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When Servant Leaders MUST Fire Someone
There is no better way to help people achieve at their highest potential than servant leadership. Servant leaders, committed to the mission, the organization, and their people, work to find more effective means to achieve, strengthen their organization, and build up their people. When the leader’s concern for people is sincere and trusted, expectations can be discussed openly and problems corrected. Occasions when someone has to separated from the organization and the team are few.
An Inescapable Responsibility
However, there are situations where a servant leader must take action to remove someone. Some of these situations are — or should be — easy decisions.
Extraordinary Organizations: What Does It Take?
It’s the perennial leadership question. There is something different about some organizations, something that helps them outperform others and even exceed their own goals.
What does it take to be an extraordinarily
effective organization?
In his book, Building the Bridge As You Walk On it, Robert Quinn says that these “extraordinarily positive” organizations can be called highly “productive communities.” In these communities, people find that they can contribute and excel.
What makes highly productive communities different?
During a visit to one extraordinary organization, a group of managers described the impact of several extraordinary people. These were people who had influenced the organization very significantly. They had inspired others to achieve at higher-than-dreamed levels.
“So what do they do?” the researcher asked. Quinn says that there was a long silence. Finally one director said, “That’s the wrong question.”
I like that. To ask first about what they do is to ask the wrong question. That question points us to look for behaviors, techniques, practices, and habits. It’s the dream of everyone concerned about leadership. “Tell me what I need to do!” We want the three-point short-list, the seven-part formula, the 87 irrefutable keys to successful leadership, the “formula” that we can apply. If we could only find out what these extraordinary people do we could then capture it, teach it, and through imitation gain that same performance advantage for ourselves.
It’s Who They Are
(more…)Guy Saffold
