As you build your personal resilience skills, you are better able to support and encourage others in building theirs.
Your goal as a servant leader is not to be the resilient hero who saves your organization from doom. That won’t happen no matter how much you dream it.
Instead you must become a role model who demonstrates resilience, even when you don’t necessarily feel confident yourself.
It’s your job to engage your team and inspire them so that you are all working through the disruption together.
You’ll find that the Resilience Ready Principles inspire leadership practices that align with many servant leadership competencies.
In the book, Servant Leadership in Action, author Larry C. Spears, former President & CEO of the Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership, summarizes ten of the most important core characteristics and beliefs of servant leaders from the work of Robert K. Greenleaf, founder of the modern servant leadership movement:
- Listening – Listens intently and receptively to what is said and not said; and hearing one’s own inner voice.
- Empathy – Strives to understand and empathize with others.
- Healing – The potential for healing one’s self and one’s relationships to others.
- Awareness – General awareness, self-awareness, an ability to view most situations from a more integrated, holistic position.
- Persuasion – Seeks to convince others, rather than coerce compliance.
- Conceptualization – Thinks beyond day-to-day realities to look at a problem or an organization from a conceptualizing perspective, nurturing their abilities to dream great dreams.
- Foresight – The ability to foresee the likely outcome of a situation based on lessons from the past, the realities of the present, and the likely consequence of a decision for the future.
- Stewardship – Holds a commitment to serving the needs of others with openness and persuasion rather than control.
- Commitment to the growth of people – Deeply committed to the growth of each individual within the organization, believing that people have an intrinsic value beyond their tangible contributions.
- Building community – Identifies some means of building community among those who work with and are connected to a given organization.
Resilience is integral to servant leadership. Its strength is in managing beyond the operational activities and empowering your team members with the capacity to thrive.
Provide training and support and build a culture that helps employees develop and practice their resilience skills.
The accompanying workbook includes discussion questions for each of the resilience principles that you can use with your team to inspire team resilience.
The results will be growth into an extremely strong, road- and weather-tested individual, team, and organization that can stand the test of time.
