My full scores from highest to lowest are below.
28 - Emotional healing
28 - Conceptual Skills
24 - Followers first
24 - Ethical Behavior
21 - Followers growth and success
20 - Empowering
5 - Creating Community Value
The thing that I found interesting was that while I scored high in “putting followers first” I scored lower in “Helping followers grow and succeed” and “Empowering”. I think this relates to the conversation that we had on Tuesday about the potential downsides to Servant leadership: It’s easy to do too much for your followers and you never take the next step to empowering them to do the work on their own. When I spoke about that on Tuesday, I definitely had myself in mind. When I first heard of servant leadership, I thought that it was really about doing the work and leading by example. Eventually, your followers will follow suit! But, after reading the chapter and understanding servant leadership better, I see that i’m missing a crucial step to empower others and and let them fly on their own.
What I’ll take away from this is that I need to work on coaching my followers more and giving them the opportunities to take on new things and new tasks with my support but not necessarily with my actions.
Rob, what a tremendous insight regarding your results! And such a great awareness that putting our followers first and helping them succeed are two distinct categories. I, like you, thought they were one. But as you stated, we have to be more intentional about empowering our followers and cultivating them. It reminds me of the Biblical principle of faith plus works. You can have faith in your followers, but we must work to get them trained and ready to fill our shoes when we are gone. Your comments beautifully highlighted the two sides to the servant leadership coin.
