Guest Blogger: William R.
Mansfield, Founder, Mansfield Institute for Public Policy and Social Change,
Inc.
The Just Third Way — any culture, in fact, that
includes capital ownership as an essential element of the system — is such a
complete shift from today’s pervasive “Jobs-Jobs-Jobs” mentality that training
the new type of servant leader needed is critical to “making tomorrow’s future.” This is all the more necessary when we
consider that tomorrow’s leaders will have the primary responsibility for
teaching their fellow worker-owners how to be the best persons, and best members
of the team at the same time, to say nothing of using their ownership
responsibly.
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| Leadership means teamwork, not dictatorship. |
This means that today’s leaders have a personal
and a social obligation to “pay it forward” by training and mentoring
tomorrow’s leaders today to deal with the challenges represented by a rapidly
changing world, especially institutions.
And not only leaders, but every member of the team must learn to deal
with the new paradigm, if only because it’s difficult to be a servant leader if
there is no one to serve.
The question then
becomes, How can today’s leaders best develop and keep young talent in an
organization, whether future leaders, or current worker-owners and partners? Pay is not enough, as has been known for
generations. Even mere ownership with
all the rights of ownership aren’t enough if the owner feels alienated from his
or her co-owners.
The answer is,
With a mentoring program. Effective
mentoring helps leaders develop today’s talent into tomorrow’s leaders. Companies that leverage the leadership and
experience of senior workers who understand the new paradigm can develop and
maintain the talent they have in-house at all levels of the organization.
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| Mentoring matters . . . and it works. |
This is critical
to the whole concept of servant leadership.
Servant leadership is action,
not position. A servant leader leads and encourages by
showing people how to do something. A
boss bosses and discourages by ordering a subordinate to do something.
Servant leaders have
a vision and a plan and must inspire people around them to build a team that
believes in and executes a plan, then carries it forward into the future. A boss just wants something done and will
hire and fire people until the task is done, then start all over again when
faced with a new task.
Although there
are different types of servant leaders, all successful servant leaders share
common characteristics that contribute towards their success. An effective servant leader knows his or her
strengths and weaknesses, and is able to optimize all of them.
Servant leaders
have a certain confidence about them, and are able to stay calm under
pressure. They are able to control their
emotions so they can think clearly, take advice, and make the best decisions
that will achieve goals and produce winning situations.
Servant leaders need
to be flexible and know how and when to change to best meet each
situation. The leader knows how to
manage conflict and understand the political culture to achieve the best
results.
Not surprisingly,
servant leaders and mentors share many of the same qualities. If mentoring of the worker meets the
agreed-upon goal, the mentor has to function as a servant leader during the
process, and vice versa.
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| Servant leadership and mentoring look a lot alike. |
It is as hard to
be a mentor without being a servant leader, as it is to be a servant leader
without being a mentor. An effective
combination of servant leadership and mentoring helps fellow workers best.
. . . that is, it
helps fellow workers best if — and only if — everyone in the company has the
same opportunity and means to become an owner of the company along with
everyone else.
If everyone does
not have the same opportunity and means to become an owner of the company, all
you’ve done is create a culture of conflict.
In a culture of conflict, people don’t seek positions in which they can
best serve the needs of themselves and others.
Instead, they figure out ways in which they can have the most power over
others.
And that is a far
cry from a justice-based system in which the leader seeks to help others, not
control them. When everyone pulls
together, everyone benefits in direct proportion to the effort he or she puts
out — and with everyone in the company working together to be happy and productive,
knowing that he or she will benefit to the same degree as the effort, each
individual and the company as a whole has the best chance of being a success.
#30#