Servant Leadership Article on CIO.com
I hope this message finds you and your loved ones enjoying the best of the holiday season. As a colleague and friend in the IT industry, I wanted to share an article I recently wrote on CIO.com with you and ask for your feedback. The article is entitled “Servant-Leadership for the IT executive” (http://advice.cio.com/benjamin_lichtenwalner/servant_leadership_for_the_it_executive) and focuses on introducing the concept of Servant-Leadership to fellow IT executives.You see, I have already had the chance to view and participate in many different leadership styles over the course of my career to date. This experience included one organization that promoted servant-leadership, one that was relatively indifferent and one that strongly opposed the concept. While each organization produced good results, I found that servant-leadership produced the greatest, long-term and sustainable results for the IT organization. As a result, given the limited number of individuals in IT familiar with the concept, I’ve taken it as a bit of a mission to spread the awareness of this leadership style. I hope you will help by providing comments on the CIO.com article or feedback directly, via email.
Thank you, in advance, for any feedback you may offer. If you are interested in more information on servant-leadership, you can also check out the following resources:
http://www.lichtenwalner.net/servantleader.html
http://www.greenleaf.org/
http://www.spearscenter.org/
http://servantleadership.ning.com/
Labels: Fundamentals, Management, Servant-Leadership, Strategy, Team Building, Wisdom
Where Have All The Leaders Gone?
The following is reproduced, with permission, from Russ M. Miller, LLIF Chairman and CEO of the Performance Institute (www.performanceinstitute.us):"The Power of Leadership"
Where have all the leaders gone? We used to have larger-than-life leaders. Public figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, Golda Meir, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King who inspired millions with their visions. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan were equally influential in the business arena.
Those leaders and others like them are gone. Today we have fame without accomplishment, form without substance. We elevate people to leadership status not for what they did but because of the way they did it.
We need leaders today more than ever before. People spend millions of dollars attending weekend leadership seminars that promise instant leadership: Follow directions, insert anybody, and out pops a leader.
These "one shot" instant leadership seminars probably produce fewer leaders than those made by accident, circumstance, or self-invention combined. These programs may reveal skills and theorize about leadership evolution, but they cannot teach the character and vision that are the raw materials of leadership.
Your character is a key element in your self-image. Your self-image determines to a large extent the level of success you achieve as a leader. The level of success you achieve as a leader, of course, helps determine the level of success your organization will achieve.
Developing leadership is hard work. It requires time and commitment to form the core habits that make up the foundation of leadership behavior. Top athletes know that it takes time and personal commitment to develop their skills into championship form. The same holds true for top leaders. They also know that it takes time and personal commitment to develop their skills into top leadership form.
Labels: Inspiration, Management, Servant-Leadership, Wisdom
