1.10.08
The Higher Plane of Leadership (Blanchard & Miller)

What separates the very best leaders from all the rest? Why is it that some leaders seem to consistently outperform all others? Is it in their DNA? Are these “great” leaders born? Since we’ve never met an unborn leader, we’ll assume they’re all born. So what makes them different? Do they know something that other leaders don’t? Perhaps.

However, great leadership doesn’t start with what you know. It begins with a fundamental belief—a different motivation. The very best leaders are driven, or feel a sense of calling, to serve. This is not a new idea, but it is a radical one by most standards. Greenleaf and others were writing about it many years ago; Lincoln, Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless lesser-known leaders have applied this secret with tremendous success for ages.

We quickly acknowledge we didn’t invent servant leadership; what we’ve tried to do is give it new life and attention by using new language to describe it. In preparing our book The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do, we did interviews, studied global best practices, and read scores if not hundreds of books, old and new, on the topic of leadership. We were trying to answer a simple question: “What do great leaders do?” Our conclusion: the best leaders serve!

Leader as servant—could this idea, so counterintuitive, really be the secret of great leadership? Yes, but not in a soft or abstract way. Serving as a leader doesn’t mean being unaware of results or undisciplined in your approach to leading. It actually means executing very well on a few fundamental practices that seem to show up over and over in the writings and the practices of outstanding leaders around the world.

Key Practices

Before we proceed to present this idea of serving as a leader, a quick disclaimer seems in order. Great leaders serve in countless ways. Countless is far too many to think about, much less do. To help you put servant leadership into action, we’ve developed a five-point list that represents the key practices that most often surface in the very best leaders. It is through these practices that leaders develop and deploy their leadership capital.

See the Future

What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to become? What does your organization want to accomplish? The answers to questions like these are what vision is made of...

Engage and Develop Others

Who will be on the team? What will the leader do to create an environment in which people will whole-heartedly invest themselves? In many of our workshops and training sessions, we ask leaders to tell us how they create this type of environment...

Reinvent Continuously

Reinvention sounds like a buzzword from the 1980s. However, the term communicates a big idea. The best leaders are always concerned with how to get better...

Value Results and Relationships

What’s more important, results or relationships? Many leaders would be quick to answer, results! Not so quickly, outstanding leaders reject the underlying assumption behind this question. This question implies a trade-off these serving leaders are not willing to make...

Embody the Values

How’s your credibility as a leader? This, perhaps more than anything else, will ultimately determine your leadership effectiveness. If leaders are not trusted by their followers, they forfeit the opportunity to deliver on the other practices we’ve reviewed...

Obstacles to Servant Leadership

We hope that after reviewing these five practices, you’ll agree—these are the primary ways great leaders serve their organization. It was true in the past, it’s true today, and it will be true tomorrow. So if these ideas have stood the test of time and still seem relevant today, why are servant leaders the exception and not the norm? Why don’t more leaders choose to serve? We could cite dozens of reasons—but we’ll explore just two in the space remaining.

Lack of Knowledge and Skill

It is staggering how many organizations have asked gifted individual contributors to step into positions of leadership without any training at all. This is probably the greatest cause of leadership failure in business today. It’s built on the faulty assumption that anyone can, without any new knowledge or skill, lead others...

Focus on Self Instead of Others

We live in a world that is fundamentally about “me.” And let’s not too quickly judge our leaders alone. Virtually all of us have our own interests at heart most of the time. We have come to believe that if we don’t look out for ourselves, no one will...

A final thought in defense of becoming a serving leader. Some will say, “Because servant leadership is not common practice, it must not work.” This would seem like a rational argument if it weren’t for the example of personal health and fitness. The fact that so few people exercise, get enough sleep, and eat right does nothing to invalidate the principles and practices of a healthy lifestyle. Neither does the lack of servant leaders reduce the validity of the idea. Take it on faith, if by no other means—serving others works!

At the end of the day, if any of us want to be great leaders, we must ask and answer the fundamental question, “Am I a serving leader or a self-serving leader?” It is our prayer that you and millions of leaders around the world will join us on this grand adventure and learn to serve!

Leader to Leader Journal: The Higher Plane of Leadership

Copyright 2007, Leader to Leader Institute. All Rights Reserved.

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