What is Servant Leadership?

According to Jim Hunter
Author of The Servant: A Simple Story about the True Essence of Leadership

• The skill of influencing people to work enthusiastically toward goals identified as being for the common good.

According to Robert Greenleaf
Author of Servant as Leader

• Servant Leadership is a unique style of leadership in which people serve first and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions.  It is not necessary to hold a formal leadership position; anyone can be a servant leader.

• The difference in this type of leadership is that the leader needs to be authentic, trustworthy, honest, and have the ability to show a certain degree of vulnerability - to be able to admit to making mistakes.

• Servant leadership encourages collaboration, foresight, listening and the ethical use of power and empowerment.

• It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.  The difference manifest itself in the care taken by the servant - first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served.

• The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those being served grow as persons; do they while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?   And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or at least, not be further deprived?