Servant Leadership and Trust

Opening an October, 2021 article, leadership guru Stephen Covey asks the following question:

What’s more important for your company: growth or trust?

He then adds:

If you said the former, you’re not alone. Organic growth is overwhelmingly the top goal for business executives, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 24th annual global survey of CEOs. It’s what 88 percent of U.S. company heads and 73 percent of global leaders reported as their No. 1 priority for 2021.

And why not? Growth brings rewards: higher stock prices, more robust executive compensation, and bigger budgets for hiring, building, and expanding in every way. In business, growth and success are nearly synonymous.

He then counters:

But executives and entrepreneurs often ignore the importance of trust to their organizations.

Going for growth at the expense of trust can give a company a short-term boost, but it undermines credibility in the long run, internally and externally. Without trust, employees don’t value their leaders or feel valued themselves. Without trust, customers doubt your company’s messaging or products and eventually fall away.

Business leaders certainly understand the need for priorities and Covey adds:

It’s vital that businesses first choose to enhance trust, both within their organizations and with their customers. You prioritize trust because you value growth.

This series will look into this priority of trust and how characteristics of servant leadership lend themselves toward hitting that target not only of gaining trust, but of maintaining and even growing trust individually and organizationally.

But first, what is servant leadership in the context of modern culture including but not limited to business?

In 1970 at age 66 after years in business, Robert Greenleaf wrote on servant-leadership. In 2002 The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership published Focus on Leadership: Servant-Leadership for the 21^st Century. The inside cover of the book explains:

Robert K. Greenleaf first wrote about a new type of leader, the servant-leader, in 1970, but his idea remains a revolutionary approach to managing an organization. Servant-leadership stresses the importance and benefit leaders gain by serving the welfare of employees, customers, and communities.

It continues:

Traditional leadership modes that concentrate solely on the quest for profit or the attainment of goals at any cost are giving way to a holistic approach to work that promotes a sense of community and the sharing of power in decision-making. Servant-leadership is a long-term, transformational approach to life and work that has the potential for creating positive change throughout society.

In Covey’s article “Why Trust Is the Top Requirement for Building and Growing Your Company (and How to Prioritize It)” quoted above, he prioritizes the importance of building a high trust culture within the business as well as in reaching out to customers and partners.

This series will delve into specifics on servant-leadership as a means for building that trust.