So what is the definition of servant leadership?  

• Leadership in which the leader transcends self-interest to serve the needs of others, help others grow, and provide opportunities for others to gain materially and emotionally.  

• Servant Leadership seeks to move management and personnel interaction away from "controlling activities" and toward a synergistic relationship between parties. 

• Servant-leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve. Servant-leaders are often seen as humble stewards of their organization's resources: human, financial and physical. 

Servant leaders identify and meet the needs of others. Those "others" include their colleagues as well as their customers, clients, patients, members, students, or citizens - whomever the organization exists to serve. But It is been hard for corporations to embrace this philosophy because it seems counter intuitive as well as implying an adjustment in status based entitlement and hierarchical power that most leaders feel they have earned.  

Many struggle with the term servant-leadership because they think you can't be a servant and a leader as those are two separate and opposite things that logically can't be combined. If you think that a servant is fawning and compliant, and a leader is powerful and commanding, then indeed the words will seem to be opposites. Yet the sincere adoption of servant leadership is the hallmark of all great leaders and companies. The non-profits have been much more successful in adopting this philosophy than organizations that claim that they follow the concepts of servant leadership but in fact do not come anywhere close.  Read more...