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Servant Leadership and Change

“ Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor. ” - H. Jackson Brown   The ability to adapt and bend is important when addressing change in this fast-paced marketplace.  As H. Jackson Brown, the author who wrote many of those Life's Little Instruction Books, said: "Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor."  For those businesses that are out there in the mix of the chaos, it is easier for them to move to another partner or change the beat...so to speak.  The role and style of leadership is particularly critical when facilitating change.  A leader shares the “vision of what could be and speaks a new organizational future into existence” (Lloyd & Maguire, 2002). Purposeful dialogue, courage and vision allow for change to manifest and for those changes to remain sustainable (Quy Nguyen & Mintzberg, 2003).  A leader must be virtuous also.  According to Cameron (2006), “when people are exposed to virtuous

Servant Leadership being Chosen by Many Leaders

Servant leadership is now being selected by senior leaders and boards of trustees as a style of leadership over authoritarian, democratic, or lassiez-faire styles.   Spears (2005) wrote: In countless for-profit and not-for-profit organizations today we are seeing traditional, autocratic, and hierarchical modes of leadership yielding to a different way of working—one based on teamwork and community, one that seeks to involve others in decision making, one strongly based in ethical and caring behavior, and one that is attempting to enhance the personal growth of workers while improving the caring and quality of our many institutions. This emerging approach to leadership and service is called servant-leadership. (p. 1) The idea of servant leadership seems to be paradoxical.   How can one be a leader if they are a servant?   But it is much more about the style of leadership than the name itself.   Imagine a stereotypical authoritarian style where the employee is not put first no