Servant Leadership Values example (STAR methodology)

Servant Leadership is a philosophy where the leader is “servant first”, i.e., his/her first focus as a leader should be on the needs of their team members, before considering their own needs. This would mean that the “servant leader” would try to see the situation from its team member’s perspective, invest personally in their development, and be their champion and find the opportunity for their development.

Situation:

Bart is a team leader of 5 members and he believes in Servant Leadership values. During the quarterly meeting, the organization announced that the KPIs metrics are being updated and now the hours billed will have 50% contribution to their KPIs as compared to 30% before. Bart always encouraged his team to invest at least 10% of their weekly time in training and team building. With the increased focus on billing hours, the team felt pressured to bill more hours. This discouraged them to attend training sessions and team building activities.

Task:

Now, Bart’s task was to find a middle ground so that the team is encouraged to attend training and with that, don’t have to overwork to bill more hours. Bart understands the importance of sharpening the knife regularly and he cannot let his team members to stop working on their professional development.

Action:

Bart took a meeting with the whole team to understand their sentiments and their thoughts on latest changes in organization policy. In addition to concerns with keeping the KPIs high, Bart also understood that different team member had different area of interest and different areas of improvement that they would like to work on. Bart documented all the areas that the team members would like to concentrate more on and discussed that with their respective Project Managers. He requested the PMs to find opportunities for his team members within the projects where they can work on their area of interest. After thoroughly understanding the requirement, instead of common trainings, Bart started providing personalized training to his team members every week and once a month, he decided to keep a common training. As the trainings were project specific, his team members were able to bill some of those hours in the project bucket.

Result:

As a result, Bart found an alternate way that ensured that his team members were still working on their professional development with less impact to their billable hours. This also created a positive impact on their projects and helped to increase the trust between team members and their PMs.