Servant Leadership and Trust

This book is about servant leadership, the dependence of servant leadership on trust, and the fundamental values that underpin strong trust. Shortly after completing my doctorate in organizational behavior and management, I embarked on a journey of teaching and practicing leadership in the military, in the private sector and as a leadership consultant. As a leadership professor, I taught from the conventional textbooks of the time, exploring various formal leadership models, styles, and leader characteristics. However, as my experience as a leader and as a leadership consultant continued, I found myself deviating from the textbook-based leadership approaches. Instead, I embraced a leadership style centered on trust, fostering the growth and building of people by providing support, guidance, caring, training and empowerment that align with their needs, their skills and capabilities, like how a coach develops young athletes. Today, we commonly refer to this type of leadership as “servant leadership”. Essentially, servant leadership is most successful when the leader has nurtured a strong trust with his/her team members. During my experience studying and practicing servant leadership, I have discovered that the strength of the trust is grounded in seven core values: integrity, courage, love, giving, faithfulness, humility, and genuineness. Each of these seven values is explicitly covered in the book. This book serves as a servant leader guide and coaching plan. Chapter 1 describes why and how servant leadership works. Chapter 2 introduces the importance of trust to servant leadership. Chapters 3 through 9 describes each trust value and provides tools for the servant leader to use in nurturing trust such as sample best practices, self-reflecting questions and actions. Chapter 10 ties servant leadership and trust together with a summary and conclusion.