What is Servant Leadership?

“The servant leader is servant first, it begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” - an excerpted line from the essay of Robert K. Green leaf titled The Servant as Leader. In our society, a leader is often depicted as one who has the highest authority in exercising power. The one who halts at the top of the society’s pyramid. As defined in the Webster’s Dictionary; a leader is a person who leads. Leadership, on the other hand, is defined by the same source as the power or ability to lead other people. But what does it take to be a good leader? This is where we should understand the concept of servant leadership and how different it is with the traditional leadership. As seen from the excerpted line on the first part of this paper, to lead is congruent to serve. Leadership has a deep connection with service. Servant leadership displays a leader’s service to the people while traditional leadership, the people giving their services for the welfare of the leader. To be a good leader, one must make sure that the other’s needs should be served. A leader voices his/ her people what are the things they must do but a servant leader helps his/ her people on how to do things. You may have heard the quote of Maimonides’ “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” That clearly shows the difference of a traditional leader’s actions from a servant leader. Servant Leadership is a philosophy wherein the leader achieves the good for the whole community by being able to attend to the people’s needs and also letting them grow individually, thus such service makes the people see him as the one who should be looked up to.
Traditional leadership is most likely where a person would like to lead to gain material possessions and power but Servant leadership encourages a person to serve and help others and to share knowledge and gifts to others which then aspires the people to lead others as well in doing the same. Traditional leadership is often only about the welfare of the leader but servant leadership focuses on the growth and well-being of the people and the communities they belong.
Yet sadly in our country, traditional leadership seems to be the one often exercised. Due to corruption, most of our country’s leaders put themselves in the positions and instead of using their power to alleviate poverty and sustain our countrymen’s needs, they use it for the benefit of their families and themselves. Most of them promise to help the poor but instead uses the poor to make them even richer. Unfortunately, though they are expected to be as servant leaders, the one who wants to serve, to serve others first, they are often placed in high ranked positions, to be served first.