The Impactful Leadership: Transition to a new leadership paradigm, The servant Leader

As part of YellowSeeds Creative Coaching and Consulting Services, one of our Seed Service is the impactful leadership. Or what I like to call them, the Colorful ones.

I talked a little bit about this new paradigm in my previous post called Empowered owners and Impactful leaders creates self-driven teams.

As The World is changing constantly and rapidly, same happens with individuals, leaders and teams. You can’t depend on leaders anymore to drive change, everyone in a team is responsible of it. New generations are coming with a lot of empowerment for which older management paradigm doesn’t have tools to handle it. These are just a few, but there are a lot of circumstances that are changing the leadership paradigm.

Command and Control managers were used to control how many hours someone worked in a day, because they were at the office with their employees. Actually It is very common to call them “my team”, “my employees” like if leaders would have any possession on them.

These managers control team by KPIs and are driven by facts and data only to make their decisions. They promote standardized methods to repeat the process and create a factory to reduce cost. Command and control managers are the manager of the Industrial Revolution.

But we are under a new re-evolution, the re-evolution of consciousness, so you can’t keep the same skills than the ones you used to have in the past.

New leadership paradigms are emerging and one of them is the servant leader. These leaders serve the team instead of control and command them.

They are facilitators or coaches, someone who is there for them only when needed, who facilitates their role and career but doesn’t own the last word of it. They believe the team has everything they need to success, even when those characteristics are not being showed up yet.

When you move from a command & control position to a servant one, you step back, change organizational charts for bubble charts and redistribute responsibilities with the team.

Becoming a servant leader requires us to work out our ego, a lot. It invites us to remove beliefs around the social status that society has created on professional titles. You basically stop serving ego with titles and hierarchies to start serving the people.

These leaders who I like to called them, Rainbow Leaders, don’t have power of decision making over anyone or anything, because you have other owners in your team to make a collective decision.

Rainbow leaders will spend less time on transitional tasks (as command and control managers were used to) to spend more time on inspiring and motivating, sparking creativity (orange), driving change and coaching (violet), visualizing the future services (blue), communicating transparently (sky blue), sharing their experience (yellow), connecting emotionally with teams (pink), inspiring well being (green) and handling issues or road blockers for teams (red).

I like to explain a servant leader with a nature metaphor, that is why I like to call leaders “seeds”. Seeds usually are unnoticed when you see a grown up tree, but have served the tree to grow, without a seed there is no tree. Of course you need more than a seed for a tree to grow, water, light and soil, those elements could be the team. But as in nature, seeds don’t have a superior role than light, water or soil, they all work together as a team.

Before ending, I would like to leave you with these questions to help you identify if you are letting the new paradigm seed emerge from you:

• Do you need to know what the team is doing exactly or do you need to be involved only when is needed?

• Do you drive the team by objetives or by work shift?

• How much time do you spend on weekly basis inspiring and motivating the team?

• Do you have spaces to spark creativity?

• Do you connect emotionally with the team?

• Is your communication nutritious enough to let a tree to grow?

• Do you feel a facilitator of people careers or the responsible of it?

• Can the team function by itself while you are not around?

• Do you lead empowered owners or employees as part of the team?

Would you change your title and add the word seed instead o manager or leader?

More to come on this topic, Stay colorful!