Page 71 - Harnessing the Strengths

54 ■ Servant-Leadership in the Intercultural Practice

Grand Design Versus Emergent Strategy

We have the Canadian Henry Mintzberg to thank for the
categorization of several strategic approaches. Mintzberg
named the top-down approach of the old power model
grand design. This is the practice whereby you plot the next
steps for the next battle far from the battlefi eld, without
having detailed knowledge of the circumstances, of what
is actually going on at the front. The result: many dead
and wounded. Another approach is to use the experience
of soldiers (bottom-up). In this form, strategy arises from
the experience gained in the fi eld and is referred to as the
emergent strategy by Mintzberg. 4
This is sometimes thought, incorrectly, to be a char-
acteristic of servant-leadership. The servant-leader should
create situations in which the strategies of others can come
to light. In reality, that is rarely the case. A sign of a servant-
leader is that he or she does not make a choice between the
two points of view, but unites them. This is what Mintz-
5
berg calls a crafting strategy. Here we see top-down and
bottom-up strategies as text in context. He or she devel-
ops the why inside of which the concrete experiences from
the fi eld have more context. The servant-leader ensures a
constant connection between experience and learning and
tests these according to the planned next steps.
You often see that the “hands-on” sales departments
have diffi culty with the more “theoretic” and distant mar-
keting department. The sales agents work with clients
every day and have more face-to-face contact. The market-
ing department, on the other hand, is much more concep-
tual and looks at the market reality from inside the offi ce.
Servant-leaders make sure that the many trial-and-error
experiences in sales are bundled together within the strate-