Essential Leader

SEMINAR: SERVANT LEADERSHIP — SKILLS AND PROCESSES

I have a seminar coming up that might interest those who wish to learn more about the power of Servant Leadership. I'll be presenting the seminar at Marylhurst University on September 27, 2008 between 9am - 6pm. Contact the University Registrar's office about registering for this seminar. I'm honored this year to have as a guest presenter Mr. Peter Marsh, founder of the Peter R. Marsh Foundation.

Presented in partnership with the Peter R. Marsh Foundation for Servant-Leadership , this one-credit seminar is an excellent introduction to servant-leadership and offers solid examples of servant-leadership in practice with companies ranging from a large airline to a retail store chain. We will share important stories from these workplaces, differentiating servant-leadership from traditional, more hierarchical leadership models.

The four learning modules of this seminar are:

• Listening and understanding the full meaning of what is being communicated

• Team Intelligence: 1 + 1 = 3

• Team Project Simulation: Putting Servant-Leadership to work

• Stories: Memorable Ways to Share Legacy & Wisdom

These modules give participants a way to experience and practice the fundamental skills of servant-leadership. Participants will assess their personal listening skills, tap into their leadership story and express it to others, and engage in team activities to practice servant-leadership in action.

The Forgotten Plight of the Displaced

In the foreground stands the television news correspondent. He is describing the bombings and devastation being wreaked by Russian troops in a defiant Georgia. Crossing behind him unnoticed is a small group of people clearly fleeing the devastation with possibly everything they own on their backs or in the makeshift bags they are carrying. Where they are going is a mystery.

A known but little-noted result of the conflict in Georgia — and others around the world — is the displacement of people who have absolutely no control of the events going on around them. In Georgia alone, tens of thousands of refugees from the secessionist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been waiting for more than ten years for a chance to return home. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, as many as 247,000 people are displaced in Georgia as of February 2007. The current situation promises only to worsen an already terrible circumstance.

Indeed, according to a 2007 study published by the IDMC, the number of refugees created as a result of armed conflicts and violence in more than 50 countries is well over 26 million. In nearby Iraq, for example, nearly 3 million people were displaced by rising inter-community violence between February 2006 and March 2008, according to the UN. “If a similar percentage of the U.S. population were displaced," writes the Brookings Institute's Elizabeth Ferris in The Looming Crisis: Displacement and Security in Iraq, "this would represent over 50 million Americans — the equivalent in displacement of those uprooted by 50 Hurricane Katrinas.”

Add these folks to the already staggering number of poor and poverty stricken people throughout the world — a World Bank report states that 2.8 billion of the world’s more than 6 billion people live on less than $2 a day and 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day — and one begins to get a sense of the enormous challenges facing the world’s decision makers.

Key Lessons on a Leadership Journey

Judith Johansen, President of Marylhurst University, recently offered some morsels of wisdom to the students in the BUS 300 (Leading in Dynamic Environments) class. Here is my paraphrasing of her thoughts augmented with a few of my own:

1. Stretch yourself and be prepared for unexpected opportunities to put your new skills to use.

Imagine yourself at the center of a circle. The edge of the circle is the edge of your comfort zone. It is everything that you know and are comfortable dealing with. Once in a while you might encounter an anomaly that hits the edge of your comfort zone, if it’s a little thing you expand to include it.

Now, if it’s a big thing, guess what? You’re going to be very uncomfortable. And what you decide to do about it is going to affect you in a major way. If you decide to avoid dealing with it, your comfort zone stays where it is. If you choose to deal with it, your comfort zone will expand to include it, and viola! You now have an even bigger comfort zone.

Many of the opportunities in Judie’s professional life came from her willingness to stretch beyond her comfort zone. Not only did this increase her personal effectiveness capacity, it also offered her unexpected career rewards. Other people noticed her willingness to “go the extra mile” and came to her with opportunities to move her career in unplanned directions.

2. Know your own leadership style.

From Mahatma Gandhi to Jack Welch, and Martin Luther King to Rudolph Giuliani, there are as many leadership styles as there are leaders. Whether you are managing a team at work, captaining your sports team or leading a major corporation, your leadership style is crucial to your success. Consciously, or subconsciously, you will no doubt have a preferred leadership style, at least some of the time. By understanding this and recognizing that other leadership styles might be more appropriate to a particular situation, you can become a more flexible, better leader.

Judi described herself as a conscious collaborator, seeking to be open and transparent in all her dealings. She reminded the audience that different situations required the leader to be able to exercise a range of leadership styles tailored to the needs of the situation.

3. Learn to recognize that you are not perfect; be humble.

Leaders are authentic. Leaders are not perfect. Leaders sometimes fail. Leaders admit their shortcomings to themselves, they recognize their strengths, and they live as who they are. Leaders have ethics. They have at the center of their beliefs a regard for human worth and dignity. They make decisions based on deeply held values and beliefs but they are not infallible. In fact, at least one former boss said that if you are not making mistakes, you are not making progress.

When Judi became CEO at Bonneville Power Administration, her natural propensity to judge (on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator she is a strong “J” – ENTJ) and take action to remove people she judged to be obstacles was tempered, thankfully so, by “cool down” policies that prohibited an elected official from removing permanent employees for the first six months of her tenure. She later learned that each of her close collaborators had something of value to bring to the table.

4. Keep things in perspective. 

One of the shows my son watches religiously on the Discovery Channel is Meerkat Manor. You may not agree with this assertion, but if you were to watch a meerkat colony, you may have been reminded of the way many organizations work. These wonderfully social animals are constantly aware of their environment, the other members of the colony, and any sign of danger. Their heads dart rapidly from left to right, searching each others’ expressions for fear or reassurance. The scene, although comedic, holds a valuable lesson. The way a leader handles adversity and stress is witnessed by every member of the organization, and the leader’s reaction has a great deal to do with how everyone else handles similar circumstances.

In a previous professional life, Judie had been working on a nationally prominent issue within her company. Under her leadership the company released a national press announcement that something had gone terribly wrong with plans for company growth. That was September 10, 2001. Events the following day forced her and everyone she worked with to realize that maybe they had the wrong perspective on the magnitude of events.

5. Know your personal limits.

According to the Health and Safety Executive, stress is the “adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them.” Pressure in itself is not necessarily bad and many people thrive on it. It is when the demands of the work environment exceed a person’s ability to cope with or control them that stress, results. For many people, managing their own stress is something they find difficult to do. There is an old story about putting a frog in a pan of water and gently heating it. Theoretically, the frog will remain in the water and ultimately be boiled to death. However, put that same frog into hot, but not boiling, water and it will immediately jump out. Whether this, the boiling frog syndrome, is true or not, it illustrates the fact that, for individuals operating in pressurized situations, it is often hard for them to sense the onset of stress until it is too late, because it gradually and imperceptibly accumulates to dangerous levels. Leaders need to be aware of their personal limits and take action to manage the demands made on them, develop time management competence, and learn to delegate. One key is to learn to trust the competence and abilities of the other members of the team. Equally they may be unaware of lifestyle actions that they can take to increase their capacity to tolerate pressure.