Who Serves Whom at Your Family Business?
Submitted by Rick Baker – Spirited Leaders
Over the last few years, “servant leadership” has become a popular topic.
When I asked Google a question about servant leadership, here’s the top-line answer I received:
“While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970.”
The key phrase in that quote is – “While servant leadership is a timeless concept”.
Servant-leadership thinking is not new. It is just a different approach to leadership, one that has not been considered by many leaders during recent generations.
Introducing my thoughts about servant leadership
Servant leadership touches sensitive areas of the “human condition”.
When I think of servant leadership, one of the first people who comes to mind is Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin started his business career in a family business when he was about 14 years old. Family business did not work out well for Ben Franklin. He didn’t like working for his older brother and he left his brother’s business when he was 16, travelling on his own from Boston to build his career in Philadelphia.
Reading Ben Franklin’s autobiography, I have the impression that Ben Franklin’s older brother was not a servant leader. Ben Franklin’s employment contract, created by his father and his brother, is accurately described as “indentured servitude”. Indentured servitude placed the servant role on the shoulders of the employee. The leaders assigned duties and the employee performed those duties.
While that was the employment culture in the 1700’s, Ben Franklin designed his own approach to business, taking personal service in a direction that aligns with the concept of servant leadership.
How did Ben Franklin change his personality to deliver service to others?
Here’s a slide I created for a review of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, ‘The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Now First Printed in England from the Full and Authentic Text’.
Ben Franklin used the word “littlenesses” to describe the unproductive things people do…petty things, prideful things, mean-spirited things, etc. He knew he had to change his way of thinking and his way of doing things in order to achieve success in life. At an early age, about 20, he created a list on 12 virtues, and he created a plan on how to improve himself in those 12 virtuous areas. He added a 13th virtue – Humility – when that virtue was recommended by an older and wiser mentor.
Ben Franklin achieved world fame and his legacy lives on today. While he never fully mastered humility and a couple of his other 12 virtues, he illustrated humility. An excellent example is he refused to patent the Franklin stove. Instead, appreciating the achievements he had accomplished as a young man, he gave the stove invention to the world.
Servant leadership demands a level of humility. People who are prideful, people who cannot control their egos, and people who cannot control their negative emotions will struggle with the concept of humility and the concept of servant leadership.
About Servant Leadership in Family Businesses
Here is one quick and easy way to begin to explore and understand servant leadership.
Starting with an open mind, ask the question: Who serves whom at your family business?
Family businesses typically have grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and people who are not related.
Set those relationships aside for the time being and draw a simple picture of who serves whom…in other words, who performs duties for whom.
In the illustration below we have a family business with 7 people. We wrote their names down under column “A” then repeated their names in column “B”. Then, we drew arrows to show who serves [does duties for] whom.
It is a good idea to have more than one person perform this exercise, the more people who do the exercise the better. Then compare the “pictures”. Do not debate the pictures. Simply compare them.
If you are truly interested in understanding servant leadership and whether or not it is present at your business or desired at your business, it is important to understand what people are thinking about your current culture and who serves whom.
soon, more thoughts will be posted on this topic…
