The Way I Lead

A challenge I will have to overcome in my servant leadership journey is the way I lead. You see, my idea of "leading" is to just take over. If someone at work is struggling with something such as bagging an order, I'll just step in and do it myself. Rather than take the time to explain or show how to do the job right, my natural response is to step in and do it myself. This is a problem for two reasons: 1) It makes me take longer to finish my job, and 2) I'm not helping the other person do their job better. By doing their job (bagging the order) for them, I am denying them the opportunity to learn the job and gain experience, and not to mention, I'm slacking in my own work.

And so the past few days, I've been working on that. I don't want to miss an opportunity to help someone grow, learn, or become better. When working with new employees, new teammates, new Christians, new whatever, you have to allow them room for mistakes and you can't expect the same performance from the new person as you would someone who has been at that position for a long time. You've got to mentor them until they are able to consistently excel at their work by themselves.

I need to do a better job of leading. The way I naturally lead is to do everything myself. But that isn't a very wise way to lead, and you'll never succeed that way. A mentor leader leads by improving everyone around him. By setting the example and by help others reach that example, he gets the most out of his team's performance. One of the purposes of mentor leadership is to train others so both they and the business/team/organization benefits. And that's the type of leader I want to be.