Table of Contents
Servant Leadership:
A servant leadership is a leadership model , in which the leader combines his motivation and puts the needs of the employees first . He shares power and facilitates development of the employees to their full potential.
Authentic Leadership:
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Authentic leadership is an approach to leadership that emphasizes building the leader’s legitimacy through honest relationships with followers which value their input and are built on an ethical foundation.
1) “ServantLleadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf.
The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.
Authentic leaders are confident, hopeful, optimistic, and resilient individuals deeply aware of how they think and behave. Such people display a high level of integrity and remain committed to building an organization through purpose, value, heart, relationships, and self-discipline.
2) Both authentic leadership and servant leadership are hard. The authentic leader’s creed must be “be myself.” The authentic leader is authentic, not playing games, not trying to be someone else’s idea of what a leader should be. For the authentic leader, there is no gap between the role of leader and the role of self. This is tough. The authentic leader must have the confidence to be vulnerable.
3) The servant leader may be authentic wholly, in part, or not. For example, one may appear self-aware and empathetic but not be. These perceptions may be cultivated as part of the leader image but not necessarily reflect the inner life of the person. Even in this situation, the servant leader can do great good. My guess, however, is that most leaders who choose this style do so out of a commitment to their fellow human beings.
4) For servant leadership , on one hand where it works for development for all. It gives due respect to everyone`s views , but on the other hand it lessens power of the leader.It may require retraing of managers to think in this way.
For Authentic Leadership
When encouraging executives to become their best selves, we often encounter resistance. People don’t want to change the behaviors that feel most natural, even when everyone agrees that change would be good. One recent client, who heads up a national magazine, insisted that her staff use her process — the one that felt most right and most natural to her — to get each issue to bed. When asked to consider changing her process to make life easier for everyone else, she replied “Look. This is just how I work.” She was being authentic, staying true to herself — and blocking her team from moving to a happier, more productive place. Her excuse, this is just how I work, can easily be justified by the recent hype around authenticity that cautions leaders: don’t pretend to be someone you are not. But hiding behind the authenticity excuse is a convenient way of avoiding the truth about who we really are, how we actually behave, and why.
Instead, we recommend the following:
- Find out how you seem to others. Ask a trusted co-worker what is difficult about working with you. Listen carefully, and write it down in the speaker’s words. You are not allowed to explain, justify, or defend.
- Talk back. When you are alone again, respond to your co-worker’s accusations, in writing. What was going through your head while you heard what is wrong with how you are? What are your justifications and excuses for what you do? List all of them. Put it in the crankiest, brattiest, most self-righteous but authentic voice you can muster. Read it out loud, to yourself. Acknowledge that this voice is yours.
- Find an alternative. The next time you feel the urge to do this thing that makes you difficult, what will you do instead?
- Clean it up. Reconnect with the co-worker and apologize for being difficult. Commit to a clean up plan. If you do this difficult thing again, despite your best intentions, how will you clean up the mess you make?
5) Result-oriented and task-driven
Authentic leaders are result-oriented and task-driven. They understand the objectives of organizations, but they don’t push towards profitability and productivity by any means necessary. They understand the importance of teamwork in order to achieve those objectives.
The authentic leader understands that flexibility can get things done faster, because different tasks and different people require different things. In order to achieve certain tasks, a leader might use a mentoring approach, while at other times a more directing approach is needed. Therefore, authentic leaders need to implement a level of situational leadership.
Result-orientation requires a great deal of knowledge. An authentic leader must therefore also be well aware of the operational goals and things such as industry trends. You must be willing to learn and listen to different opinions regarding the objectives in order to pick up the best ways forward.
Furthermore, Bennis wrote in the introduction of the revised edition of his On Becoming a Leader that today’s leaders must have ‘adaptive capacity’. To Bennis, this means the ability to make decisions and later measure the effectiveness, instead of waiting to analyze the situation before acting. For this to yield the best results, an authentic leader must be on top of tasks and the desired outcomes continuously.
Focused
Authentic leaders must be focused. As George’s three-step pathway to leadership highlights, authentic leadership takes years of experience and personal growth. You therefore must be able to see the end-goal and outline this vision for your subordinates. According to George, “Without a real sense of purpose, leaders are at the mercy of their egos and narcissistic vulnerabilities”.
Staying focused on the face of different challenges can be difficult. But the more self-aware you are about your values and the objectives you need to accomplish, the better you become at draining out the unnecessary aspects around you. Therefore, to become more focused, you need to continually re-evaluate and re-assess your own goals, behavior and those of people around you.
Empathetic
Finally, an authentic leader has to showcase high level of empathy towards people. George writes in True North that leaders can grow as authentic leaders when they “are more concerned about serving others than they are about their own success or recognition”. Authentic leader wants to empower others, instead of focusing on their own needs.
Being more empathetic is ultimately about understanding other people’s needs and stepping into their shoes. This can be enhanced through better communication and analysis of your own feelings.
List of the Pros of Servant Leadership
a. Decisions are based on the benefit of all.
Instead of having corporate decisions made in a way that benefits the leadership team, servant leadership includes the entire organization. A decision should be made in the best interest of everyone working for the company.
b. It encourages empathy.
When leaders make decisions in this kind of environment, they do so by looking at the situation in the shoes of others. That allows leaders to refuse requests if it doesn’t benefit everyone for some reason.
c. People grow in a servant leadership environment.
This type of environment encourages people to work together for their mutual benefit. It creates diversity within the workplace that helps everyone through the lens of different perspectives.
d. It serves the customer.
When people serve the organization over their own needs, the customer wins too.
List of the Cons of Servant Leadership
a. Decisions take longer to be made.
Because a decision must benefit all instead of some, a corporation can get bogged down in research or different perspectives. This slows down the implementation process and could be costly from a revenue standpoint.
b. It may require retraining.
Servant leadership is not how many supervisors, managers, and executives learned how to think. An organization wanting to implement this type of environment will often need to spend time and money retraining their personnel in how to think in such a way.
c. The role of the leader is lessened.
As a servant leader, there is a required to do what your staff asks of you if it is for the benefit of the company. The only time it is appropriate to refuse is when it is deemed that a request is self-serving. That can cause many leaders to work harder and longer hours in a support role instead of a leadership role.
These servant leadership pros and cons show us that it is possible to help a company grow and succeed by placing others first. The needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few, which is a perspective that can take some getting used to from an individual perspective.
Conclusion
So after considering pros and cons of both the types of leadership – I can conclude that , we need a balance of both the types of leaderships. On one side , we want the leader to be emphathetic to employees needs , but under certain situation we need the leaders to be real and take real and practical decisions. We want the employees to have autonamy and share in decisions – as well as need to be more responsible to leader`s needs.
