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Servant Leadership

How to Start and How to Continuously Improve Servant Leadership Teams?

This book fills a gap that has existed for decades—clear, practical, step by step guidance on how to start and sustain servant leadership teams. While many resources discuss the philosophy of servant leadership, few address the question that every leader eventually asks: How do we put this into practice? This book fills a gap that has existed for decades—clear, practical, step by step guidance The most pressing questions are practical: Where do we begin? And once we begin, how do we sustain it? This book answers those questions.

For years, I searched for a resource that explained clearly how to build servant leadership teams—teams grounded in trust, empowered by shared purpose, and committed to continuous improvement. Although many books explored the values and virtues of servant leadership, none explained how to start one. So, I began documenting everything I learned during my years as a military leader, consultant, teacher, and practitioner.

This book is the result.

Here, you will discover:

• What servant leadership teams look like in action
• The qualities and responsibilities of both leaders and team members
• How to prepare your organization for servant leadership
• A four phase implementation model that any team can apply
• How to build continuous improvement into the very fabric of the culture

Whether you are a CEO, team leader, educator, athletic coach, pastor, or practitioner, this book will guide you in creating a culture of trust, empowerment, and excellence—one where people thrive because leaders choose to serve.

Servant leadership is not a technique. It is a transformation. And this book shows you exactly how to begin.

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Servant Leadership and Trust

Core Values That Build Trust and Inspire Greatness

This book is about servant leadership, the dependence of servant leadership on trust, and the fundamental values that underpin strong trust.

Shortly after completing my doctorate in organizational behavior and management, I embarked on a journey of teaching and practicing leadership in the military, in the private sector and as a leadership consultant. As a leadership professor, I taught from the conventional textbooks of the time, exploring various formal leadership models, styles, and leader characteristics. However, as my experience as a leader and as a leadership consultant continued, I found myself deviating from the textbook-based leadership approaches. Instead, I embraced a leadership style centered on trust, fostering the growth and building of people by providing support, guidance, caring, training and empowerment that align with their needs, their skills and capabilities, like how a coach develops young athletes. Today, we commonly refer to this type of leadership as “servant leadership”. Essentially, servant leadership is most successful when the leader has nurtured a strong trust with his/her team members. During my experience studying and practicing servant leadership, I have discovered that the strength of the trust is grounded in seven core values: integrity, courage, love, giving, faithfulness, humility, and genuineness. Each of these seven values is explicitly covered in the book.

This book serves as a servant leader guide and coaching plan. Chapter 1 describes why and how servant leadership works. Chapter 2 introduces the importance of trust to servant leadership. Chapters 3 through 9 describes each trust value and provides tools for the servant leader to use in nurturing trust such as sample best practices, self-reflecting questions and actions. Chapter 10 ties servant leadership and trust together with a summary and conclusion.

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