Last summer, I attended a four month Emerging Leadership Program within my company that was designed to prepare and train project managers and supervisors for their enhanced roles and responsibilities. In our first session, the facilitators spent a significant portion of the class discussing the differences between leading versus managing, and introduced a concept called "servant leadership". I have to admit I had never heard of the term before, but I was intrigued by its premise.

Servant leadership, which was originally coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970, is a theory of serving your people first to build community, create opportunities, and support the growth and development of employees. Rather than focusing on leading from an aerial view of 30,000 feet, managers should re-focus on caring for their teams, supporting performance, and removing the roadblocks that impede progress as one entity. There are ten principles to servant leadership which include:

1. Listening
2. Empathy
3. Healing
4. Awareness
5. Persuasion
6. Conceptualization
7. Foresight
8. Stewardship
9. Commitment to the Growth of People
10. Building Community

As I sat in the class, I couldn't help but think about how servant leadership applied to my current professional network. Most of the managers that I've shadowed are female, and I wondered why "servant leadership" didn't feel so unfamiliar to me. From all of my experience in management, It seemed as if female professionals tend to embody servant leadership naturally! As women, we tend to wear a multitude of hats: mother, caregiver, senior executive, softball coach, and best friend. In each of these roles, we've had to build our skill sets based upon the ten principles and live them daily. We are continually listening and empathizing with our project teams over a new client, healing our children when they have "boo boos", conceptualizing innovative ways to launch our small businesses, or providing awareness to gender parity in the workplace. In many ways, we are the most experienced servant leaders in the workplace today.

Servant leadership is not a new concept for women. It's just the rest of the world that needs to catch up. :)

The Green PM - Fresh Perspectives on Project Leadership
Twitter: @TheGreenPM