Servant Leadership Approach: Managing Millennial Employees

This essay evaluates the key elements of a servant leadership approach to understand its importance in managing millennial employees and how this approach contributes to the success of a company. It analyses the pros and cons of this approach and provides recommendations for leaders who want to implement it in their company.

Organisational Behaviour

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Leadership is an important topic which has gained popularity in the 1900s because
leaders have the ability to influence and motivate individuals which contributes to the
success of an enterprise (Schuh et al., 2014). Leadership is about motivating,
enabling and influencing individuals in order to achieve corporate goals of a
company. There are many popular leadership styles which have gained popularity in
the past few decades such as transformational, follower-centric, competency and
managerial. Servant leadership is a management approach which has gained
popularity as it is one of the key employee-centric approaches. The leaders who
implement this approach focus on understanding the needs of employees and
fulfilling their needs to ensure that they work towards achieving common
organisational objectives (Liden et al., 2014). This essay will evaluate the key
elements of a servant leadership approach to understand its importance in managing
millennial employees and how this approach contributes to the success of a
company. Many experts argue that servant leadership management style is the best
approach when it comes to managing employees in workplace. Pros and cons of this
approach will be analysed in this essay and recommendations will be given for
leaders who wanted to implement this approach in the company.
Servant leadership management approach focuses on a view that the leaders should
serve follower rather than vice versa; this approach helps the leaders in
understanding and fulfilling the demands of employees as their facilitators, stewards,
and coaches which lead to development of employees and the organisation. The
objective of servant leaders is to ask employees how they can help them rather than
expecting from them to serve them (Panaccio et al., 2015). There are key
characteristics of servant leaders which distinguish them from other leaders. They
are considered as egalitarian, nurturing, selfless, humble, ethical and empathetic
coaches who support their followers rather than dominating them. The key goal of
servant leadership approach is to support the overall development of stakeholders
by fulfilling their needs. It is considered that the servant leaders have natural desire
to help and support others by nurturing them. They did not help others just to
achieve their objective; however, they help them to contribute to their overall
development (Hoch et al., 2018). There are specific ethical and moral principles
which guide the actions of servant leaders which guide them towards achieving
common goals.

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These leaders lead without being judgemental about their employees, and they
serve them without evoking superior status. They avoid criticising others and prefer
to work with them to ensure that improve their overall performance (Chen, Zhu, and
Zhou, 2015). This leadership approach was introduced around four decades ago,
and since then it has gained popularity especially among those leaders who leader
millennial employees. This approach is suitable for handling millennial employees
because they did not prefer a dominating leadership approach and it is hard to retain
them in the workplace without providing them a healthy and nurturing working
environment (Liden et al., 2015)). Studies have shown that organisations in which
the senior level executives exhibit servant leadership traits are more likely to have
higher performance (return on assets). Based on these elements, it can be said that
implementation of a servant leadership approach resulted in increasing the chances
of the company to achieve effectiveness. The leaders are able to fulfil the demands
of employees which motivate them to improve their performance in order to achieve
the organisational goals.
As per the above discussion, it can be said that the servant leaders approach is one
of the best leadership styles which can be implemented by modern leaders. There
are various pros of this statement which provides advantages to the leaders,
employees and the corporation (van Dierendonck and Patterson, 2015). A key
advantage of servant leadership approach is that it assists the leaders in fulfilling the
social responsibility of the corporation towards its stakeholders. In the modern era,
pressure has been created on companies, especially, multinational organisations to
ensure that they take appropriate steps to fulfil their social responsibilities. These
responsibilities are imposed based on the principle of corporate governance under
which the leaders have to implement policies which are focused on maintaining a
balance between the interests of stakeholders. Many companies implement a
corporate social responsibility (CSR) structure in the workplace to ensure that they
disclose the actions taken by them to contribute to the benefit of the stakeholders
(Jones Christensen, Mackey, and Whetten, 2014). These objectives can be achieved
by implementing a servant leadership approach which is focused on nurturing the
employees.
These leaders are also focused on nurturing other stakeholders of the company that
assist them in fulfilling its corporate responsibilities which improve the brand image

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of the organisation. A positive brand image attracts more customers to the company.
For example, a recent study shows that 73 percent of millennial customers prefer to
pay extra for products which are sustainable (Curtin, 2018). Similarly, millennial
employees prefer to work under leaders who are nurturing rather than dominating
which resulted in increasing retention rate of employees. Another benefit of servant
leadership management approach is that it improves a company and society over
the long term. Servant leaders are ethical coaches, and they are guided by various
ethical principles. Similarly, they focus on ensuring that they comply with ethical
principles which lead to improving society along with the corporation. Servant
leaders attract employee trust and build strong bonds with improves credibility of the
organisation’s brand (Van Dierendonck et al., 2014). Servant leaders usually develop
a positive corporate culture which supports employees and creates a positive work
environment which retains millennial employees. This approach also motives
employees to perform better which resulted in increasing the profitability of the
company.
The points mentioned above show that the servant leadership approach is the best
way of managing employees in the modern era; however, there are various cons of
this approach as well which creates challenges. A key challenge with servant
leadership management approach is that it takes a long time for the leader to
achieve the common objectives (Yoshida et al., 2014). It takes time to build
relationship with employees that are based on trust; the leader has to show his/her
commitment towards employees and nurture their needs to ensure that they work
together as a team to achieve corporate goals. The leader is also required to consult
with all employees to understand their views regarding the changes in the workplace
which increases the time taken in decision making. It makes it difficult for the servant
leaders to quickly adapt as per emerging changes in the market and ensure that they
are ready for any recent factors which could adversely affect the growth of the
enterprise (Chiniara and Bentein, 2016).
Another problem with servant leadership is that leaders find it difficult to control the
team who they are serving which leads to chaos. The responsibilities are distributed
by the leaders among employees in servant leadership approach; therefore, the
leader finds it difficult to establish his/her authority back in the organisation if the
employees are not able to handle the pressure or work accordingly (Winston and

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Fields, 2015). Critics such as Deborah Eicher-Catt have argued against the servant
leadership management approach by providing that they are vastly overrated and
gender discriminatory (Eicher-Catt, 2005). Corporations also find it difficult to find
leaders who are ready to adopt this leadership approach since they have to cater to
employees’ needs rather than establishing their authority in the company. Many
times these leaders are perceived as weak that are not able to handle the workplace
operations on their own.
To conclude, servant leadership approach focuses on fulfilling the needs of
employees and nurturing them rather than dominating them to motivate them. This
approach has gained popularity in the past few decades because it assists leaders in
building strong relationships with employees which leads to the effectiveness of the
enterprise. There are various pros of considering servant leadership as the best
management approach such as fulfilment of corporate responsibility, strong
relationship with employees, retention of staff members, positive workplace
environment, growth of employees and others. However, there are cons of this
approach as well which include perception of leaders as weak, lack of leadership
authority in case of chaos, time-consuming decision-making process, and others.
There are various recommendations which can assist leaders in effectively
implementing a servant leadership approach in the organisation.
Leaders should value people while implementing this approach to build trust and
strong bond with employees without which this leadership approach cannot become
effective. Leaders should engage in development of other employees and build
strong communities which lead to overall growth of the company and society.
Servant leaders should not completely delegate their authorities to employees;
instead, they should remain in charge without being dominating to ensure that they
are able to handle the operations of the company without adversely affecting the
needs of employees. The leaders should be genuine towards employees while
engaging in their personal matters to ensure that employees trust them. It will lead to
a positive work environment which is important for retaining millennial staff members
in the workplace which contributes to the overall success of the enterprise.

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