Spencer Schar is company president of The Club at Bella Collina, heading one of Central Florida’s premier golf and country clubs. This article will look at servant leadership and transformational leadership, identifying their key similarities, benefits, and differences.
Business leadership is about more than the select few at the top. Rather, successful organizations require great leaders at all levels of the business, each with their own unique capabilities and leadership style.
Companies and the individuals that run them are increasingly finding success with servant leadership and transformational leadership styles. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, there are key differences between the two leadership styles.
Servant leadership centers around the principle that managers exist to serve employees rather than the other way around. Servant leaders allow their own interests to take a back seat, prioritizing instead the hopes, needs, and goals of employees. As a result, they experience higher levels of trust, creating safe spaces for workers to share ideas and concerns, have honest conversations, and pursue professional development.
Transformational leaders believe in the power of encouraging all employees to hone their individuality, contributing on the basis of their lived experiences and individual passions. Transformational leaders create connections with employees, providing support and positive motivation and inviting enthusiastic input. At its core, transformational leadership involves supporting the positive transformation of every team member and employee to the benefit of the company as a whole.
Servant leaders place an emphasis on listening and support, instilling in employees a sense of purpose, value, and job satisfaction based on their conversations with leadership. Ultimately, servant leaders are responsible for ensuring that employees are happy in their roles, instilling in them the belief that management will always be there for them and providing whatever resources employees need to thrive.
Transformational leadership values employees, guiding and inspiring them to unlock their true potential, not only benefiting the individual in the process but the company as a whole. Transformational leadership hinges on the notion that workers are not merely cogs within a corporate machine, but potential superheroes, each pulling to make the organization more successful, dynamic, and profitable. When executed effectively, transformational leadership culminates in healthy working environments, enabling employees to reap the rewards of shared success, encouraging them to constantly think about their essential contributions and growth potential.
Essentially a selfless leadership style that focuses on improving both individual employees and the collective, servant leadership requires keen listening skills, as well as a great deal of empathy, good persuasion skills, big picture thinking, and the ability to motivate and develop others. Servant leadership often paves the way for high employee engagement, motivation, and a strong sense of ethics. One of the distinguishing factors of servant leaders is their lack of ego, an unusual trait among business leaders.
As the name suggests, transformational leaders have a revolutionary impact on organizations as well as the people working within them. They help team members to transform their values, expectations, aspirations, and visions into something better and stronger. Requiring a capacity to help develop people and inspire them to reach for a new level of performance and success, transformational leadership sets positive moral examples, coaxing subordinates to reach higher, continually challenging themselves and striving to achieve better things. Transformational leaders create strong bonds of loyalty among team members, who trust and believe in them, leading to strong employee engagement when executed properly.
Servant leadership and transformational leadership are similar in terms of providing comprehensive support to team members and encouraging employees to develop themselves. Both styles are inclusive, motivating, and highly engaging, requiring big-picture thinking, adept communication capabilities, an inclusive approach to decision-making, and a high degree of emotional intelligence.