Applying Servant Leadership in Practice: Principles and Practices

This paper delves into the application of servant leadership, a leadership style emphasizing service to the workforce rather than traditional hierarchical control. It outlines core principles such as empathy, active listening, conceptualization, persuasion, healing, stewardship, foresight, team-building, and commitment to team growth. The paper highlights the importance of quality improvement initiatives, particularly educational workshops and regular audits, to enhance leaders' understanding and implementation of servant leadership. It further explores the roles of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in encouraging team compliance, with personal growth and development identified as key intrinsic motivators. The paper concludes by examining the characteristics of performance-driven teams that practice servant leadership, including collective decision-making, customer satisfaction focus, and corporate social responsibility, emphasizing the leader's role in serving the team and organization for collective success.

Running head: APPLYING SERVANT STYLE OF LEADERSHIP
APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Introduction
Leadership is the skill and functionalities associated with the act of guiding and directing
a group of individuals, towards fulfillment of a collective organizational goal or objective. A
leader is primarily the individual who is responsible for leading or directing teams towards
achievement of both personal and professional development. Contrary to traditional and popular
beliefs, a servant style leadership is based upon the foundational principle that the leader must
aim to serve the workforce and not the other way around (Kashyap & Rangnekar, 2016).). The
following paper will hence extensively discuss upon the principles of servant leadership, scope
of quality improvement, comparisons between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and the key
characteristics of performance driven teams practicing the same
Discussion
Principles of Servant Leadership
In a servant style of leadership where a leader must serve and not traditionally lead, he or
she must be aware of the following principles (Gandolfi & Stone, 2018; Grisaffe, VanMeter &
Chonko, 2016):
 Empathy: A competent servant leader must be empathetic and understanding towards
the unique perceptions, ideas, opinions and decisions of team members and also
demonstrate a non-judgmental attitude towards their application.
 Active Listening: A competent servant leader is expected to engage in two way
communication where he or she must first actively listen to the team members’ concerns
during the decision-making process.

2APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
 Conceptualization: Servant leaders must engage in decision-making and problem-
solving skills bases on long term benefits in the form of abstract, hypothetical concepts
instead of limiting application of the same across merely daily life functions.
 Persuasion: A servant leader is not expected to be authoritative or engage in delegation,
but is rather recommended to gently persuade and convince team members to cooperate
for collective fulfilment of organizational objectives.
 Healing: The aim of a servant leader is to ensure comprehensive and holistic
development and growth of team members via mentoring, discussing and coaching
activities.
 Stewardship: A servant leader must engage in caring for and building trust, not only
across team members but also across the entire organization for the purpose of achieving
collective wellness within the community.
 Foresight: A servant leader must have the ability to analyze and draw conclusions from
previous mistakes of situations and apply the same for influencing existing decision
making and foresee future scope of organizational threats.
 Team-building: A servant leader must aim to engage in activities and functions which
directly have the potential to build unity, harmony and cooperation across members of the
team.
 Commitment towards Team Growth: The aim of the servant leader is to ensure, not
just collective achievement of goals and objectives but also the growth, development and
improvement of each team member across both professional as well as personal levels.

3APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Quality Improvement Initiative
It is worthwhile to denote that the concepts of a servant leadership style diverts
extensively from commonly prevalent leadership activities of leading, delegating and
demonstrating significant authority over team members. Thus, it is unsurprising to find leaders
relatively unaware of the principles and applications of servant leadership style which in turn can
contribute to delayed leadership activities and collective organizational goal achievement. Thus a
key quality improvement initiative required to enhance knowledge and awareness across leaders
is the implementation of an educational and training workshop (Chiniara & Bentein, 2018).
An educational and training workshop, comprising of potential leaders being taught
concerning the principles and application of servant leadership, either via written, verbal,
kinesthetic or audiovisual means, can prove to be a useful initiative in terms of increasing the
quality of teams and leaders with respect to implementation of this leadership style (Chiniara &
Bentein, 2016). Additionally for the purpose of assessing competencies of teams and leaders
with respect to servant leadership styles, the workforce can be assessed in the form of quality
audit initiatives periodically, on grounds of the above mentioned 10 principles and traits, which
are: listening, empathy, awareness, healing, conceptualization, persuasion, stewardship,
foresight, growth commitment and community building (Mughal & Kamal, 2018).
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
During implementation of quality improvement activities, educating leaders and teams
based on factors which can encourage levels of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, will pave the
way for increased team compliance. In the case of encouraging teams and leaders on the
application of servant style of leadership, a key intrinsic motivation is personal growth and
development (Qiu, Dooley & Xie, 2020). A servant style of leadership is based on principles of

4APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
not just serving but also engaging in meaningful and fulfilling communications and activities
which prompt harmonious leadership and recognition of personal strengths and weaknesses.
Thus, association between personal improvement and servant leadership is a key intrinsic factor
which may motivate individuals to engage in the same (Yang, Ming, Ma & Huo, 2017).
A key extrinsic motivation is customer satisfaction as well as organizational profits. A
servant leadership style is characterized by empathetic, persuasive and cooperative relationships
across members. This is in turn, can influence team members to communicate empathetically and
persuasively with customers. This in turn, is likely to pave the way for increased customer
satisfaction, customer loyalty and organizational profits (Peachey et al., 2018):
Characteristics of Performance-driven Teams
Teams which are driven by performance and application of servant style of leadership
have been evidenced to practice the following characteristics (Allen et al., 2018):
 Collective decision-making: Teams practicing servant leadership engage in the
implementation of decisions which not only benefit a single member, but rather the
entire, organization and the community in the long run.
 Customer Satisfaction: Teams base their sense of performance and achievement upon
their ability to empathize with customer needs and thus, work towards maintaining
customer satisfaction and positive feedback.
 Corporate Social Responsibility: Teams practicing servant leadership focus on
corporate social responsibility comprising of activities and targets aiming for
achievement of positive community rather than organizational outcomes.

5APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Conclusion
This paper thus provides a succinct yet detailed discussion on the key principles and
components underlying the learning and application of a servant style of leadership. One of the
most important principles based upon which a servant leader must work, is the need and
expectation to serve rather than engaging in traditional leadership qualities of delegation of
authoritative communication. Considering its diversion from age-old leadership concepts, there
is a need to engage in educational workshops and frequent audits as quality improvement
initiatives. To conclude, servant leaders must be aware of the risks and limitations when applying
this style of leadership to professional practice.

6APPLYING SERVANT LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
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