It was very encouraging to discover that our blog and website is being used by people from around the world.
Poland, Latvia, Russia, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, France, Pakistan, Turkey, and several countries in South America. We are both delighted and humbled to learn that our learning community is expanding to so many corners of our planet. The term, servant leadership, is coming into daily language as more and more companies are recruiting for people well suited to be a respectful, collaborative servant-leader. Marketing is picking up the language and selling products and services based on servant leadership as more and more people understand that a culture that is leaderful produces much better products and services. Southwest Airlines, a 21 year partner with AMCA, describes their culture as leading with a warrior spirit, servant’s heart and fun-luving attitude.
We’d love to receive comments, stories and questions from our readers. How are you using servant leadership? What are the benefits? What are the challenges? One of the most encouraging benefits is when we bring these skills and attitudes home to our families and friends. We become more collaborative, appreciative and fun to be with. Everyone benefits because high-trust teaming is contagious just as is judgmental, dictatorial one/way leadership.
We have a very gifted business friend and client who took her skills as a servant-leader to South Korea to a business culture that was unfamiliar with servant leadership and a traditional top-down, command and control culture. Within the first year of her arriving and teaching and modeling servant leadership, productivity began to improve significantly. The work teams began to learn to communicate by taking more ownership for their work. She helped them learn to replace blaming with being curious about what may have contributed to the mistakes and made it safe to explore all the various factors. People began to enjoy their work more. It is fascinating that when you introduce this spirit of respecting each other, defining common goals and agreeing of how we will work together to achieve these goals, the productivity and joy to accomplishing work improves significantly.
We know this leadership transformation is happening all around the world in organizations, and communities. Greg Mortenson’s work in Afghanistan as described in his two books, Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, describes servant leadership in action. Please tell us your stories and/or just leave your comments. We’d love to know who is listening and recognize your good work.
Warm regards,
Ann and all of us at AMCA
“Ann McGee-Cooper and Associates are a perfect 'fit' for our organization because they live and breathe the Servant-Leadership philosophy. The concept of Servant-Leadership is not new to Southwest Airlines. Our Leaders are passionate about taking care of our Company, and they understand that the best way to do this is to serve others. Ann McGee-Cooper and Associates have become a partner in learning for many of our Employees through the motivational and uplifting presentations they make to our Culture Committee members.”