The Tribe Gathering

Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

John C. Maxwell

In a world full of systems and solutions, it’s no wonder that the most noble of virtues has fallen prey to micro-managers and their attempt to bullet point to death the act of servanthood. For servant leadership to be taught, both the teacher and the student must be sincere, patient, kind, honest, and most importantly, truly affected. In our leadership of others are we crossing tasks off of a to-do list, or are we seeking to embed in the psyche reasons and reasoning for being selfless?

In the morning, I drive my kids to school and we have both a time of prayer and devotional study. After that, it’s pretty quiet in the truck and I have time to think deeply about things on my heart. Today a metaphor linked to this topic came to mind. As I’ve read and listened to the systems of many coaches and life coaches, what I’m finding is that many of them, not all but many, are simply checking boxes on a to do list of leadership. We’re feeding people leadership, but are we nourishing them? Here’s the difference and the metaphor.

Anyone and everyone can eat in some way, shape, form, or fashion. We’ve all had something to eat when we’re hungry and need calories. That can look drastically different based on your day, time to get groceries, ability to pull into a drive-thru, or what’s in your backpack. That’s what overly systematic approaches to leadership look like. “Here eat this. Ok got it chewed up? Good now wash it down there’s more.”

“Do we have goals? Check. Vision? Check. Expectations? Check. Am I making time to arbitrarily speak to my group and people 1:1? Check. Ok let the leadership harvest begin!” That’s pulling up to the fast food drive thru just to check eating for the day off of your list.

But truly affecting someone’s life with your leadership, showing them how they can be a servant leader, and then empowering them to do so if different. If you’re fortunate enough to still have a mother, grand-mother, or person of matriarchal status in your life then you’re blessed and you’ll get this metaphor. Truly affecting someone in leadership is like momma’s home-cooking. You don’t just fill up your stomach. Your emotions, mind, heart, and soul are nourished. The sanctity of momma’s kitchen is untouchable. She’s not just cooking in there, she’s “building a cathedral.” She’s providing an act of love. That’s the affect of true servant leadership.

The key to effectiveness, as stated is to match our intent with our action. Below is an infographic I like to use to make sure my intent and actions are aligned and impactful. Proactive analysis of your methods needs to be performed with the subjective needs of your people helping to serve as the context by which you make your decisions to act/implement strategies. Our guiding questions are like navigating the drive to grandma’s house for our “soul” food feast! Where are we? How can I best get to where I’m going? What are the obstacles? If you have already established who you are as an organization, what you value, and what you’ll uphold then these processes can be held up to one another to see if they align as well.

Many well meaning systems of leadership development and culture can have both positive intent and positive action, but still “miss the mark” and be ineffective or simply influential in the short term, but not impactful for a person’s ability and confidence to lead in the long term. Then there are negative actions from a place of well-meaning intent. Ever hurt someone when you were trying to encourage them? Yeah that. And finally both the ill-intent and negative acts, think “do what I say when I say it and don’t ask why", and the positive acts with ill intent a.k.a manipulation. Next week I’ll add some specificity for subjective strategies both in the realm of 1:1’s and “team talks” but in the meantime analyze your leadership. Even if you’re simply leading a household, this can be effective. I’d like to admit I’ve analyzed my parenting with this tool, sometimes to my own realization that I “missed the mark.”

• Be intentional

• Be sincere

• Be honest

• Be a servant

And you won’t need a checklist. You’ll be hitting the mark of instilling servant leadership with laser focus and Ted Lasso dart throwing precision. Your leadership should feed the soul. And you know what goes great with just about any meal? BBQ sauce…….

If you’d like to access more of our content please use this link to follow and subscribe to our YouTube channel as well as to this newsletter.

The Coaches at The Tribe would like to partner with you! If you’d like to see and use some of our tools or recruit us to come along beside you in your leadership pathway please contact us at [email protected]