What does servant followership look like?
Despite being originally described by Robert Greenleaf in 1977, the concept of ‘servant leadership’ remains a popular consideration in the modern exploration of organizational dynamics.
Fundamentally, I see leadership as a responsibility to facilitate the excellence of one’s followers.
Access to resources and relationships can be leveraged on behalf of subordinates to enable them to do their tasks most efficiently and effectively. Activities of affirmation, advocacy and promotion can provide the kind of endorsements that followers need in order to gain access to opportunities and to continue to apply themselves diligently.
While much of my thinking about leadership—through the lens of the leader-follower dynamic—has been these aspects of servant leadership aimed at facilitating followership, there is another facet of excellent leadership that needs to be considered as well.
Servant followership.
Instantly, your mind may merely move to the other side of this relationship: servant leader on one side, servant follower on the other. And indeed, I think that is a right perspective.
Let’s think about the leader’s service and followership of his or her superior—this is an essential facet of leadership to his or her followers. We’re pushing the dynamic up one stratum of the organizational hierarchy.
Everyone is a follower; all leaders are followers. As I desire to serve my followers and to enhance their excellence, one necessary engagement for me is to ensure that I am serving and following my own leaders with similar excellence.
One of my subordinates recently came to me with a funding request. My own direct access to financial resources wasn’t sufficient to cover the full need, so I went to my leader with the request. He has even greater access to resources, and so I described the opportunity and the costs, and he committed the funds to make it happen.
On what basis did he do that?
My boss has never even met this particular subordinate. While I have spoken well of him, ultimately my boss applied his resources to this request based on his relationship with me and the confidence he has in me as one of his followers. I have a credit balance of trust in my joint account with my leader at Fidelity Bank, and as a result, I can make a withdrawal on behalf of my followers…enabling them to engage opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable.
I desire to serve and care for my followers and hope to see them adopting similar postures of service and care, along with humility and submission, in their response to me.
Similarly, my opportunities for serving them will be maximized if my own relationship with my leader is also characterized by service, care, humility and submission. Embracing these traits of servant followership will open up the possibility of my followers benefiting from the even greater reserves held by my leader.
The better I follow him, the more I can serve them. Our followership opens up opportunities for our followers.
Photo source: istock
 | Allen Hamlin Jr. has worked with an international Christian non-profit organization since 2006. His role has primarily consisted of providing team development training and consultation, along with mentoring and member care, to multiethnic teams serving around the world. Allen has a deep appreciation for the values and tensions associated with serving in and alongside of cultures outside of one’s country of origin. |
More on Servant Leadership
- Are you an adaptable leader? (by Miranda Carls)
- When wisdom begins with ‘I don’t know’ (by David Bowman)
- The secret weapon a pastor needs for church growth (by Mark MacDonald)
- Read the room to lead the room (by Jenni Catron)
