Transforming Your Charity
– Servant Leadership
Andrew Forrest, Visiting Fellow and
Principal Consultant, Cass CCE
Aims:
• Place Servant Leadership in context
• Show how approaches to leadership have
evolved
• Look at current versions including Servant
Leadership
• Distil their common features
• Enable you to judge whether this is right for
you
Evolution of Leadership Theory
From traits of the “perfect leader”:
• multi-talented,
• heroic,
• hierarchical,
• using military figures as examples………..
towards……….
Evolution of Leadership Theory
………….. A more human leader,
• Modest
• Vulnerable
• Working through a team of followers:
• Welcoming their diversity
• And building their confidence
Sequence of approaches
Traits
What you ARE
the abilities you
were born with
John Adair – Action-Centred
Leadership
TASK
TEAM
INDIVIDUAL
Sequence of approaches
Behavioural
What you DO
so leadership
can be learned
Sequence of approaches
Contingency What you DO
varies according
to the situation
and your followers
Sequence of approaches
Transformational
What you
CREATE
changing the
culture
Sequence of approaches
Liberating
How you
remove
OBSTACLES
Values-based,
authentic and
transparent
Liberating Leadership
Values-based:
Stephen Covey, Charles Handy, Jim
Collins, Duncan Fraser
Servant Leadership:
Robert Greenleaf, Ken Blanchard,
Benjamin Zander
Emotional
Intelligence:
Daniel Goleman
Complexity:
Mary Uhl-Bien & Russ Marion, Roger
Lewin & Birute Regine
Authenticity:
Richard Barrett, Steve Radcliffe, Rob
Brown & Margaret Brown
Followership:
Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones, Barbara
Kellerman
Storytelling:
Stephen Denning, David Whyte
Liberating Leadership – Features in
Common
• No hiding place for the leader’s character:
Jim Collins, Good to Great – leader’s
extreme personal humility
• Spiritual intelligence: Richard Barrett – Your
work becomes your mission [4 intelligences]
Intelligences
• Intellectual or cognitive – the mind:
• Includes intuition – sometimes called gut feel
• Behavioural – the body:
• Actions that we take – includes communicating;
political skill; body language
• Emotional – the heart:
• Daniel Goleman – emotional intelligence
Intelligences
• Spiritual – the spirit:
• Morality, stewardship, principles and truths
The authors I have selected don’t all have the
same religious affiliation:
• Robert Greenleaf: Quaker
• Stephen Covey: Mormon
• Charles Handy: “a sort of Christian humanist”
Note: Howard Gardner (Harvard) – 9 intelligences
Hierarchy less important than teams:
•
•
•
•
Leaders at all levels
Language: not use “subordinate”
“Manager” becomes Coach or Co-ordinator
“Head Office” becomes Support Centre
Yielding control: “Free to Achieve” - rules
replaced by values:
• CEO of children’s charity inherited 600 page manual of rules
and regulations
• She threw out the manual and presented 5 values
Unlock Talent:
“We don’t know how good our people are because we have
compartmentalised them for so many years”
Martin Wilson, Ulster Bank
Intense direct contact between leader and
followers:
• Coaching and support – John and stroppy cleaner
Share knowledge and reward learning:
• Annual report highlights the organisation’s learning
e.g. VSO, United Response