Servant Leader or Self-Serving Leader?

Coming from the Holy Week and thinking about Jesus Christ the Savior also made me think about Jesus the Leader. What can I learn from Him as a leader? Jesus was clear about His mission here on earth. Of Himself, He said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” That was evident in His earthly life and became all the more so in His sacrificial death on the cross.

More and more books have been written on Jesus’ leadership model.  At the same time, more and more businesses are embracing the concept of servant leadership as a professional development intervention to help improve efficiency and productivity, with a dose of humility, particularly in the area of customer service whether external or internal. 

I entered the training industry back in 2000 by facilitating a leadership workshop entitled Servant Leadership based on the Lead Like Jesus Encounter. I became a master trainer for and eventually a country representative for the Philippines. When we first ran the program, I honestly thought it would not work because of its spiritual underpinnings. But more and more companies are coming to realize that the nature and quality of one’s leadership is not just a matter of experience and education or people skills, but is essentially character-based, founded on such values as stewardship, responsibility and accountability. It has been 15 years and we’re still running the program in the corporate world.

While every manager and supervisor I have engaged on the topic wants to see themselves as a servant leader, admittedly we are still far off from Jesus’ self-sacrificial ideal. So whenever I am asked to facilitate this program or to intervene. The first step is to help them realize and acknowledge that they’re not. A wise adage says recognition is the prerequisite to recovery. And any skilled doctor would like to diagnose first before giving a prescription. So that’s how we’d approach any servant leadership intervention. Hence our first aim to move away from being self-serving leaders.

Gordon McDonald, in his book, Ordering Your Private World, distinguished between two kinds of people, which I find helpful in understanding the difference between these two forms of leadership: the driven and the called.

People who are driven, Gordon says, think they own everything: their relationships, their possessions, their positions. As a result, they spend most of their lives protecting what they own.

You can tell if you are a driven, self-serving leader by the way you treat feedback. Have you ever received feedback from subordinates? If you “killed the messenger,” you might be a self-serving leader. Why?  A self-serving leader sees critical feedback as a threat to his position, and puts up his defenses by discounting the message and the messenger. 

A second way you could tell if whether you are a servant leader or a self-serving leader is by the leadership legacy you create. Do you create ways so that others may lead?  Self-serving leaders who are protective of their position feel threatened by anybody else who might be good.  They are afraid that others might say,  “Oh, they ought to lead rather than you.”

On the other hand, Gordon describes “called” leaders as those who think everything in life is on loan — he sees himself as a steward of his relationships, possessions and roles. 

When you see your relationships as loaned to you, you treat people with utmost care and respect. You seek to contribute to their growth in the borrowed time you have with them.  In contrast, can you imagine what it would be like if a leader felt like he owned the people around him?

A leader with a sense of calling also treats his position as a trust, as something loaned to him by God and by the people he is attempting to lead. And so, if you give a servant-leader feedback, they love it, why? Because if the only reason they are leading is to serve, they will welcome suggestions on how they can do it better.  

Servant leaders love seeing other leaders developing in their group. To them, the development of people is one of the most important things they can do. So when a really good leader comes along or grows from among the ranks, they welcome this development, are willing to share leadership, or even step aside and take another position if it would help achieve their organization’s goals more effectively.

And so the question for you is, where are you on this? Do you think that things are on loan or that you own everything? Are you a self-serving leader or a servant-leader?

Now, the reality is that we are all self-serving to some degree, because we came into this world as self-serving. Is there anything more self-serving than a baby? I mean, babies don’t come home from the hospital and say, “Can I help around the house?” But the more you grow and mature as an adult, the more you realize that life is about what you give rather than what you get. And so, we need to recognize that becoming a servant leader is a journey. We are like brand new laptops with a default system. And our default is naturally to be self-serving.  We have to change settings and almost on a daily basis log on to that new setting otherwise we start off with our natural default, the way we were originally wired.

And you know, even if you are aware and conscious that you have to be a servant leader, in your heart, you are going to be constantly challenged by options and temptations to get you back into your driven, self-serving leadership mode. So, we almost on a daily basis, have to ask our self the question, am I going to be a servant-leader today or a self-serving leader?

So now, answer that question. A dose of honesty here is worth years, months of denial. Now, that is how you begin your journey to become a servant-leader.

And our team is willing to help. We would love to help you and your organization in your journey towards servant leadership, towards becoming servant leaders.  Our team could facilitate a Lead Like Jesus Encounter, or a Servant Leader Workshop for your organization this summer. We could also run an assessment of your team via the Merit Profile™ a character-based data-driven diagnostic survey that evaluates an individual and team’s character competencies and behavior tendencies. We could also conduct a continuous coaching and/ or mentoring program for the leadership development of your team.  To set up an exploratory meeting, you may call us at (02) 813-2703/32 or email trainings@breakthroughleadership.asia

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Boris Joaquin is the President and Chief Equipping Officer of Breakthrough Leadership Management Consultancy, Inc., the exclusive carrier of the Maximizing Workforce Contribution™, Personal Leadership Effectiveness® and Merit Profile™ Assessment Tool. He is also a master trainer and country leader of Lead Like Jesus Philippines.

Their learning events division, Salt & Light Ventures will be holding the following learning events this month:

April 21 – Communication Strategies for Supervisors (Learn How To Lead By Your Talk) by Oliver Pangan at Discovery Suites, Ortigas Center, 9am to 5pm

April 24 – EQ Essentials for Managing People by Coach LitoCornejo at Discovery Suites, Ortigas Center, 9am to 5pm

April 29 – Developing Strategic Leaders and Managers by Dr. Aggie Sarthou at Discovery Suites, Ortigas, 9am to 5pm

You may also call Juliet at (02) 813-2703/32 or text 0922-8980044 or email inquiry@saltandlight.phto know more about these seminars.