The nuts and bolts of servant leadership

Although servant leaders help strengthen the membership of driving forces,

perhaps their most important work is with those who represent restraining

forces and yet may be waffling or fence-sitting as a result of charismatic

messages.

Four general areas of involvement for servant leaders are key:

 ✓ Educating and communicating

 ✓ Enhancing participation and involvement

 ✓ Facilitating and supporting

 ✓ Negotiating and moving toward agreement

Servant leaders are often involved in starting conversations, perhaps for the

first time, about goals of cooperation, fair play, appreciation of diversity,

tolerance, and so on. They may be restating similar OA charisma points, but

it’s more likely to be in an intimate office setting across a table than before

thousands of people.

Servant leaders also engage in simple cost-benefit conversations with resistors

in an attempt to show the rewards of changed priorities. Servant leaders may

also broker win-win agreements or they may work with mature individuals who

are perhaps more set in their ways, in order to reduce anxiety over adjusting

to and embracing new priorities. Ideally, through reframing, servant leaders

can demonstrate that much of the fear of change is unfounded or exaggerated.

Servant leader “interventions” can also be done with solidified social institu-

tions, such as patriarchies (male-dominated societies), which have formalized

rules and procedures or highly structured organizations, including bureau-

cracies. Finally, servant leaders often deal with the “smaller stuff,” such as

misunderstandings, entrenched self-interest, lack of trust, and so on, helping

those mired in restraining forces to see, in nonthreatening ways, that change

is possible while maintaining integrity and dignity.Managing staff is a huge subject — people get MBAs and PhDs in this stuff —

so we can’t tell you all there is to know about management in this chapter.

Hundreds of books have been written on the topic. So, after you read this

chapter, we recommend you check out Managing For Dummies, 2nd Edition,

by Bob Nelson, PhD, and Peter Economy (Wiley).

The five fundamental areas of management that are especially germane to

social enterprises are planning, organizing, directing, monitoring, and train-

ing paid staff — and we cover these in the following sections.

Planning

Planning is so important and complex that we devote an entire chapter to the

subject (Chapter 7). There we make the point that good planning in social

enterprises revolves around their mission and goals. But after you’ve deter-

mined your official goals, remember to consider the following as you manage

your employees:

 ✓ Who in the enterprise is assigned to do what to bring each goal to fruition?

 ✓ What kind of person or persons should be asked to reach each goal?

 ✓ How should these people work with your target of your benefits to

achieve each goal?

In the course of managing your employees, you also want to consider how

far your enterprise has come in realizing its goals. Ask yourself how your

employees’ performance figures into your answers to these three questions:

 ✓ How long has it taken you to reach this point, and is that faster or slower

than you had planned?

 ✓ How much more time will be needed to achieve those goals?

 ✓ Are there any ways of speeding up achievement of your goals?