Robert Greenleaf Servant Leadership Examples

Servant leadership is a management principle that focuses on life enrichment even as good relationships are built with the intention of creating an environment that focuses on justice and care (Marquis and Houston, 2014). The notion of servant leadership was first presented by Robert Greenleaf in 1970 who indicated that servants made the best and most effective leaders. Greenleaf noted that the basic moral foundation of the servant leader is built on a motivation to serve (Sousa & Dierendonck, 2017). Overtime, the concept has evolved and been refined to identify three principle aspects about this form of leadership (Marquis & Huston, 2014). First, servant leaders’ primary focus is on the well-being and growth of subordinates and the environment even as they engender as sense of belonging. This is contrasted to traditional leadership where the leader’s primary focus is on exercising the accumulated power to be at the top. Second, servant leaders put the needs of others first and before their needs. This means that they ensure that the highest priority needs of others are served first to imply that they avert deprivation and encourage others
to be more autonomous, freer, wiser, and healthier (Marquis & Huston, 2014). Servant leadership has been theorized as a model where the moral virtue of humility co-exists with action-driven behavior (Sousa & Dierendonck, 2017)
Finally, a servant leader makes it a priority to serve others first, making a conscious choice to be a servant first.
This is unlike traditional leaders who make a conscious choice to assuage their drive for wealth, material possessions and power (Cianci et al., 2014). An example of servant leadership in practice can be seen in the case of Nelson Mandela (the first Black South African president and a Nobel laureate) who sacrificed his personnel freedom by spending more than 20 years in jail to spearhead the end of apartheid in South Africa. A traditional leader in Mandela’s position would have taken the opportunity to enrich himself with regard for others. The three aspects of the servant leadership show that the leader has an absolute set of priorities in distributing equity, empowerment and leadership (Marquis & Huston,
2014).
The definition offered for servant leadership indicate that servant leaders have an intuitive awareness , compassion and responsibility towards their subordinates. By virtue of this leadership conduct, servant leaders are inclined to act with integrity, responsibility compassion and forgiveness, thereby making them ethical and moral leaders (Marquis & Huston, 2014). Woods (2014) contends that the relationship between servant leadership and ethical leadership is best understood from the perspective of a nurse whose decisions will often imply the difference between death and life, calls for perceptive evaluation and continuous awareness. Even as nurses are faced with scarcity of resources, changes in medical technology, evolution of diseases, differences in practice areas, changes in communication, updated professional standards,