Noble-Purpose Leadership: A passing trend or a true paradigm shift?

When Robert Greenleaf defined the phrase “servant-leadership”  in 1970, it was a much-needed improvement over the traditional command-and-control leadership model that had prevailed for centuries.

Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy in which the goal of the leader is to serve. This is different from traditional leadership where the leader’s main focus is the growth and ongoing success of their company or organization. Don’t let the rhetoric towards subservience or submissiveness fool you. Nothing of the sort. A servant leader shares power, puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and enables them to reach or unlock their highest potential.

When leaders shift their mindset towards service, they too reap the rewards. They and employees experience personal growth, while the organization flourishes as a direct result of the employees’ increased commitment and engagement. Since this leadership style came about, a number of different organizations including the biggest ones, like Starbucks,  have adopted this style as their way of driving forward.

In servant leadership, the employee is the backbone of the company’s operations, and the leader is the person who discovers the potential of an individual, helps spread their wings, and watches from the sidelines how they take the ownership of their assignments.

The leader’s role is to observe how they approach them with openness and  apply their knowledge and experience, how they engage in creative problem-solving, and finally how they achieve goals within a mutually agreed time frame. Crucially, the leader is always readily available to provide experience, knowledge and assistance whenever necessary.
Extensive research tells us that organizations and individuals perform significantly better when leaders focus on the team rather than themselves. On an individual level, servant leadership fosters trust, loyalty, and a deep sense of satisfaction to both the leader and organisation.

Servant leadership was a crucial stepping-stone into a more humane world of work. However, the next evolution is just around the corner! Current workplace trends (and my own experience) tell us that we are approaching another turning point, a shifting paradigm. We are at a point in time when leaders, both formal and informal, need to move forward towards a more purposeful leadership style that focuses on the tangible impact that work has on people’s lives.

This impact-driven philosophy is called noble-purpose leadership. This happens when leaders and team members collectively pursue a goal bigger than themselves (their team, their customers, their community), and their goal is to positively influence (rather than serve) their constituents.

This may sound like a nuance, but it is an obvious shift. In service-based leadership, the core of the message is: you are in your role to serve others. This makes it very difficult to say “no,” and leaders (and their teams) are tempted to please everyone.

(I like the saying that goes: “ I’m not tomato soup so that everyone likes me!” Would you agree?)

In leadership based on noble-purpose, the main message is: you are in your role to make an impact. This requires more strategic thinking in terms of where and how to allocate your resources to achieve the greatest result.

And just to give you some food for thought the question pops up: which approach is more you?
“Magic happens when you connect people. I credit much of my success to always making it a point to truly get to know people and help them whenever I can. It’s become the backbone of our firm’s success. Women founders in particular are often highly skilled at making connections that can help advance their businesses.”

– Susan Macpherson
(Founder & CEO, McPherson Strategies)