What Can I Do for You?

Four Steps to Greater Servant Leadership

Servant LeadershipImagine your team members happy, dedicated and passionate about their jobs. They can't wait to get to work in the morning and are always striving to do their best. It's the perfect scenario, but, unfortunately, only possible if you have a budget the size of Texas, right?

Actually, no! Being able to have a dream team working right alongside you is highly achievable, and it all begins with a simple concept that is thousands of years old. Servant leadership has been practiced in churches for many, many years. In fact, references to putting the needs of others before your own are mentioned throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.

It can work for your business, too, no matter your size. Dave and his leaders have been practicing it for years, and he credits it for much of the success of his business. To get you started on your own journey to servant leadership, we've listed a few of the principles that you can put in place today. Give them a try! They're not complicated, time-consuming or expensive.

1. Follow the Golden Rule
Servant leadership is as simple as following the golden rule: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Luke 6:31). Handle all interactions with your team by putting yourself in their shoes, and then act the way you'd want to be treated. When you would expect to be praised, praise. When there's a problem you would expect help with, lend a hand.

2. Act With Grace
The best way to handle any negative situation is to act with grace. For example, if you have to reprimand a team member, never embarrass them. Talk to the person privately and promptly, and always remember how you would feel if you were being admonished.

3. Give Praise
For the majority of your team members, money isn't the chief motivator; they just want a sense of accomplishment for a job well done. People, no matter what age, yearn for approval, and the best way to make them feel appreciated is sincere praise. So make sure you are always on the lookout for people doing something right instead of focusing on mistakes or failure, and be sure to let the team member know they are doing a good job. Don't be stingy with your praise. The person who helps a fellow worker in time of need deserves as much gratitude as your superstar salesperson.

4. Treat Them With Dignity
People also have the need to be treated with dignity. At Dave's office, there are no time-clock-punchers. He believes there is no dignity in doing just enough work to collect a check. Make it clear that your team members' work is important to you and your company. It allows them to buy into your dream and work with passion.

By serving your team members with respect, dignity and a caring heart, success will naturally follow, and you'll become a true EntreLeader. It's the best way to grow your business. In fact, in the long run, it's the only way.

Why train mentors?

The biggest reason to train mentors is that although people understand, intellectually, the value of mentoring, they don’t know its real power until they experience an actual mentoring conversation. You can tell them and they can read about the process and techniques. However, until they experience being listened to without being judged or told what to do, see for themselves the amazing ability of people to find their own answers when given the space and support to do so, and feel the synergy that can occur when people are attuned to one another, they may not have the wherewithal to be the mentor they could be.

Preparing people for mentoring begins as you promote the mentoring strategy. It is critical once you match mentors and mentorees and continues as part of your program support. Most mentoring programs provide a workshop each for mentors and mentees, separately then bring them together to get them off to a good start. Follow-up group sessions are a feature of best practice programs. If it is not feasible to get people together regularly, webinars can be very effective.

Training builds on people’s experience and natural skills. It focuses them on the outcomes desired of mentoring and equips them with tools and techniques to do it well. Training demonstrates a serious commitment to your mentoring strategy. Train people so that mentoring works!

Leadership, Integrity, Ethics and Morals.

This is an interesting post by Mike Henry,founder and Chief Instigator of the Lead Change Group.

There is much to discuss in the relationship between leadership, integrity, ethics and morals. Many people have opinions on the meaning of the words and they way they’re applied. Jim Furr, of Tulsa Executive Events has written a series of articles titled Pointers in Proverbs making drawing relevant wisdom for living from the biblical text. He connects leadership, integrity and ethics in an interesting way that I thought would start some discussion. See what you think.
Pointers in Proverbs by Jim Furr

“Good leaders abhor wrongdoing of all kinds; sound leadership has a moral foundation.” –Pr 16:12

After surveying over 75,000 people around the world and performing more than four hundred written case studies, James Kouzes and Barry Posner (The Leadership Challenge) identified the characteristics most desired in a leader. In virtually every survey, integrity was identified more often than any other trait.

No surprise here. Peter Drucker writes in The Effective Leader: “By themselves, integrity and character do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.”

According to Steven Hayward in Churchill on Leadership, a Wharton School of Finance study of large corporations over a four-year period concluded that “between 15 percent and 25 percent[!!] of the variation in profitability was determined by the character of their chief executives.” “… sound leadership has a moral foundation.”

Integrity

So what’s integrity? One study framed it in terms of ethics and morality. Ethics, they said, refers to our standard of right and wrong; it’s what we say we believe is right. Morality, on the other hand, is our lived standard of right and wrong; it’s what we actually do. “Integrity” means “complete,” “integrated.” To the degree, then, that our ethic and morality are integrated, we have integrity. To the degree that our ethic and morality are not integrated, we lack integrity.

Looking at this another way, if John tells you that he will lie, cheat and steal from you, he has a low ethic. If he does business that way, he also has a low morality. John is unethical and immoral, but he has integrity – twisted as it may be – because his morality is consistent with his ethic. Of course, when you and I think of integrity, we’re assuming a high ethic matched by an equally high morality.
Right Things

Most of us would probably agree that always acting with integrity can be a challenge. Norman Schwarzkopf made this observation: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”

Several years ago, a friend who owned a certain professional sports franchise, although his team had just won the national championship, due to a failed TV contract found himself $10 million upside down. Many advised him to file for bankruptcy, but my friend’s ethic required that he pay his debts. It took him 11 years!

How does one develop this level of integrity? I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that it takes practice and hanging around the right kind of people. Stephen Graves and Thomas Addington put it this way in The Fourth Frontier: “Integrity is a character muscle we either develop or ignore. And it’s rarely a last minute decision. It requires discipline. It comes from years of practice or, at the other extreme, years of neglect…Our integrity is shaped not only by our personal decisions, but also by the company we keep…Good character keeps good company.”
Personal Observation

One other tip, if I may, that I’ve found helpful in developing integrity. The Bible says that God searches the earth in order to strengthen those who are totally committed to him (2 Chronicles 16:9). I’ve discovered that when my driving and guiding ambition is not simply to build a reputation, but to serve God and his people, then God lends his power to my efforts to have integrity, and that seems to make a significant difference.

CONGRATULATIONS!

Thanks guys for honouring the invitation and turning up for the YLMP Awards Day last Friday. Special thanks to the speakers who made it as well as the junior mentors.

Rev. Ogbarmey-Tetteh was the guest of honour and he encouraged the mentees to put into practice whatever they had learnt this past year. He made it known to the mentees that they should first of all be able to lead themselves before they could lead others.

All those who for one reason or the other couldn't make it can pass by the office to pick up their certificates.