Results Servant Leadership Profiler
DEMO
The Dilemmas of Leadership
This survey tool is intended to help you explore the type of cultural dilemmas you face as a leader.
Leaders are continually faced with the need for consolidation and growth, long term and short term focus, tradition and innovation, planning and laissez-faire, order and freedom, stability and change, etc.
Organizational culture is the result of the way the fight between these competing values manifests which the servant leaders needs to reconcile.
If one value dominates its opposite you run the challenge as a leader that you are not addressing the value that is subjucated. e.g. Do your staff prefer to meet deadlines for short term results or give priority for a visionary long term future? Do they take individual responsibility or rather share in teams?
These factors are explored in this survey tool in which we illustrate the different priorities for people, power, tasks and work roles in your role as a leader.
How we score your ratings
We combine your responses to the individual duality questions to show the underlying competing demands on an X-Y grid. How you rated your organization leadership as a whole is shown in the Servant Leadership Index Graph.
X-Y grid
- if you positioned your organization leadership (and on subsequent screens) in a red region, they are at risk by giving too much emphasis on Value Y rather than its opposite Value X (or emphasising X rather than Y).
- if you positioned your organization leadership in a yellow region, they are less effective because you have chosen a compromise by alluding only to some aspects of both values.
- if you are positioned your organization leadership in a green region, they are leading the tensions between these competing values.
Ideally your organization leadership should be reconciling all competing demands they face as a leader.
This new approach extends Servant Leadership to overcome the limitations of other traditional models of leadership based on coercion, charisma etc.
Servant Leadership Index
As leaders, you/they are being less effective when these competing demands are not addressed.
We rate how you described your organization leadership with an overall SLI of 60%.
A higher index is better and reflects
how effective they are delivering the servant leader paradigm.
Now explore how you rated how your organization leadership responded to each of the six key dilemmas above.
Click on each bullet in the graph to explore the individual dilemmas. It describes your organization leadership in coping with the dilemmas derived from the competing values.
Servant Leadership Profile
Combining responses on the individual dualities, gives rise to the following profile. The coloured segments show how you rated your organization leadership and the blue lines polygon how you described yourself in comparison to how you rated your organization leadership.
The ideal profile, that is your organization leadership are acting as effective servant leaders, would be a completely filled in (circle) green profile.
Corporate Culture
Why are some areas of the profile may be larger than others?
How things are done around the organization provides meaning and direction that can exert a decisive influence on the overall ability of leaders to deal with the challenges they face.
- The horizontal axis in the profile relates to concern for people (on the left) to concern for results (right).
- The vertical axis from hierarchical leadership (bottom) through to participative (top).
The net result of the way any one organization has developed its corporate culture over time, depending on its mission, founding entrepreneur, leadership styles, its environment etc, often will have led to more emphasis on some values than others.
In the extremes, the dominant competing values give rise to four organization stereotypes:
- Role Culture - with a high degree of formal rules and procedures, and thus inflexible.
- Power Culture - with power centralized around an autocratic leader, and thus manipulative and where status differentiates.
- Person Culture - less formal rules and exists to serve the needs of its individual employees. Control is through persuasion and mutual concern.
- Task culture - flexible and dynamic in order to deliver results but is thus difficult to manage as it is designed to respond to rapid changes.
More Information
Leadership Development
Values powerfully influence the corporate culture of a business unit or organisation and represent the key challenges for the servant-leader. They do so when they are in conflict or split apart.
A leadership style with high levels of strife and polarisation can be depicted as follows – that is where there is a separation between 'criticism' and 'support' (and likely that the leader promotes one rather than the other.)
Excessive criticism on its own leads to low morale as it is seen as an attack. But support without criticism is simply indulgence and does not challenge low subordinate performace.
The further apart your placed the competing demands (= when you gave different ratings to competing question statements), the greater you have described poor leadership resulting in strife and polarisation within the culture of your organisation.
Someone criticised by a leader feels attacked, where support is absent, or indulged by a weakleader where criticism is withheld. Where decisions are made without participation, leaders are typically uninformed.
But now consider the situation where the servant leader has enabled the two values become closer together... One begins to flow in to the other, so that ultimately they become combined:
With the two shapes together, yellow flows into blue to make green, thereby depicting the spark of vitality, which brings values to life and denotes springtime, growth, renewal and cross-fertilisation. Whereas earlier values might have fought they are now mutually sustaining.
For example, the servant-leader will be able to provide constructive criticism of staff to improve shortcomings and progress personal growth and by providing appropriate support (such as training or job rotation) ensure that motivation of employees is sustained and real progress results. The servant leader connects criticism with support so they are no longer seen as competing alternative extremes.
The creativity, productivity, effectiveness, work spirit and profitability of the culture of any business unit will be a function of how closely its values combine with one another. Different pairings will reveal different qualities of excellence. The degree of integration of the extreme values (towards 'green') is a measure of the degree to which the leadership style is achieving the servant-leader ideal.