Servant Leadership Definition

I begin my paper with the explanation of servant leadership provided by Sousa & Dierendonck; Servant leadership ‘The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead” (2017). Jermaine Cole a successful rapper and creator of the successful non-profit organization Dreamville foundation, is a primary example of the definition. Jermaine Cole better known as his stage name Cole established the non-profit in 2011 with the mission to “To reveal to the urban youth, their limitless potential, through positive life- altering experiences”. I use this as an example because the founder of the non-profit is a successful rapper that tours all around

Meaning a person is able to identify or relate with another person’s experiences. This is a key factor because without leaders that are in public or non-profit organization having empathy and understanding the position of their followers, many tasks would go undone or not done with the same quality. For example, while working in the prison system, the only way to get to upper management was to start out as a correctional officer and work your way up the ranks, because of this the upper management staff always stated “I’ve been in your shoes, I know what you’re up against.” Although this speech came with a stipulation of something the upper management wanted done more often or better, it still would validate the concerns we had as followers and gave us eases that change would soon be in store. The servant leader with empathetic characteristics is able to relate to the follower therefore encouraging them to be more productive.

“Foresight is a leader’s ability to design her work and decisions around predictions of what is coming based on past and current contexts” (Terosky & Reitano 2016). Being able to see the future in the sense of predicting an outcome based on the present circumstances is critical to the non-profit public servant leader. Without this ability and fore thought the leader could place the followers in danger, in an unethical situation and could tarnish the image of the

I feel as if this style best fits me naturally as a person as well as offer the greatest reward for the leader follower combination. Throughout my paper I have provided examples of the servant leader as it pertains to the public and nonprofit organizations. The Dreamville foundation has a strong building community characteristic and is one of the motivations that assisted in it’s inception. While the prison servant leader and upper management often use empathy to relate to the followers. With both nonprofit and public the servant leader being able to have foresight can prevent danger negative imaging from the public as well as promote positive imaging from the public if they are able to properly predict situations based on the current situation. Servant leaders may have issues with the follower’s perception of them being a leader as well as not being able to devote large amounts of time into the follower because of the organizational needs. Using multiple styles of leadership is ideal but when work in public and non-profit organization the important factor to remember is that the goal can not be accomplished with out both the leader and the follower no matter the style of