Mike, great thoughts. After a 38 year career in business, including serving as President of two manufacturing companies I recently wrote a book called, The Journey To Competitive Advantage Through Servant Leadership. The main theme of the book is that servant leadership offers the best chance for a business to thrive. It is a philosophy that believes people are truly the most important asset in a business. They are not just words on a web site. Leaders who have moved away from the power model of leadership and believe their role is to help their people discover and reach their potential.
That people come to work every day with their unique personalities, dreams, goals, skills, and hunger for achieving something bigger than themselves. What they need is the right style of leadership, communication, training, and guidance to help them discover and reach their potential.
Servant leaders believe people don’t come to work to fail, produce bad products and services, or have a bad day. It is a leader’s responsibility to lead them by teaching, encouraging and motivating them to reach that potential.
Servant leaders paint picture, so to speak, to help their people understand what needs to be accomplished and why. Then brings them together to accomplish the company goals and objectives; It’s about concentrating on the people who do the blocking and tackling each and every day.
Servant leaders bring a vision that believes that the best strategy to achieve organizational goals and create a competitive advantage is by developing and environment of caring, mutual trust, and respect between the leaders and the people by focusing their efforts and energy on developing the full potential of all associates and the business therefore creating a winning partnership.
In the end servant leaders have discovered that it is their responsibility to make difference in the lives of the people they have been called to lead.
Here is a link to YouTube to a speech I gave on servant leadership at Leaderfest in Wisconsin in April if anyone is interested. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW5lp_K4INY