You Serve Others – Who Serves You?
It seems like you serve others while others serve themselves.
- You stay late; others go home on time.
- You adapt; others make demands.
- You work to resolve conflict; others clash over trivialities.
- You think about what’s best for others; others think about what’s best for themselves.
You serve others. Who serves you?
Serve others:
Don’t expect team members to serve you. Expect them to serve each other.
Teams serve leaders when they serve each other – while they serve customers.
Successful leaders create environments where teammates serve each other.
Questions for team meetings:
- What do you admire about the person to your left or right? Servant-leaders honor others. Help your team honor each other.
- Who’s stuck? What might we do to get the wheels turning again? (If no one is stuck, you aren’t reaching high enough.)
- How might we better serve each other? Generate a list of three of four items and put one into practice.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if teams tried to outdo each other in service to each other?
You’d hear things like:
- How can I help?
- What can I do to be useful?
- Who might I know that could help?
- What’s slowing you down? Maybe I can help.
Yes but:
Service isn’t doing someone’s job for them. Service is helping others reach higher, faster, easier. Service is pulling the rope with someone, not for someone.
Service that enables drifters and slackers demotivates.
Receiving honor:
When you receive honor, turn others toward serving others.
Show gratitude. “I’m thankful for your honor.” Turn outward. “The thing I’m most thankful for is your service to each other.”
Great leaders display an outward mindset.
Giving honor:
When you see others serving others, honor it. “I noticed how you stepped up when Jeff faced a new challenge. Thank you.”
How might leaders create environments where teammates serve each other?
The “who serves me?” is simply in living out our convictions.. it’s about who we must be, not what we must get…
Thanks Ken. You put that clearly. We get energy when we live authentically.
Dear Ken and Dan,
For me this is hitting an often forgotten point about any kind of leadership… Leadership is not about our own rewards.
All the contrary – the leader is the person who takes the risk and potential blame if that is what it takes.
As soon as we are driven by reward we are not as much of leaders as we can be. The more we put our teams first – starting with building them up carefully and consitently and developing them to be better than we could ever be alone.
The reward to me is what Dan pointed out: “We get energy when we live authentically”. And what a reward that is!
Hi Claudia, thanks for the encouraging reflection. It’s pretty easy for me to drift into selfishness (and I’m pretty good at covering it!) Taking time with my Faith, Dan, and ohers, keeps me on track… (for me) it’s a journey that goes better with helpers.
Ken, does this work in places where people are just doing a job? Most toilet cleaners if told the story of the NASA janitor will just roll their eyes. They aren’t scrubbing lavatories out of conviction, just from economic necessity.
There are times when we do jobs that are tedious and repetitive and don’t feel significant.. doing them in integrity and to our best ability remains important, as is continuing to drive to use all our God given ability (which may open doors to other things)
…not all seasons of life feel fruitful.
Thanks Mitch. Mundane behaviors aren’t always exciting but they can be meaningful. Creating clean/healthy environments is more meaningful than taking out the trash, for example.
However, it’s unrealistic to thing hard work is easy and exciting all the time.
Sadly Ken, I doubt that even 1% of my co-workers would agree with you.
I get that Mitch .. I hope you’ll be a great example…
Recharge with Leadership Freak 🙂
Dan -Serving is a great topic. When I was in
charge of financial teams whether in a subsidiary or at the headquarters I tried to stress the singular importance of serving both the other staff groups but especially the operating businesses with timely responses.
The harder role is at the headquarters where many people, as you suggest, believe there future success comes from just serving the other headquarters groups. I always told my staff that this is a very short term view.
Brad
Brad James, The Business Zoo
Thanks Brad. “Timely responses” are powerful expressions of service. 🙂 Enjoy the holiday.
Dan,
Your message today is great, because, IMHO, it is one of those foundational principles, a value, that underlies and guides everything else we do and say. Thank you for continuing to encourage us to get to the core of wisdom.
Alan
‘Who serves you?’ People whom you buy things from 🙂
We are deep into re-framing my team building game around collaboration and organizational optimization around Servant Leadership, Teal, and some other similar supportive frameworks. Five of us are delving into issues and opportunities, some from the more academic perspective and some of us from the pragmatic.
The key seems to be implementation, which is no surprise, and the establishment of a SUPPORTIVE culture that will allow for some individual backsliding while pushing the normative behaviors farther along.
These concepts seem really easy to TALK about doing, but getting more people doing that WALK seems to be a real challenge. Concepts from various psychological constructs such as shaping are relevant, but it also seems like big adjustments in measurement systems and feedback is critical.
How about a bit more discussion of some of these things, or some more of Dan’s Freaking Great Posts around such things, my friend? Other resources? Other real tools?
Our Inquiring Minds want to consider a wider variety of possibilities.
Start each meeting by going around the table having each team member answer the question: Who has most helped you this week?
There is leadership, and then there is constructive leadership. Dan gets it with honoring others. This begins at the top. Wells Fargo did not use honor and now they face a class action suit with close to 4M bogus accounts! This dishonor trickled down to the customer. Effective leadership always includes honor which is a form of respect – this is always found in competent leadership. It’s time to weed out the hacks and raise up and reward honorable (truly competent) leaders.
Happy Sunday morning Dan!
Great post on this first day of the week. Leadership is all about helping others reach higher by asking engaging questions. It is not about doing it for them. As leaders, when we step in and do everything ourselves, we weeken our team members, and ultimately our teams.
Have a great week!
Jay
Hi! My name is Tristan Brew and I am a sophomore veteran attending Lipscomb University in Nashville. TN. I am fascinated by your take on Servant-Leadership and the kinds of questions a LEADER (emphasis implied) should ask. How can I help? And What can I do to be useful? I think are best kept for subordinates wishing to grow in initiative. A leader asking these questions possibly signals to me a weakness in listening…The more engaging and sophisticated the question, the more I am able to believe that I am either leading correctly or being led effectively.
Dan, this is a great topic! What is your feeling about the connection between servant leadership and transformational leadership? Topics such as vision, trust and influence if grown organically within the organization begin to shape a culture. From my experience, building and maintaining relationships with your staff can only perpetuate and facilitate growth. Our HR director has created a similar environment which isn’t a complete self-sacrifice of herself. She will certainly leverage her influence for the betterment of the department but at the end of the day would rather see the focus on growth and development of her staff. At first glance these leadership approaches seem very similar.