The Path to Servant Leadership: A 12-Month Guide to Implementation

Copyright 2023 by Susan Renni Anderson

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

Month-by-Month

Management is What We Do. Leadership is Who We Are

Benefits of Doing the Right Thing

It’s Time to Ask . . . Are You Sure You’re Ready for This?

OVERVIEW

Let’s Bring Some Clarity to What Servant Leadership Is

The Original Servant Leader

Robert Greenleaf

Ten Qualities of a Servant Leader

What Servant Leadership is NOT

Servant Leadership in the U.S. Military

Four Reasons to Be a Servant Leader in Your Small Business

Four Ways to Become a Servant Leader in Your Small Business

A Shameless Plug

THE FIRST THREE MONTHS

Flip the Organization Chart

Aspects of a Person’s Job You Can Impact

Diffusion of Innovation: Maloney’s 16 Percent Rule

SWOT Analysis

How to Perform a SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats

Careful Not to Put the Cart Before the Horse

Change Readiness Assessment

What is a Change Readiness Assessment?

Assess the Change

Assess the Organization

Considerations in a Change Readiness Assessment

What are the Benefits of Using a Change Readiness Assessment?

How to Conduct a Change Readiness Assessment

Tips for Conducting a Change Readiness Assessment

MONTH FOUR

Mission, Vision, Values

How to Create a Mission Statement

Vision Statement

Core Values

Five Reasons Core Values Matter

Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility

Values Based Recruitment

MONTHS FIVE TO NINE

How to Change

How to Manage the Human Side of Change

Prosci Change Management Methodology

Phase 1—Prepare Approach

Phase 2—Manage Change

Phase 3—Sustain Outcomes

ADKAR Methodology

Awareness

Obstacles to Building Awareness

Comfort with the Status Quo

Credibility of the Sender of the Message

Circulation of Misinformation or Rumors

Desire

Creating Desire

Knowledge

Factors That Influence Knowledge-Building

Tactics for Building Knowledge

Ability

Potential Resistance Forces and Challenges

Reinforcement

Building Reinforcement

Tips for Building Reinforcement

CLARC—People Managers

Communicator

Liaison

Advocate

Resistance Manager

Coach

Master Change Management Plan

Core Plans

Sponsor Plan

People Manager Plan

Communications Plan

Training Plan

Extend Plans

Resistance Management Plans

Additional Extend Plans

Putting Together Your Change Management Plans

Resistance to Change

Three Tips to Managing Resistance to Change

Resistance Phase 1

Resistance Phase 2

Resistance Phase 3

Identify the Root Cause of Resistance to Change

Engage the Right Resistance Managers

Senior Leaders

People Managers

MONTHS TEN TO TWELVE

Building Your Team

Team Effectiveness and 6 Essential Servant Leadership Themes

The Great Resignation

Fifteen Tips to Reduce Follower Turnover

Your Cost of Turnover

Reducing Turnover Starts with Hiring

Employee Engagement

Seven Things You Must be Doing to Create a Happy Workplace

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Gallup’s Q12 Employee Engagement Survey

Gallup Engagement Hierarchy

The Values of Strong Workplace Ethics

The Foundation of Any Relationship is Trust

Three Common Challenges Businesses Face Getting To Customer-Centricity

How Gratitude Can Transform Your Workplace

Why Gratitude is So Revolutionary

Gratitude As a Gateway Drug

Four Keys to Gratitude at Work

WRAPPING UP

Introduction

According to Goodreads, there are more than 36,000 books on leadership and just over 450 on Servant Leadership. When I searched Implementing Servant Leadership, I found only two titles currently in print. I own both books. They were helpful, but they were more of the what and why of Servant Leadership. I could not find what sounded like a book on how to implement Servant Leadership in an existing enterprise.

So, I wrote what was missing on the bookshelves. This book is a step-by-step, month-by-month path to implementing Servant Leadership in your enterprise. Just keep in mind that I speak of implementing Servant Leadership at a high level because no two companies are ever exactly alike. No two companies have the same executive team, the same toxic manager, the same size and shape and culture.

This book will resonate especially with entrepreneurs and corporate leaders in mid-size companies; 50-500 employees; revenue of $10 million to $1 Billion; the age of the business is five to ten years. That’s pretty specific, I know. I’ll explain why I niched down so much.

The company has to be larger than a mom-and-pop, but smaller than one that requires a board of directors. Too small and the business can change simply because the boss said so. Too large and there are too many layers of approval to be agile.

Revenue should be sufficient to be able to afford to do it right.

And lastly the age: Decisions in a start-up rest solely on the founder’s shoulders as they build their new enterprise. As the founder adds on VPs and department heads, a pyramid develops with the boss at the top and frontline workers at the lowest level. The top-down, autocratic approach to leadership begins to lose touch with those followers who have the most contact with the customer. Communication becomes top-down, and leadership doesn’t have their thumb on the pulse of the organization and employees feel undervalued. This breakdown happens about five years in. The company is agile at this point and can make changes relatively easily. Over the past ten years, however, we see see that things have been broken for so long that change is challenging. Problems have rusted in place. Change is possible but takes a real commitment.

This is not to say that organizations outside my niche aren’t well suited to adopting a servant-led approach to leadership. I speak from experience about the ideal. Companies outside the parameters just have to prepare for a bumpier ride on The Path to Servant Leadership.

This book is probably not the first that you have read on Servant Leadership. If you have been considering implementing Servant Leadership in your organization, you probably have read quite a bit about the "what and the why" of Servant Leadership. You might have viewed video presentations on Servant Leadership. You probably have taken the pulse of your senior management team and found that they recognize the need for change.

