 37) gave a rousing example of how the approach documented by its architect Robert Greenleaf back in 1977 has worked well in this charity. ‘Superior, most productive organisations are those where the people who are inside it do the right things, things that optimise total effectiveness at the right times because they understand the things that ought to be done and they believe inside their souls that those are the right things to do and they take the necessary actions without being closely supervised and instructed to do so,’ says Greenleaf.
This neatly sums up why ‘liberating leadership’ could be said to have found its new home in the voluntary sector. Barrick shared with a highly engaged audience his approach – to lead through persuasion centred on a vision. It does seem to have worked – the roadshows, the open door policy and the ‘everyone can make
a proposal that will be listened to’ philosophy has paid off. Stroke awareness – both its prevention and aftermath – has a much higher national priority than ever before. And I am not alone in having a severe stroke survivor in my household to see this for myself. According to Barrick, organisations need to look closely at any systems that could be holding people back – the mantra being that ‘nobody shines if we don’t all shine’. In other words, complex hierarchies and rule-sets that stifle ideas and accessibility to the leader might work for the armed forces but don’t really have a place in a beneficiary-driven sector.
Just in case there is any confusion that the servant leader might be the ‘Mr/Ms Popular’ featured in Dotlich and Cairo’s Why CEOs Fail: The 11 Behaviors That Can Derail Your Climb to the Top and How to Manage Them, there shouldn’t be. A servant leader might be accessible, but gets tough when needed – for example, getting a merger done or having to deal with a performance management situation. One can only hope that if that CMI survey was conducted among just voluntary sector employees the appalling statistics on accessibility and empowerment would be very different indeed.
Author: Clarissa Dann
Clarissa Dann was the editor of Caritas as well as an HR and management online service,he People Bulletin until July 2011.
She is now the editor of the specialist trade finance magazine, Trade and Forfaiting Review which can be viewed at www.tfreview.com but does write on charity finance and investment from time to time.
Clarissa has a background in legal and professional publishing, as well as business journalism and holds an MBA from
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