What Is Servant Leadership in Business
What Is Servant Leadership in Business
Having become a buzz word in certain circles, it’s not immediately apparent how serving people or servant leadership can be applied to the business world where there needs to be accountability, and goals. Business has profit-and-loss, and bottom lines, and needs to be rigid, right?
How can we make this happen in the workplace? Your typical performance review is an inaccurate look at how your employees are performing. More often than not, it’s a giant waste of time for you and your team. They’re a massive destruction, and demotivating. This was what Forbes had to say in an article aptly titled Performance Reviews Suck.
In my experience the way most performance reviews are accomplished, like what Forbes describes, are the complete opposite of servant leadership— the most dangerous aspect being demotivation.
In most situations performance reviews have you waiting 90 days to talk with someone about setting goals and projects which were set at the last performance review, and the two of you go over how well they accomplished them. The typical process also asks you to set goals for
your employees that are just outside of their ability to accomplish within a 90 day window. The school of thought around this process is that by setting goals just out of their reach, your employees will strive higher and work harder to meet them. If and when they don’t meet them at that predetermined window, at least they’ve exceeded the previous term’s mark.
The fundamental problem with this broken system is that it’s setting your employees up for failure; and that demotivates them, and hurts their confidence. Many performance reviews are also incredibly strict, and don’t allow opportunities for direct one-on-one conversation. No one is excited about it, and often employees are scared or putting on a mask anticipating you will only tell them what they are doing wrong.
Servant leadership turns this traditional performance review on its head. A servant leader asks for employer reviews. They ask questions like “what do you like about your job,," “what’s going well,” and “what can be done differently?” By going directly to the source and gaining actionable information from the people who know it best, management can find out how to make the most out of employees while at the same time giving them value.
This Week’s Take Away
How are your pursing your employees? Are you allowing them to review you? At Stewardship every quarter I make a point to meet with everyone for lunch. I let them choose the venue— some people pick coffee or a smoothie, and some ask for a steak dinner. In every case, my team knows they’re getting a free meal out of it, and that I’m not going to tell them how they’re winning or losing. I will show genuine care for them, and that their opinion is valued... and I get to know exactly what I need to do, to enable them to become the most effective asset to the company.
