By Hollie Packman
Packman & Associates

About the Author: Hollie Packman founded Packman & Associates to continue her career in executive coaching, team workshops, and organization-wide initiatives that improve communication. Studio 8 Consulting serves clients in five primary areas: Executive Coaching, Communication Workshops, Team Development, Communication Strategy, and Organizational Studies.

INTRODUCTION

A wavering economy raises significant questions about the value of investing in leadership development. This value has been clearly established by several studies arguing that focused development produces measurable results. The question, at this point, is what kind of development? Over the years, I have come to believe that most coaching is striving toward an impossible feat; trying to get leaders to be convincing, charismatic, composed and respectful enough to earn the follower-ship of their people. Organizations used to afford leaders a respect that was automatic. If you had the role you had the respect. We all know that times have changed. We live in a world where respect is earned not freely granted. In these times, most leaders will work hard to gain the respect they need. Some will continue to flourish because of their indescribable gifts of charisma and rhetoric, but most will fight the fight. It is for this reason I believe that leadership development has lagged behind the times. We have continued to focus on creating charismatic leaders to invoke the allegiance and servitude of employees. Instead, I’d like to propose that leadership development focus on developing the ability and will of leaders to serve rather than be served.

I shall support this proposal in a variety of ways. First, I’ll provide a case for understanding the importance of service as a focal point of leadership and leadership development. Secondly, I’ll briefly discuss the two main methodologies used in leadership development: 1) changing one’s mindset and 2) changing one’s behavior. From there I’ll provide some specifics around developing leaders into servants using both of those methodologies.

CASE STUDY: WHY IS SERVICE THE SOLUTION?

Over two years ago I started working with a director of a large division in telecom. This director always struck me as a bit crude in his leadership approach. He was often longwinded and unprofessional. Yet, over the years, I noticed a unique dedication and loyalty from his people. His reports, whether they had worked with him for months or years, were willing to do nearly anything for him. They worked long hours, made hard decisions and significant personal sacrifices for someone that cannot be considered charismatic in any sense of the word. I had several opportunities to observe this client (whom I’ll refer to as Peter) when he interacted with his staff, when he presented formally, even when he was in the middle of crisis. I also conducted a longitudinal series of four assessments on Peter, the final one of which was an extensive interview analysis with several of his colleagues and reports. I was astounded by the results because they were extremely positive and full of gratitude. If I had not met him before, I would have thought him a saint and definitely an excellent communicator. The problem was that I had long observed otherwise. I knew that he yelled at people and, by his own confession, regularly lost his temper. I also learned from watching that he was less than articulate.

Aside from this clear disconnect between my observations and the responses of the people he worked with, I was shocked by the loyalty his people expressed. I received countless comments like, “He’s the best person I know, even though he yells sometimes,” “There is no one I’d rather work for in the world,” “He has a bad temper sometimes but he’s the best boss I’ve ever had.” And most commonly, “I’d do anything for him.” Where was this dedication coming from? The pieces began to fall together when I met with him last. We talked about his relationship with his employees and his leadership philosophy. He told me, “I’d do anything for them, I make sure they have everything they need, I go to bat for them.” He made a point to say that he didn’t consider it necessarily important to know their spouses, or to go out with them and socialize outside of work. He made a choice instead to focus on the person he knew, his employee. He diligently worked for them and in turn they worked for him.

One of the most basic principles in communication studies within organizations is that communication is contagious. In other words, people tend to communicate and behave in the same fashion as their leaders and peers. Peter’s people knew that they didn’t have to fight for themselves; they knew he was fighting for them. The result is a productivity that is hard to ignore. It just so happens that his division is the most productive in the region and the nation. His people don’t feel the need to waste organizational resources covering their backs and protecting their interests with senior management. In Peter’s organization, people felt protected and represented. In turn, their efforts were spent on developing their direct reports, serving their customers and getting their work done.

Peter’s willingness to serve produced a team of people who were willing to reciprocate. This is not surprising; the insights of extensive research suggest that human behavior in general is reciprocal. While many executive coaches may hope to elongate their contracts by over complicating coaching, the notion is a simple and timeless truth: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The good news is that this truth is not only a moral decision but also, evidently, a strategic one.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT: WHERE TO START?

The primary task of an executive coach is to change the mindsets and/or the behaviors of leaders. There is a clear connection between mindset and behavior in most human behavior research. Some scholars argue that mindsets drive our behavior while others suggest that our behavior drives our mindset. Regardless of which comes first, we know that there is a strong interplay between mindsets and behavior. Effective development will address both. To focus entirely on behavior is to leave out a clearly powerful force of influence in the executive’s development capacity. Over the years I’ve come to believe that the determining driver actually has more to do with the individual than with any set law of human dynamic. For instance, one leader’s internal dialogue may be so powerful that through some discovery I’ll find all of his or her behavior is connected to his or her primary point-of-view. In others, their behavior may be in contrast with most of what they believe. In this case, there is a clear opportunity to let behavior drive the development process knowing that over time it will change the leaders’ perspective. In order to develop leaders to serve, both their mindset or will and their skill or behavior must be taken into consideration.

DEVELOPING THE SERVICE MINDSET

Leadership development has failed to produce service-oriented leaders and has instead propagated old models of leadership. Most development is competency based. Most competencies for leaders instruct them to focus on creating individual characteristics in themselves rather than focusing on building a certain kind of relationship. We have told leaders that they need to have vision, display the big picture, be persuasive and compelling, and motivate direct reports. But if it is true that mindsets directly impact behavior, there is a wellspring of opportunity that may be rarely accessed.

