Leadership Reflection – Part 2

Part 2 – Serving and Being Served


      Servant leadership is "a philosophy and set of practices that enrich the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world (Greenleaf, 1970)", which focus on the customers, followers, and organization itself (Wikipedia, 2018). The core belief in servant leadership is leading to consistently providing high-quality personal service to everyone that one comes into contact with, including one’s self (Shek & Lin,2015).

Servant Leadership is Serving-ship

      Different from a transformational leader, a servant leader focuses not on the goal of the organization but on providing services to organization itself, customers and staff; a servant leader influences others not by using known psychological models but by satisfying others’ needs; a servant leader focuses not on an issue itself but on developing in people’s growth, on improving people’s skills to solve problems, and on building morality connection with everyone that in contact with (Wikipedia, 2018).

      When I was a Pharmacology major student in a medical college, we had Basic Medical System courses shared with Medicine major students which included Medical Ethnology and Internal Medicine. We had our Medical Ethnology course in our freshman year, but the real learning experience was in Internal Medicine course. Each Internal Medicine class always started with a professor introducing a common disease with emphasis on patients’ complaints and its negative impacts on patients’ lives, which followed by analysis of the possible pathological mechanism and possible treatment methods.

      In process of learning how to diagnose this disease, and in learning how this disease can be treated, I learned medicine practicing should focus on patients with 100 percent devotion, on improving patients’ life qualities, and on healing patients biologically and psychologically. Years later, after I changed my career from a pharmacologist to a computer programmer, I learned that great business opportunities are where people’s needs can be cared for.

Servant Leadership is “Serving and Being Served”

      In dictionary definition, leadership is the capacity to lead, an act of leading, a research subject, and a person or a group of persons who lead; it is also a set practical skills and behaviors competencies that contribute to great performances. Strong Communication, Passion and Commitment, Positivity, Innovation, and Collaboration are among those most important leadership competencies (Foley, 2017),  and Leading is to serve that paired with Evaluation is from those being served is the core of the servant leadership.

      In his review to James Strock’s Serve to lead, 21st Century Leaders Manual, Professor M.S. Rao admires Strock for his passion for service and his vision to build moral and ethical leaders globally by promoting

• Effective leadership to spur new, creative, unexpected associations of ideas and individuals, from his discovery that today’s leadership relationship dynamics is serving others, from the bottom up and outside-in;
• A unique, durable relationship that customers value beyond any particular transaction, from his understanding that the culture created for customers is the same culture created for those with whom a leader collaborates.
• Highest priority to hire, motivate and develop leaders for the organization, from his insights that being served increasingly have the power to evaluate the leadership effectiveness.

When I started my programmer job in Stamford of Connecticut, I never considered myself a research type person. For my selfish purpose of learning to be better positioned in finding a job in New York City, I was a good but very independent performer and follower for all my assignments, which had helped me to have more and more difficult ones for me to learn more. In this process of purposed to learn more, enabled to contribute more, and rewarded for more learning opportunities, I grew into an independent researcher. 

I learned to form my own hypothesis independently, to discover dynamics in trending independently, to relate complexities with theories independently. Before anyone in that company had time to realize, I already became a first-rate computer security specialist with leading capabilities, which enabled me to be a tech-leader, between 2004-2007, to promote “computer technology can develop not only innovative but also good quality products to serve the business as customer-orders”. 

I learned from both work experiences that the best presentations of leadership competencies are when those being served can evaluate the efforts to serve them.

References

Andrew Foley (2017) Strategic Leadership: The 5 Characteristics Of A Good Leader. Retrieved from https://www.clearpointstrategy.com/strategic-leadership-characteristics/

M.S. Rao (2018) Book Review―Serve to Lead: 21st Century Leaders Manual. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/book-reviewserve-lead-21st-century-leaders-ms-rao-phd-rao

Jonathan Sandling (2014) Ten Principles of Servant Leadership. Retrieved from https://jonathansandling.com/ten-principles-servant-leadership/

Shek, D., Lin, Li (2015) Core Beliefs in the Service Leadership Model Proposed by the Hong Kong Institute of Service Leadership and Management. UKnowledge. University of Kentucky. Retrieved from https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=pediatrics_facpub

Wikipedia (2018) Servant Leadership. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership