(Mondays are Lynn Miles Peisker days at The Daily Blur. Lynn’s the Executive Sister and Chief Plate Spinner at the Imagination Advisory Group. Check out her growing archive of posts here.)
You want to be a successful leader? You want to be the boss? The top of the org chart?
“Seek not to be served, but to serve.”
This statement is going up on my wall. It does not come naturally to me and I need to remember it.
My good friend Jason said it in church last Sunday. But it really applies to all of life doesn’t it? Even business?
I’m here to suggest that you do something radical and turn your org chart on it’s ear. No more top-down leadership. When you flip the org chart on it’s ear and put the leader on the bottom, you become the foundation of your company. A strong foundation is how you build a successful business. Make the big switch to top-up, serve-others leadership.
Servant leadership is not a new concept, but boy, is it hard to live out on a daily basis. Unless you are constantly aware of the value of serving others within your organization. This week try it out.
Put the lowest paid employees with the least responsibility on top.
Ask them things like:
“How is it going?”
“What do you need today?”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Then, and here comes the hard part, listen to the answers. And act on them so far as it is in your ability to do so. This is how you turn that org chart on its ear. (Awesome pun intended.)
I think you will be amazed at the results. Harder working employees. Happier employees. More satisfied customers. We call it shareworthy service. People will start talking about your amazing customer service. And the phone will ring.
You want to be a successful leader? You want to be the boss? The top of the org chart? Then flip it on its ear and take responsibility for everything and credit for nothing (another great Jason quote). And serve well those who do the real, everyday work of your organization.
Great post, Lynn.
This reminds me of a leadership practice called “rounding” that I was taught when I worked at Quint Studer’s organization. Leaders and managers were expected to go through to all the frontline employees and ask them questions similar to the ones you proposed. Of course, inititally, you need to ask more “getting to know you questions” and you need to keep up the rounding on a weekly or so basis until the employees know you’re for real, and that this isn’t an anomoly or a gimmick and that you care about the answer. Then, when you ask the kind of questions you proposed, you’ll get real answers. And when that happens, you need to ACT on them. When the first action filters back down to the employee — the first time you take care of an annoyance or stumbling block for an employee — it’s electrifying. Trust goes way up. Job satisfaction goes way up. It’s great.Two questions you’ll want to add to the ones you proposed: “what’s going well? And who have you noticed doing a really great job and/or making your job/task easier?”First, people don’t notice the positive unless asked to, and noticing and being thankful for it makes a difference. Second, it’s great when you can pass on an “atta boy” from one employee to another. Now, you can do all this because it’s great servant leadership, but if that’s not enough for you, think of it as lean manufacturing applied to the soft side of business. By rounding you are squeezing out cognitive waste — all those observations and insights and suggestions that would have gotten lost and never acted on — AND you’re improving your own situational awareness of what’s really going on at work. More frontline insight gets pushed up to leadership. And more trust and respect flows both up and down the org chart.
Interesting post, I’ve seen a number of different posts about this topic and think it would be difficult to put into practice, at least with someone who has been working at the top for a long time. I found a great tool for creating org charts with a web based tool called
Lucidchart. It is integrated with google drive and allows real time collaboration. I recommend taking a look at it. It is much more than just org charts as well.