Servant Leadership: Similarities And Differences Between Greenleaf And Christianity

I have recently completed a service project at the animal shelter in Bulloch County, Georgia. For four days I rode with my group to the animal shelter to play with the animals. Playing with the animals shows them compassion. We played with many dogs over the course of four days. Doing this service have made myself and my group servant leaders. What is a servant leader you ask, well a servant leader wants to help others better themselves. They want to help even if they do not look like, think like, or talk like us.

Originating in the seminal work of Greenleaf, servant leadership is a paradoxical approach to leadership that challengers our traditional beliefs about leadership and influence. Servant leadership emphasizes that leaders should be attentive to the needs of the followers, empower them, and help them develop their full human capacities. They build strong relationships, with others, are empathic, and ethical, and lead in ways that serve the greater good of followers, organizations, and the community.

The type of leadership most noticeable in the service activity was servant leadership. Servant leadership was first introduced in 1970 by Robert K. Greenleaf in the essay “The Servant Leader”. In his essay Greenleaf says “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.” (Greenleaf, 1970) Greenleaf essentially

Your post is solid and has the right amount of detail. Robert Greenleaf’s belief that good leaders must first be good servants is germane. Clearly, unselfishly developing, guiding, nurturing, and leading others is a foundation of servant leadership and attributes of humbleness and humility are guiding principles. As you suggested, focusing on the needs of others can create greater clarity and help develop one into a better leader.

Servant Leadership is a leadership style that primarily focuses on the people side of leadership. It was developed by Robert Greenleaf in the early 1970s.

Servant Leadership is “an approach to leadership with strong altruistic and ethical overtones that asks and requires leader to be attentive to the needs of their followers and empathize with them; they should take care of them by making sure they become healthier, wiser, freer and more autonomous, so that they too can become servant leaders” (Valeri, 2007). Although there is not many servant leaders in this world but the concept of servant is one of the most leadership approach leaders today struggles with. Servant leadership is mainly about the leader helping to grow their followers or members personally and professionally through empathy, listening skills and compassion. The concept of servant leadership which was proposed by Robert K. Greenleaf in his 1970 writing indicated that servant leadership is a theoretical framework that advocated a leader’s primary motivation and role as service to others.

Servant leadership, as it applies to the modern world, is a concept that Robert Greenleaf defined in his influential 1970 essay, The Servant as Leader. Greenleaf’s essay explains that servant leadership is an amalgam of concrete leadership styles and “fragments of data” that came to him through “intuitive insight” (1970). Having worked at AT&T from 1926-1964, he accumulated a number of leadership qualities throughout his professional career. After retirement he began teaching at Harvard Business School, but became distressed by younger generations and their rebellious attitudes. After careful consideration, he decided institutions were doing a poor job of serving, so they were doing a poor job of leading. His

Servant leadership from a Christian perspective is a replica of what Jesus Christ symbolizes. Jesus was a servant because he showed truth, vision, humility, commitment, teacher to his followers, and brought about change; he was a suffering servant, yet was merciful, he was a teacher, yet willing to be taught by the Holy Spirit. “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”

The phrase “Servant Leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as a Leader, an essay he first published in 1970 ("What is servant," ). The servant leader serves first, while aspiring to lead second. The servant leader serves the people that he or she leads, implying employees are an end in themselves rather than a means to organizational purpose or bottom-line. Servant leadership is meant to replace a command and control, top-down, model of management. Servant leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment. A few famous examples of servant leaders are George Washington, Gandi and Caesar Chavez.

Robert Greenleaf and James Hunter are both experts when it comes to leadership. Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership” and published his first essay regarding this topic in 1970. Hunter is a world renowned author and speaker because of his leadership forte, and has worked with thousands of business executives on developing leadership skills that create successful businesses (Hunter 1998). Both of these men are distinguished professionals because of their philosophies and approaches to efficacious leadership, but they each have a different approach of how they present and represent these ideas.

From the group Biblical Integration Paper, it was understood that servant-leadership is not only a gift of purpose that God places in the hearts of His people, but it is also a calling in one’s life to truly touch the lives of others in need. Living a successful life, as a servant-leader is not one that focuses on self-fulfillment, rather it is in seeking a fulfillment that comes from Christ when one pours him/herself out for the sake of others. It is through servant-leadership that one is able to bring hope into hopeless situations (Group Integration Paper,

Servant leadership is a type of leadership whereby the leader serves the needs of the people, empathizes with them, and involves them in solving their needs. Servant leadership is all about involving the people you are leading in your decision making, being ethical and caring for the people to enhance their personal growth at the same time improve their life. A servant leader does not simply delegate roles; he starts the work and energizes the others to join him and get the work done. According to Spears (2004), the servant leader as defined by Greenleaf is one who gets the natural feeling of wanting to serve first and then a conscious choice brings him/her to lead. This leader makes sure that other people’s highest-priority needs are take

In both passages Greenleaf and in Biblical verses it is congruently agreed upon that servant leadership, is a naturally calling that transcends both education and standard conformity. “The only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted to the led by the leader in response to, and in proportion to the clearly evident servant nature of the leader” (Greenleaf, 2002). In anticipation of becoming a leader within a healthcare field this writer plans to utilize the teachings of Matthew 20: 20-28 for guidance in becoming one with whom you serve. As mentioned in passage 26 “Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be

God uses exceptional servants, even a woman. The servants God used to judge His people were men—except for one woman. Her name was Deborah. God uses women such as Deborah to do His will and that is what this paper is about, God’s servant leader, Deborah. As a servant leader Deborah was one of the twelve Judges and in her story, is recorded in Judges Chapters 4 and 5 we see the faith, strength and leadership of a faithful woman of God. Using the Seven pillars of servant leadership model suggested by James W. Sipe and Don M. Frick, Deborah’s life reveals the several of the seven characteristics of a servant leader but we will cite three: As a servant leader, she was a person of character, a skilled communicator, a System thinker, and Lead with

What is a serving society and does that concept embrace spirituality? Does the fact of incorporating spirituality into an organization or a workplace provide healthier and more effective employees? How does the concept of a serving society and an organization that incorporates spirituality into its mission relate to Robert Greenleaf's servant leadership model? These questions and issues are reviewed and critiqued in this paper.