Servant Leadership

By Pae Ki-pyo

Recently noted is the leadership style of demonstrating self-sacrifice by lowering a leader's own position to that of his subordinates, breaking the concept of submission to superiors and the ordering around of subordinates. This goes beyond the leadership model of the past, and settles in the reality of finding compromise at a proper level while taking the initiative in organizational activities.

The practice is referred to as servant leadership in business management terminology. This term, meaning the type of leadership that commits to the establishment of a trusting relationship with others in a service perspective, was proposed by Robert K. Greenleaf, a business management scholar in the 1970s. He got the idea of servant leadership from Leo, a character that undertook all sorts of chores and yet eventually had to stop his journey in '``Journey to the Eastern World," a work by German writer Herman Hesse.

Servant leadership is based on teamwork and community and goes beyond traditional dictatorial hierarchical leadership. It is leadership that strives to listen to other people's opinions and reflect them in the decision-making process. Leadership firmly based on ethnically considerate behavior. Leadership that makes efforts to uplift personal growth while improving the quality of various organizations, which, after all, is supposed to provide mutual survival in the broader sense.

Though servant leadership is a concept derived from Western business management that puts emphasis on efficiency, this concept becomes friendly in that it is in line with the Eastern spirit to live in harmony. In such aspects, if more interest and education are given to service leadership, our society will adapt more flexibly to rapidly changing leadership paradigms.

Many world-renowned companies, including 3M, Intel and HP, include servant leadership workshops in education training programs already. On the other hand, domestic companies do not have sufficient interest in servant leadership yet, and the interest level needs be further extended.

In addition, the society has an impending need for education that can inspire the values of service and self sacrifice to students and infuse the importance of trust in others.

We all are leaders and followers in various aspects of life. If each and every individual gives rise to the effects of serving and trusting the society by becoming a servant with true motivation, leadership with new dimensions will undeniably lead our society in spite of ourselves.

I close this article by introducing a remark of Doctor Warren Venice, a master of business administration studies.

``While too many organizations are overly biased toward management, they are excessively negligent in leading. That is because top dogs are skilled more on creating policies, common practices and procedure rather than work that produce persuasive and leading vision. They are not leaders but managers."

Pae Ki-pyo is a certified public accountant in Delaware in the United States and he is currently pursuing an MBA at Seoul National University. He can be reached at consultant@snu.ac.kr.