By serving your employees, you can build a happier, more-productive business with a better bottom line. At least that is the assertion by Peter Economy in an article for Inc. magazine. Here is a brief excerpt. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Over the past decade or so, I’ve heard a new term for leaders come into common usage: servant leader. The idea of servant leadership is that the typical hierarchy where employees are supposed to serve their bosses is turned upside down. Instead, leaders serve their people.

In his book, The Culture Engine, organizational consultant S. Chris Edmonds says that servant leadership is the foundation for leading others effectively. According to Edmonds, “I define servant leadership as a person’s dedication to helping others be their best selves at home, work, and in their community. Anyone can serve–and lead–from any position or role in a family, workplace, or community.”

All servant leaders share two fundamental beliefs about the people they lead, and engage in five practices that put these beliefs into action.

Servant leaders believe that…

1. Every person has value and deserves civility, trust, and respect

2. People can accomplish much when inspired by a purpose beyond themselves

According to Edmonds, the five practices of servant leaders include the following:

3. Clarify and reinforce the need for service to others

Servant leaders educate the members of their team through their words and actions, and they encourage their people to set aside self-serving behaviors in favor of serving others.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

While Peter Economy has spent the better part of two decades of his life slugging it out mano a mano in the management trenches, he is also the best-selling author of Managing for Dummies, The Management Bible, Leading Through Uncertainty, and more than 75 other books, with total sales in excess of two million copies. He has also served as associate editor for Leader to Leader magazine for more than 10 years, where he has worked on projects with the likes of Jim Collins, Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and many other top management and leadership thinkers.

It should be noted that Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990) is generally credited with formulating the concept of what he characterizes in a seminal essay (in 1970) as “servant leadership.” Here is a brief excerpt:

“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. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”