Servant Leadership

There are numerous definitions of leadership, as leaders can be successful with various types of education, personalities, as well as theories. Servant leadership is one leadership style with specific characteristics (Van Dierendonck, 2011). Servant leadership is a set of practices and philosophies that enriches individuals’ lives, builds better organizations, and ultimately creates a more just and caring world. The common features of a servant leader include considering employees’ needs first; committing to assisting employees improve the performance or develop expertise; and insisting that the organization needs a positive contribution (Barbutto & Wheeler, 2006). The local council needs to adopt the servant leadership style mainly because employees are public servants. Public servants are employees who willfully sign a contract to serve the interests of the public, which is, to a certain level, similar to servant leadership which focuses on considering employees first (Kasner, 2017; Starratt, 2005). Therefore, discussing servant leadership and its role in changing the City Council leadership is significant.

Theoretical Framework of Servant Leadership

Greenleaf was the first person to introduce the theory of servant leadership in his 1970 essay titled ‘The Servant Leader.’ Other theorists have since contributed to its understanding. Larry Spear (2002) is one such theorist who outlined the characteristics of a leader based on Greenleaf’s essay. These characteristics include building community, committing to the growth of others, stewardship, foresight, conceptualization, persuasion, awareness, healing, empathy, and listening. Senjaya et al. (2008) used quantitative and qualitative studies and developed seven leadership measures of six dimensions. The six dimensions include transforming influence, transcendental spirituality, responsible morality, covenantal relationship, authentic self, and voluntary subordination. They asserted that their model extended previous work on servant leadership through an emphasis on followers, service, and moral-spiritual dimensions.

Servant leadership is an attitude toward leadership responsibility as much as it is a leadership style. It is often understood and presented in juxtaposition with hierarchal and autocratic leadership styles. Servant leadership posits that traditional leadership styles are lacking in motivating followers (Gregory et al., 2004). In today’s mindset of enduring, productive, and effective organizations, firms can be re-engineered, restructured, or reorganized to be more effective. However, these actions will not be successful for long unless the change is founded on human resource preeminence (Liden et al., 2008). Process and people will always be more important than organizational structure and tasks in accomplishing productivity and goals. Effective processes and systems are only effective if the employees that make them are also effective. The highly-trained and motivated human resource provides an assurance that an organization will effectively accomplish its goals. Servant leaders motivate their followers by empowering them and investing in them as well to become their best (Liden et al., 2008).

Decision-Making In Servant Leadership

Dennis et al. (2010) assert that mentoring and coaching are key in organizations that pursue servant leadership. Trying to control employees often does not bring out the best in them. Servant leaders tap into the employees’ best by mentoring, coaching, inspiring, and engaging them. The leaders help their teams understand the organizational goals, mission and vision, and the employees’ role in fulfilling the same. After developing the employees, the leaders target to unleash the potential and energy of their colleagues.

People need to gain experience in making their own decisions because there may be moments when they will need to make decisions they would otherwise not make (Melchar & Bosco, 2010). Servant leaders encourage their colleagues to make the maximum contributions to the organizations, including decision-making. In other words, decisions are made through the collection of ideas from the different team members and after which the final conclusion is reached to ensure the best option to a challenge is utilized.

Changes in the City Council Command Structure

The city council is not created to maximize shareholders’ wealth; rather, it is charged with promoting public welfare at the city level. The efficient and effective execution of this mission is what is paid for by the taxpayers. It is also the motivating factor for employees. However, a blurred mission can result in unmotivated employees and estranged employees (Jamrong, 2004). Employees, in such cases, fail to see how their individual efforts affect the performance of the council directly, and hence, they begin to focus on producing outputs as opposed to achieving outcomes (Bakker, 2015). In other words, employees begin to work on auto-pilot, not giving much thought to what they do, and instead, are stuck in delivering services while disengaged from the council’s mission (Chen et al., 2011). This is an unfortunate situation because when employees lose sight of the council’s overall mission, they may only care for things they can control directly, such as protecting their own area of control. The city council needs to change the command structure to one that is more engaging with its employees.

