To Serve

“Servant leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you, you work for them.” – Ken Blanchard

I am helping a client roll out core values to their team. It is a lot of fun and an awesome responsibility. How can you get 300+ people to understand and live out the values leadership believes are the most important for the success of the business, its people, and its customers?

The first step is to help leadership understand this is not a project, it is a way of life. Core values are intended to define, maintain, and sometimes create the culture of the organization. Culture defines “who” the business is. 

Compare this to us as people. Being the best who are is a lifelong process – full of analyzing where you are today, comparing to where you hope to be, and changing course along the way. 

Back to the project at hand. The first core value leadership decided to role out is “Serve.” It is an excellent place to start and a wonderful foundation to build on, but… The topic of service is so big it can be overwhelming. How can you teach “serving” to an incredibly diverse group of people from front-line employees to managers and up?

The first step is defining the core value. You do this by answering some key questions:

• What does the core value mean to the organization?
• What does living out the core value look like? What actions will everyone take to live out this value?
• What actions are contrary to this core value? What will you not do?

How do you define “servant leadership?” For most Christians, our example is Jesus Christ. As it says in Matthew 26, “… the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve…”. God loved us first by sending his son to serve us by dying on the cross when we didn’t do anything to deserve it. How do you translate something like that to work?

The best resource I could think of is Ken Blanchard. Ken has been training leaders to be more effective and build better organizations since 1979. He has authored many best-selling books. Ken has this to say about Jesus as a leadership role model:

“To be a servant leader, go to the gospels. There you will meet and be led by the greatest leadership model of all time.”

Most interesting to me is that Ken didn’t start his business from a Christian perspective. It was the success of his 1981 book “The One Minute Manager” the led Ken to a deeper relationship with Christ. Ken first set out to determine what makes leaders successful (based on the world’s metrics). He then found out that Jesus was the best example of those traits. I find that very cool!

Ken has found that great leaders do four things well:

• They set their sights on the right target and vision. 
• They treat customers right. 
• They treat their people right.
• They have the right kind of leadership. 

The great thing about Blanchard’s work is that it works. It delivers real-world results and has for years. The fact that Ken feels the principles he teaches are best exemplified by Jesus points us to a model that can produce results now and for eternity. 

I’m excited about digging into Ken’s principles over the next few weeks and explaining them in a way we can put them to work in our lives inside and outside the office.

Are you ready to invest in your business to create long-term, sustainable growth? Head over to our Resource Page to find great tools to get you started.