Page 80 - How to Drive the Bottom Line with People

Built to Serve

For this reason, successful leaders truly belong to
their followers.

Quite often, leaders get this concept reversed—they
embrace a misguided notion that their followers are
their property. Such thinking is destructive because it

is impossible to build a culture-driven, people-centered
organization without understanding that serving oth-
ers helps them realize their potential.
In a context of personal faith, serving others is
called servanthood. For this reason, many leaders

avoid thinking of servanthood in a secular way. Cer-
tainly, the modern view advocates separating anything
56
= that might be considered faith-based from things that

are secular-based. In many cases, the courts, politi-
cians, and educational scholars endorse this view.
Therefore, many leaders today resist using the con-
cept of servanthood in the day-to-day management of
organizations because they fear that the concept blurs

the lines between religion and secularism. Some crit-
ics even suggest servanthood is rooted in negativism
because it creates too much focus on people’s short-

comings.
For example, critics argue that churches, social serv-
ice organizations, and medical practitioners cannot
realize a sense of servanthood unless they fix the prob-