Policy Changes in the City Council

Transformation effort must begin with a rededication of the mission commitment by the employees (Chen et al., 2011). This will mean helping the employees rediscover why the city council was created and going beyond that by calling for excellent service provided to the public. This will require an alteration of the council’s mission to one that the employees can easily relate to and adapt to. The goal will be to stimulate innovative thinking and making the council’s reorientation an impossible fact to doubt.

Once the mission is articulated, the leadership will need to create a firm foundation through the establishment of improvement in performance against the modified mission as the fundamental goal of the transformation effort (Chen et al., 2011). This will entail selecting improvement and performance-driven goals and formulating specific initiatives. In the process, skill or performance gaps in the council will be exposed.

Servant Leadership at the City Council

Servant leadership will help in facilitating the leadership change process in several ways (Melchar et al., 2010). When the leader begins to treat employees with care and concern, employees will do the same to the clients and the public they serve. The leaders will attract the trust of the employees, which will improve the council’s credibility. Servant leadership will develop a corporate culture that is positive and one which will prevail over the current negative culture in the council. The leadership style will also motivate and encourage high performance among employees.

As Wong et al. (2007) suggested, shared leadership through shared decision-making will represent the city council’s ability to allocate resources and make important decisions. This will empower employees to work toward the city council’s mission and for the good of the group. When servant leadership is implemented in the organization, relationships will be nurtured, and an organizational community will be built. Healthy relationships between employees will nurture teams that will accomplish more and increase productivity as well as enhance the quality performance of the organization (Wong et al., 2007)

In conclusion, servant leadership at the city council will enable employees to work with one clear mission in mind to achieve the best overall performance for the organization. Decision-making and ideas-sharing that will be encouraged through this leadership style will increase confidence in individuals and in the origination which in turn, will positively impact customer satisfaction and employee retention.

References

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Barbuto Jr, J. E., & Wheeler, D. W. (2006). Scale development and construct clarification of servant leadership. Group & Organization Management, 31(3), 300-326.

Chen, G., Sharma, P. N., Edinger, S. K., Shapiro, D. L., & Farh, J. L. (2011). Motivating and demotivating forces in teams: Cross-level influences of empowering leadership and relationship conflict. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(3), 541.

Dennis, R. S., Kinzler-Norheim, L., & Bocarnea, M. (2010). Servant leadership theory. In servant leadership (pp. 169-179). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Greenleaf, R. K. The Servant as Leader (Newton Centre, MA: Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1970). Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness.

Gregory Stone, A., Russell, R. F., & Patterson, K. (2004). Transformational versus servant leadership: A difference in leader focus. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 25(4), 349-361.

Jamrog, J. (2004). The perfect storm: The future of retention and engagement. People and Strategy, 27(3), 26.

Kasner, A. J. (2017). Local Government Design, Mayoral Leadership and Law Enforcement Reform. Stan. L. Rev., 69, 549.

Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. The leadership quarterly, 19(2), 161-177.

Melchar, D. E., & Bosco, S. M. (2010). Achieving high organization performance through servant leadership.

Sendjaya, S., Sarros, J. C., & Santora, J. C. (2008). Defining and measuring servant leadership behaviour in organizations. Journal of Management studies, 45(2), 402-424.

Spears, L. C., & Lawrence, M. (Eds.). (2002). Focus on leadership: Servant-leadership for the twenty-first century. John Wiley & Sons.

Starratt, R. J. (2005, June). Responsible leadership. In The Educational Forum (Vol. 69, No. 2, pp. 124-133). Taylor & Francis Group.

Van Dierendonck, D. (2011). Servant leadership: A review and synthesis. Journal of management, 37(4), 1228-1261.

Wong, P. T., Davey, D., & Church, F. B. (2007). Best practices in servant leadership. Servant Leadership Research Roundtable, School of Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship, Regent University, 7(1), 1.