Moving Toward Their Purpose: SERVANT Leadership

John sharing the perspective on work/life harmony - rather than work/life balance - opened up a whole new world to me. Working hard, and working a lot, wasn’t something I should be ashamed of. And I wasn’t putting myself at risk of burnout, like far too many people suggest as the result of such a heavy workload. As I mentioned before, I had identified the beginnings of my definite purpose through the training I provided teams across the US in behavior-based safety, seeing some many of them use the concepts I shared to advance in their careers, and Cindy pushing me to get licensed to use John’s material (since she said the 10 hour days I was working in my next job was like something part time compared to the 12 to 14 hour days I had worked the last few years for the manufacturing facility) took me a huge step closer to realizing the clear purpose that drives us today. The fulfillment I get from working toward a clear purpose makes nearly everything involved enjoyable, and each step we take toward achieving that purpose actually gives me energy. Burnout can’t compete with that!

Here’s where the challenge comes for you as you lead each member of your team: How can you provide them with what they need to be able to achieve THEIR purpose while they’re engaged in the tasks detailed by their job descriptions? Don’t miss my point here; I’m well aware of the pressure on everyone in a leadership role to produce results and maintain (and grow) profitability within their area of responsibility so I’m certainly not suggesting that we pull our focus away from that as we support our team members in pursuing their own purpose. Quite frankly, that’s why I’ve hit on the importance of connecting the two so much to this point!

This is where we earn our stripes as leaders. This is where we make sure we’re treating leadership as a verb and we’re truly serving each of our team members. I’ve heard too many people confuse this idea of “servant leadership” with the perception of doing anything or everything for someone, just for the sake of serving them. It’s not! In fact, I’m convinced that doing something for someone that they can and should be doing for themselves is anything but serving them; I believe that does far more harm than good. I can think of several kids I grew up with who were handed everything and never appreciated any of it; they hadn’t earned it so they didn’t value it… The “servant leadership” I’m referring to is where we do everything we can as leaders to remove the roadblocks our team members face in accomplishing the tasks they’re required to do AND we look for ways that doing this can help them move closer to achieving their individual purpose at the same time.

When we’ve been intentional in doing several of the things I shared before - learning all we can about our team members, listening to what they share as their goals, and watching how their behaviors align with it all - we’ll have a strong foundation in place. This won’t be a place, though, where we lower our expectations regarding their work requirements; if anything, it may serve as an excellent reason to maintain or even increase our expectations of them. What we will need to be clear about is what we’re attempting to help them achieve and why we’re doing it. We’ll also need something from them: they’ll need to let us know how we can help best - so that’s what we’ll look at next.