If the mindset of a leader is focused on his personal and professional development, his behavior (no matter how persuasive and charismatic) will expose his motives. This is why we have so many problems with trust. If, however, the mindset of a leader is on developing a service-oriented relationship, behavior will follow suit, even if the leader is just learning to lead. The leader’s focus changes to, “How can I help?”, “What can I do to add value?”, “What does this person need from me?” The behavior that follows these mindsets is generally respected by those being lead because it involves them in creating organizational solutions.

DEVELOPING THE BEHAVIOR OF SERVING

A service approach to leadership also requires some attention to varying audiences. Leadership development in the past has had it all backwards. We’ve said that employees are there to serve the people they report to. The backlash in organizations from this approach is extremely destructive and widespread. For the leader, the focus is on pleasing my boss and presenting myself well to him or her. For the follower, the focus is on exactly the same thing. The problem with this model is that it leaves no one to care about organizational outcomes and the bottom-line. Who is there to act as a steward of the tasks granted to them? As Peter Block so aptly put it in his book, Stewardship, “Stewardship begins with a willingness to be accountable to some larger body than ourselves, an organization, a community.” The more popular approach encourages accountability only to my boss, which in the end is a self-serving emphasis on my career development. Most leadership development has more closely reflected career development than professional development. The promise of most executive coaching proposals is to make the leader more of all of the things that will eventually get him or her promoted. Incidentally, this has been a great sales tactic for executive coaches.

Composure, strategic thinking, and vision are all valued behaviors in a leader. In some important instances, this emphasis should be placed on his or her relationships with seniors instead of his or her followership. Direct reports desperately need their leader to have power with the people with whom they do not. A key role of the leader is to have influence with a few critical people and be willing to exercise that influence on behalf of their people.

UPWARD SERVICE

Serving upwardly means that leaders approach their seniors as ambassadors of their organizations, departments and teams. In order to aptly represent them they must know the language and values of their seniors. This is where executive presence, composure, and other more traditional competencies are relevant. Their ability to be heard with seniors becomes an extension of their ability to serve their people. Research argues that most seniors look for composure, likeability, competence, sense of urgency, and trustworthiness. Leadership development that focuses on helping leaders to build these impressions with their seniors is valuable. Leaders can begin to focus on building with a few key people instead of an organization of people. The result will be a set of audience specific behaviors that fit their greatest needs instead of a series of shot in the dark attempts at behaving generally credible.

DOWNWARD SERVICE

Most of the efforts of leaders and therefore leadership development should be spent in building relationships downwardly. For the servant leader, this is where the major work begins. The current emphasis of leadership development on charisma and vision leads to more broken relationships and distrust than it does followership. Charismatic leaders use their charisma to influence and persuade often times at the cost of the long term relationship. Relationships with direct reports have too many day-to-day needs to find fulfillment and nurturing in vision and charisma alone. In order to grow, these relationships must be rooted in trust. These trust relationships are developed by personal connections, provision, and investment.

PERSONAL CONNECTIONS: FORMING TRUST AND RESPECT

Servant leaders develop personal connections very quickly with direct reports by working side by side in the organizational trenches. The personal connections established from work place trials form lasting trust and respect. A willingness to engage informally in a peer like manner opens the door for dialogue even on difficult issues. While the extreme alternative of fear and intimidation may produce immediate results of productivity, over time it leads to turn over and lost opportunities. Executives have long argued that their needs to be a distinction between friendship and work relationships. Most leadership development further perpetuates this view by teaching leaders to ‘set themselves apart’ from others. Everything we intuitively know about relationships tells us otherwise. We know that influence over our children, for instance, is invoked primarily from a safe, comfortable, ongoing, and even casual relationship with our kids. Creating followership means living among followers and creating alliances the old fashioned way: through mutual respect and honest communication.

PROVISION: PROVIDING FOR EMPLOYEE’S NEEDS

Our same intuitive sense of caring for the people we love leads us to provide for their essential needs when it is within our power. We, in fact, so vehemently believe this to be true that our society has laws against not providing for our children, and even for strangers if they are in extreme need. What drives this intuition? A law of human decency, a law that has been beaten out of many of our leaders by development that emphasizes self-provision above all else. Thousands of hours and millions of dollars are spent each year on executive coaching and leadership development that plays into this desperate attempt by leaders to protect and provide for themselves. The common question, “How can I get better at x…?” is an unfortunate distraction from, “How can we better accomplish Y?” There are times when the accomplishment of our goals is directly linked to personal improvement but more times when personal improvement is linked only to personal ambitions. One study found that employees really only need answers to three basic questions, “What’s my job?”, “How am I doing?” and, “Do you care about me?” Even if leadership development started to focus on helping executives answer these basic questions, leaders would be well on their way to better providing for their people.

INVESTMENT

Making investments in the development of employees is one of the easiest ways to directly combat the competitive spirit of self-preservation we’ve been discussing. These investments come in many forms ranging from formal investments of training and pay raises to informal conversations about life aspirations and dreams. Leadership development can focus on helping leaders identify and pursue employee potential. One of the biggest misconceptions about investing in employees is that they primarily expect more money. According to a study conducted recently by W.M. Mercer, employees place the value of pay significantly lower than they do feeling connected with their boss and recognized for the work they do.

CONCLUSION

While an emphasis on service may strike many of us as counter intuitive when looking at organizational leadership, it makes perfect sense to us in every other relationship context…family, friends, community, and customers. The very idea of customer service is a clear example of this. We intuitively know that serving customers well leads to good customer behavior, repeat sales, and a depth of relationship. Consultants involved in leadership development will argue that leaders ought to serve customers well in order to influence their behavior. Yet, the same consultant will focus little attention to serving their colleagues and direct reports. Leaders who serve encourage the dedication, loyalty, and trust that results in strong organizational outcomes.