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The concept of servant leadership is that bosses who help their employees succeed have better employees and see better profits and production. Studies have shown that bosses who create an environment in which employees feel cared about and know that the boss puts their needs above his or her own, see higher job satisfaction, lower turnover, and better performance.
The idea here is to get in the trenches and find out what you can do to help your employees succeed, instead of issuing orders from above about what employees should or shouldn’t do. This is an important concept to understand because when employees succeed the company succeeds. But there are a lot of ways to go about achieving that success.
Servant leadership promotes the idea that everybody is there to work together as a team. It helps to build a workplace culture in which people feel confident that, if they need help with something, they can not only ask for it but expect it.
Of course, actions speak much louder than words. Simply telling employees that they can ask for help isn’t enough. Bosses need to prove that they care about helping their employees by actually helping them. Finding out what someone needs to finish a project and then actually getting that for them, or putting in the effort to help as much as possible, will go much further.
And employees aren’t stupid, either. People can tell when they are being lied to, when company culture is real and acted upon versus when it is simply lip-service. We’ve all had jobs where the lived experience of the workplace doesn’t live up to what company culture promised when we were hired on, and that causes job dissatisfaction, reduces performance, and increases employee turn-over rates. But putting a little effort into making sure employees have what they need to succeed can go a long way.
