All successful businesses adopt a leadership method or style in their overall operations and functions. Leader-Service Leadership (LSL) is a researched leadership style compared to transformational, transactional, and situational leadership styles. LSL operates similarly to servant leadership but not with an inferior mentality that the word “servant” instills upon the mindset of the disadvantaged or underrepresented. LSL happens when the leader works to perform service first toward team members before expecting them to follow them just on their name, position, or title. The LSL performed then helps team members make a conscious choice to lead and follow the leader. The LS leader is sharply different from a person who is a leader first with the need to have a title or position to have power or to acquire material possessions. The LSL style proposes when leaders behave in a manner that is consistent with a drive to adopt and enact a leadership role to maximize stakeholder as opposed to self-interest, team members experience increased growth and well-being. As a result, team member commitment and contributions to organizational and community goals surpass self-seeking or transactional goals toward their work.
The LSL style contends that a leader’s psy-chi, thinking, behaviors, attitudes, and actions manifest a desire to serve the interests of all organizational, community, and team interests first as opposed to primarily serving their own self-interests). Team members can experience increased well-being and growth, and they adopt a serving-others orientation like that of the LS leader. There are several key behaviors of LS leaders for which they developed a psychometrically sound multi-dimensional measure, and they are: (a) putting team members first—manifesting this through actions and words that satisfy the needs of team members is a top priority; (b) creating value for their environment—showing a genuine concern for helping their community within the organization; (c) emotional healing—attending to the emotional needs of team members with empathy more than sympathy; (d) empowering—helping team members develop skills to become a solutions generator with control to identify and solve organizational issues and problems; (e) helping team members grow and succeed—showing genuine concern for their career growth and development by providing support and mentoring; (f) having high ethics—interacting openly, fairly, and honestly with team members; and (g) possessing business acumen to effectively support the growth and well-being of the organization. The functional attributes of LSL are vision, honesty, high integrity and moral ethics, service, modeling, charisma, appreciation of others, and empowerment. The accompanying attributes of LSL are active communication, credibility, competence, stewardship, visibility, influence, persuasion, listening, encouragement, teaching, and delegation. Listening, empathy, healing, awareness persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to growing people, and building a community are the 10 core attributes of LSL. LSL emphasizes leadership behaviors with a team member-development focus rather than a focus on the leader. The LS leader can potentially revolutionize organizational culture through positive transformations. LSL is part of the BlackPrint of 3xP Leadership® that can configure any organizational climate that shares moral accountability with value creation, therefore producing goods or services desired by consumers in our globally conscious society.
- Dr. No Days Off (Dr. NDO)