May I never miss a sunset or a rainbow because I am looking down
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To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
(Reblogged from The Leaders Zone. Click here to see the original post)
TAKE THE PATH TO SERVANT LEADERSHIP
By Dan Price
It’ s time for your annual performance review. You walk into your boss’s office, sit down and prepare for the litany of clichéd critiques and uninspiring atta boys. You try to decipher the feedback and pull out some actionable items, but grounding the theoretical appraisal proves difficult. You leave the room with your intrinsic motivation weakened by the encounter.
Now imagine this: Instead of a performance review, your boss sits you down and asks you how she can improve, how the company can flourish and how both can stay truer to their values. You’re naturally full of ideas, so you take the opportunity to launch into new concepts you’d been keeping in the back of your mind. You work with your boss to come up with a plan to improve the company and help her elevate her performance. You leave the meeting motivated by the prospect of working with your boss to create something great.
“REAL SERVANT LEADERSHIP IS ABOUT GIVING WITHOUT THE EXPECTATION OF RECEIVING. IT’S NOT AN INCREMENTAL CHANGE; IT’S A COMPLETE PARADIGM SHIFT.”
Every six months at Gravity Payments, we do this type of review. We seek to turn the boss-employee relationship upside down and create an environment in which leaders exist to serve those around them. Historically leadership has been about amassing power in order to operate paternalistically at best and tyrannically at worst. The notion of servant leadership has since permeated the business world, but too often it is used only as a more efficient way to gain authority, not as a way to truly serve.
Real servant leadership is about giving without the expectation of receiving. It’s not an incremental change; it’s a complete paradigm shift. Many people struggle with this because they are used to being the ones with all of the answers. Making this leap requires a certain level of vulnerability, but those able to challenge the leadership status quo will reap the benefi ts. If you succeed in shifting to the role of servant leader, you will fi nd the surprises you receive are far more impressive and humbling than you expected. When I made the decision to implement a $70,000-a-year minimum wage at Gravity Payments, I expected our business to take a f i nancial hit. I took the risk, and my team surpassed my expectations. Not only did our business accelerate, but a year after the implementation of the policy, our team banded together and bought me a Tesla to thank me. Ask yourself, Am I truly working to serve the people around me, or for personal gain? If the answer is personal gain, try beginning the journey to servant leadership by requesting to be held accountable, rather than the other way around.
Follow these steps to become a servant leader:
1. Instead of spending your time defining expectations for your team, spend it identifying how you can support them.
2. Have your team keep an eye on your actions rather than the other way around.
3. Ask for feedback rather than telling your team what to do.
4. Resist the urge to accumulate power. Focus on giving it away.
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Price is the founder and CEO of Gravity Payments, a credit-card processing company that supports independent businesses. In 2015 he took a personal pay cut that secured a $70,000 minimum salary for his employees.
To read the original article fron Success Magazine click here.
If someone offers you a gift, and you decline to accept it, the other person still owns that gift. The same is true of insults and verbal attacks.
Plan your hours to be productive.
Plan your weeks to be educational.
Plan your years to be purposeful.
Plan your life to be an experience of growth.
Plan to Change.
Plan to grow.
Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.
