Vision is knowing who you are, where you're going, and what will guide your journey.
Ken BlanchardRead
One of the topics I'm most passionate about is servant leadership - the greatest leaders recognize that they're here to serve, not to be served.
Interpretation
Servant leadership emphasizes serving others rather than seeking personal power or recognition.
This quote by Ken Blanchard highlights the core principle of servant leadership, which suggests that true leadership is about prioritizing the needs of others and empowering them, rather than being self-serving. It implies that the greatest leaders are those who view their role as one of service and support, ensuring the growth and well-being of their team members.
In practice
During a team meeting, I quoted 'the greatest leaders recognize that they're here to serve' to inspire my colleagues to adopt a servant leadership approach.
Vision is knowing who you are, where you're going, and what will guide your journey.
Servant-leader ship is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don't work for you, you work for them.
Congratulations offer more potential than cash. The amount of available cash is limited, but managers have an unlimited supply of congratulations. It's important to pay people fairly, but managers also should heap on congratulations and feed people's souls.
If your employees are disengaged, and they don't take care of your customers, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is - your customers will still go somewhere else.
The biggest obstacle that stalls leaders' growth is the human ego. When leaders start to think they know it all, they stop growing.
Leadership is not about you; it's about investing in the growth of others.
Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.
At the end of the day, people will follow you or people will be energised by you if they buy into your vision or purpose. So the most important thing is to be true to yourself. That's why I would say to be a great leader - you, first and foremost, have to be a great human being. And sharing that purpose and sharing the values.
Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.
The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation.
Achieving vulnerability-based trust (where team members have overcome their need for invulnerability) is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of the team, but that is exactly what is required.
The true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own. Great leaders truly care about those they are privileged to lead and understand that the true cost of the leadership privilege comes at the expense of self-interest.
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