What Are The Characteristics Of A Servant Leader

Leadership and Teams When working in any organization, whether structured or unstructured, an effective leader must be able to identify the approaches that are applicable to that setting, what their leadership approach is, how to manage conflict, and how to help the team to achieve their goals. As an effective leader, performance outcomes must be established so as to clarify goals, document progress towards achieving the goals, and generate data on the effectiveness or efficiency of the team. Leaders must also understand where conflict arises from within a team and how to manage that conflict, so the team is able to achieve the results according to the established performance outcomes. Additionally, understanding the components of an effective …show more content…
This hampers the team’s ability to cohesively and effectively accomplish the team and organization’s goals. We have all seen a team fail to accomplish a task when team members are not cooperating with one another due to differences in interpersonal incompatibilities, tension, background, ethics, or an inability to communicate. The servant leader will apply the traits of a servant leader to turn that conflict to stimulate discussion, promote critical assessment of the problems, and create solutions as a team. A critical problem could be having team members that have differing views on how to accomplish a task. While one team member may see one way to accomplish a task, another team member may also have a completely different way of accomplishing the task, but both feel they are right. This could be a task as simple as conducting outreach to manufacturers. One team member may have experience conducting outreach via e-mail and waiting for a response, whereas the other team member may have experience visiting the manufacturer’s facilities and doing face-to-face interactions. While both feel their way is right, the servant leader would have the team members communicate their experiences with one another and the team to find conflict resolution and help the team to make a cohesive decision on how the outreach would be conducted. By applying the tenets of servant leadership, the leader is able to manage conflict, troubleshoot, act as a liaison, and coach their team and empower them. This ensures the leader is empowering the team to make a decision together, while allowing the team to learn how to manage conflict amongst themselves instead of directing the team to a decision (Robbins, DeCenzo, & Coulter,