Servant Leaders work towards minimizing or removing systemic dysfunctions through selflessly helping their followers. This sounds admirable, and it is. But it isn’t easy to do and requires the leader to have exceptional people skills at all levels. Putting yourself out there for the greater good is the sign of a Servant Leader. If you are taking the pain away from the team, shouldering the criticism when things go wrong, winning a following, and helping the team to find great ways to excel—you are a Servant Leader. And the really good news is that you’ll get better as time and dedication go along.

Servant Leadership:

Creates a safe environment where people aren’t afraid to fail.

Builds a culture of trust. Without trust, everyone will be focused on survival rather than success.

Inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more.

Millennials and GenZs are drawn to this leadership style, and they make up 46 percent of today’s workforce.

For more than thirty years, I coached financial services and real estate professionals. As a real estate sales manager, I grew the company from one office of twenty-six sales associates to two offices of sixty-five associates. I positioned the company for sale. The company sold to our largest competitor, affording the owners a comfortable exit strategy. I credit my success to Servant Leadership.

I’m a certified Maxwell International coach, trainer, and speaker. My success with Servant Leadership was one of the reasons I aligned with John C. Maxwell. His shift into a servant-leadership role happened when he started to change his leadership focus to empowering others to do what he was doing.

With this book as your guide, you will have the bones of a successful implementation. You will have a timeline and the basic steps to change your corporate culture and your leadership to a culture of Servant Leadership. This book will give you what you need to put in place an environment where everyone in your organization—leaders, managers, and employees alike—believe in the power of Servant Leadership as a path to business success.

Month-by-Month

My private clients work with me within a twelve-month framework to transition from an autocratic leadership style to a Servant Leadership approach. This book is a companion to my coaching program. The Path to Servant Leadership isn’t organized in the usual chapter mode. Instead, it follows the timeframe of an average implementation.

The book begins with THE FIRST THREE MONTHS. Covered in this section is the discovery of your company’s current situation. You can’t progress to a future point if you don’t know where you are starting from. Here you will learn how to conduct a SWOT Analysis and a Change Readiness Assessment.

Next comes Month Four. This section walks you through your mission, vision, and values. This isn’t a box-ticking exercise. All organizations must write a mission, vision, and value statement. All stakeholders need to know what you and your company stand for. If you get clear on your core values, it will be a game changer.

Incredibly valuable, the next section is MONTHS FIVE THROUGH NINE, which walks you through the actual change itself. Included are managing the human side of change, Prosci Change Management Methodology, ADKAR Methodology, Master Change Management Plans, and dealing with resistance to change.

These five months are the actual step-by-step "How" to change your organization’s leadership.

The last section, MONTHS TEN TO TWELVE, is all about building Your team. With the extraordinary help of this book, if you are very committed to transitioning to Servant Leadership, if your senior management team is totally on board, if you use this book as your true north, you can implement Servant Leadership on your own.

Management Is What We Do. Leadership Is Who We Are.

There is no one universal definition of leadership. If you work at it and find joy in leading others, you’ll define your own style of Servant Leadership.

People often mistake leadership and management as the same thing, but in essence they are very different. The main difference between the two is that leaders have people following them, while managers have people who simply work for them. Leadership is about motivating people to comprehend and believe in the vision you set for the company and to work with you on achieving your goals, while management is more about administering the work and ensuring the day-to-day activities are getting done as they should.

For small business owners to be successful, however, they need to be both a strong leader and a manager to get their team on board with working towards their vision of success.

Therefore, leadership and management must go hand in hand. Even though they are not the same thing, they are closely linked and complementary to one another.

For any company to be successful, it needs management that can plan, organize, and coordinate its staff, and leaders who are inspiring and motivating them to perform to the best of their ability, even if those distinct roles are played by the same person.

Employing Servant Leadership doesn’t happen in a moment—it is a movement. Implementation in an existing enterprise—under a different leadership expression takes time and resources. The decision to embrace Servant Leadership is just the very beginning!

Benefits Of Doing the Right Thing

What do FedEx, Aflac, Costco, Starbucks, Southwest, Balfour Beatty, TDIndustries, Marriott, The San Antonio Spurs, REI, Nordstrom, Popeyes, WD-40, Zappos, and Whole Foods have in common?

If you didn’t answer, Servant Leadership, you’re in the wrong room! These are all very large companies with layers of administration and organization. Why did they choose a Servant Leadership business model? I’m repeating myself here, but it’s that important! Write this down . . . Highlight this in yellow:

6 percent higher job performance

8 percent increase in positive customer service ratings

50 percent higher staff retention rate

Creates an atmosphere of trust and respect

Adds value and improves morale in employees

One of my favorite books on Servant Leadership is Dare to Serve by Cheryl Bachelder, former CEO of Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, Inc. She writes:

Popeyes’ performance in 2007 couldn’t have been much worse. Every data point that we measured was going the wrong way. Sales were declining. Guest satisfaction was worst-in-class. Restaurant profits were down in absolute dollars and in margin. Morale at the company was negative. Franchise owners were mad and ‘sick and tired’ of bad results. Investors were disappointed in the stock performance and wanted answers. The board was tired of hearing promises that did not materialize.

Those were the conditions at Popeye’s when Cheryl stepped in as CEO. By the end of 2016, Popeye’s restaurants experienced:

Eight straight years of growth

Market share grew from 14 to 24 percent

Profitability doubled in terms of real dollars

Profit margins up from 18 to 23 percent

Stock price grew from $13 to $61, up nearly 500 percent

What is the secret to Popeye’s turnaround performance? Servant Leadership.

ZAPPOS

Tony