Servant Leadership Across Cultures [Hardcover]

"Good managers" seek to help people win through teaching and coaching them to do their best. They listen to their people, praise them, support them, and redirect them when they deviate from their goals. They find out what their people need to be successful. Rather than focusing on self-interest, on what will please them, "good managers" are interested in making a difference in the lives of their people and, in the process, impacting the organisation for the better.

Replace "good managers" with "servant-leaders" and you have a direct quote from Ken Blanchard on servant-leadership (trainingzone.co.uk 13/5/09, "Is servant-leadership the answer to the recession?"). So, what is servant-leadership and how might it differ from "good management"? I've read about servant-leadership for many years (the concept was first introduced by Bob Greanleaf in the 1960s) and have always found it hard to get a real handle on just what "servant-leadership" as a concept or model is. So, the chance to review "Servant-Leadership Across Cultures: Harnessing the strength of the world's most powerful leadership philosophy" by Fons Trompenaars and Ed Voerman (Infinite Ideas Limited, Oxford, 2009), was quite appealing.

Although the book focuses on managing cultural differences, the first part of the book does give background to and an explanation of, servant-leadership. The underpinning ideal behind servant-leadership is that the leading and serving are two sides of the same coin. A servant-leader is someone who has a strong wish to serve as well as a strong ability to lead and as the authors suggest "most importantly, is able to combine both in such a way that they strengthen each other positively." As a behaviourist myself and despite the authors best intent, I still found it quite difficult to describe "servant-leadership" - perhaps the description of servant-leadership as a "movement" or "philosophy" rather than a leadership model, is quite appropriate.

The second part of the book takes us through the seven dilemmas the authors have found that face many managers and shows how servant-leaders handle each. The use of these dilemmas, such as "control versus passion" and "short term versus long term" are very useful ways of showing what servant-leaders might do when faced with such challenges. Each chapter is preceded by a case study to put the dilemma into context and the chapter finishes with how the manager as servant-leader, handled the situation. This provides the reader with his/her own thoughts about handling the situation, before reading the chapter. All the dilemmas focus on differences within the workplace and within the one company, so this is an excellent way of looking at how to manage differences across cultures.

Many of the chapters refer to the authors' extensive research in the area of cultural differences. I was particularly impressed with their ability to tease out key organisational issues and how they might differ across cultures. For example, in discussing the dilemma "serving" versus "leading" they asked respondents to choose between the following alternatives:
"a) The most important reason to have an organisational structure is so that everyone knows who is in charge of whom" or,
"b) The most important reason to have an organisational structure is so that everyone knows how tasks are divided and coordinated"

The percentage of people (by nationality) who selected "b" ranged from Venezuela at 44% to Denmark at 100%. Where does your country rank? You'll have to buy the book to find that out! This and similar research results, to my mind are worth the price of the book alone.

The third part of the book then explains how one might get started with servant-leadership. Titled "Getting started with servant-leadership: a systematic approach" as the name suggests, is the time for implementation. Covering a mere 11 pages, I found this to be the least influential aspect of the book. I was expecting more "how to" although this probably goes back to my original perplexity about the notion of "What is servant-leadership?"

The book is well written and translates well from the original Dutch. Native English speakers will notice the odd word, but will be impressed by both the straight forward language of the authors and their occasional use of humour and many metaphors to explain or enliven key points. Their understanding of cultural differences is very clear.

From a trainer's perspective, the seven dilemmas outlined by the authors could be ideally used in cross-cultural training for managers. Equally, managers and particularly those who have to manage cross-cultural teams, internationally mixed or dispersed teams, will find both the dilemmas and the case studies very useful learning.

Bob Selden, author What To Do When You Become The Boss: How new managers become successful managers

I am sure that the authors are learned individuals with much experience in leadership, management and, apparently with servant leadership. Unfortunately this book is so full of contradictions and circular, unsupported statements, that it is difficult to get a sense of what servant leadership is.

The authors, in general, make the statement that since there is an inherent contradiction with the term "servant leadership" that the reader should change their understanding of the term by inserting a hyphen between the two words thereby transforming the word "servant" into a modifier of the noun "leadership," hence the term servant-leadership is born. This in itself is an interesting concept and I really loved that premise. Servant is indeed used to describe the type of leadership and it is interesting that it took this long for this idea to surface.

The book's main theorem is that since the term servant-leadership is, in itself, a term where opposites are joined (servant and leader), and it refers to a type of individual that is able to resolve this contradiction by their style of leadership, then it should also be true that this style of leader would be able to take many contradictory ideas or states-of-being and resolve them as well. Not by compromise, where everyone is unhappy, but by finding a "third choice" or an "alternative solution." Opposites (or employee diversity and their problems, both cultural and universal) are strengthened by being combined. Interesting concept and yes the authors are able to support some of the dilemmas, i.e, leading versus serving and specific versus diffuse, but fall short in the others or don't provide specific enough examples to prove their points.

In many ways I felt (and the class that I was in) that this was a book on basic leadership and, at times, the term servant-leadership was inserted. The statements were so general and obtuse as to make us wonder if possibly the book was translated poorly or if the authors grasp of English might be lacking. Had our class started our education about servant leadership with this book we may not have been so critical of it. But after reading a litany of books on the subject and researching articles and whatnot on the theory, we found many contradictory statements that did not resonate with the rest of the field.

One such was "Transformational leadership - which is another name for servant-leadership - is all about change." Anyone who has studied servant leadership for a semester knows the clear difference between those two styles. Other statements were just strange, such as "the most banal form of ethnocentricity is the first phase: Denial. . . leaders cannot recognize cultural differences. . .These are the managers like the ones you meet in the Midwest of the United States that insist, 'if everyone just learns to speak English, there won't be any cultural problems." I have no doubt there is truth to that, but I've met the same managers in California, the Southeast and the U.K.

All in all, this is not the first book on servant leadership anyone should start with. Frankly, this is not a book on determining cultural differences either as there aren't any breakdowns on specific cultures and how leadership style should be implemented with them. I did find some interesting concepts but would rate it a C- overall.