If you are like me you have probably found yourself in a variety of settings where you are meeting someone and they will at some point invariably ask, “And, what do you do”? My first fleeting thought is, “is this a trick question”? What do I do 24/7, at home, in my job, recreationally? But, mostly I find myself answering that I am a Servant Leader in a Not for Profit Organization. That pushes them into the next question which is “what the heck is a Servant Leader”?
As President/CEO of Buffalo Hearing & Speech Center with a $21M+ budget and 500+ employees, my leadership self-image is one where I see myself as a servant to the mission of the organization and to the staff who are the face, heart and soul of this great service organization. My role is to serve them in meeting the needs of the community while meeting our clients, patients, students (where they are at) in an attempt to help them make their situations better.
Servant leadership by definition may best be summed up as being a philosophy and set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organizations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world (Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership). For me, it begins with the innate sense that the leader, first and foremost wants to serve. It sits as a conscious choice (and effort) on the part of the leader to be different from a top down, power oriented leader that sees herself or himself as being on the top of the organization chart. It may be as simple as, do you see yourself as a leader first, or as a servant first?
While there may be simplicity in that leader worldview choice, it can vastly impact differently the type of relationships, culture and outcomes that the two leadership positions look to build within a business or organization. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first leader to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. That prescriptive difference is foundational to being a servant leader and must be exercised as the leaders think about their clients/customers, as well as their staff.
At some point in my leadership development I learned that as a leader I do not build the business; I build people and then people build the business. I know it was at that moment that I realized “my job” as a servant-leader was to share power, put the needs of others first and help people develop and perform as highly as possible. I needed to be developing and taking care of the people within the organization in order for them to go out and build and grow the organization we all cherish playing a role with while helping and serving the children, adults and families that seek out our services.
Any success I feel as the result of my leadership comes from finding the people around me growing, feeling a satisfactory comfort level with their lives and work, and willingly going beyond themselves to work efficiently, effectively and caringly with the people who find a way to our doors for help.
As a servant leader I know that my role is to foster the culture, develop and support the staff, and create the practices, values and behaviors that elevate our individual and organizational capacity to serve and perform in meeting the needs of our community. In summary, as a Not for Profit leader I am responsibly aware of the margin-mission conundrum that todays Not for Profit leader must balance.
In choosing to operate as a Servant Leader in a Not for Profit organization today I see my role as managing that conundrum…but the margin-mission pressure is secondary to my primary focus of serving our staff and clients in helping them to understand the magic that occurs when a better organization (society) is to be built- one that is more just and more warm, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people to grow, to change, to become servant leaders themselves.
In my view of leadership, in order for there to be margin and mission, there must be magic. Servant leadership works to create that magic within a business or organization such as the one I happily and proudly serve.
Be well, joe cozzo
