[BEST] Servant Leadership Quotes

I Serve because I am the Leader.
I am The Leader because I Serve.
—   Servant Leadership
       

A leader is a servant first is the principle of servant leadership. Before dwelling into the Servant leadership Quotes, let’s get some idea on this revolutionary form of leadership.

In Servant leadership focus is on

• Influence rather than power and control
• Replacing self-interest with service to others servant
• Listening rather than giving orders 
• Long-range benefits rather than short-term profits
• Focusing on other strengths rather than weaknesses 
• Creating a shift from managing for results to designing environments that create results

Robert K. Greenleaf coined this term in the 1970s.  Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy, a way of looking at leadership. Servant leadership is going to influence how you act as a leader.

To understand more on it let’s compare servant leadership to traditional leadership. In traditional leadership or power leadership approach, a leader guides and encourages their subordinates or employees to try to the best in their job. They provide motivation, guidance, direction to the team. The focus in traditional leadership is to improve the business position. Servant Leadership, In simple words it’s a completely upside down model of traditional leadership.

Traditional leadership sees the people lower on this pyramid of leadership, lower in this structure, serving the leaders in authority above them. So that people below serve the leaders. Obviously this is very different from servant leadership. It’s a very boss-centered approach, this traditional approach where the person in authority typically is looking to amass more power and more control and unfortunately this can devalue other people. People below the leaders often feel quote, “used and abused.” Servant leadership really flips this whole equation on its head. 

In Servant leadership the leader instills the sense of community in their people or team. Their policies are employee friendly, and they take excellent care of their people. Servant leadership is about transformation and future focus and adopting its leadership principles complements agile ways of working really well the nature of work in the workplace has changed drastically our leaders need to change to in order to continue to maximize delivery and

Servant leadership is grounded in many of the religions as well. Jesus said  “whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all” This is a classic servant leadership example. 

Some of the well known influential people like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa are examples of servant leaders. They all had a deep sense of responsibility for the people that they lead. Gandhi was trained as an attorney, as a lawyer he had a high level of education but he thought the best way to have influence was to serve and so he changed his whole lifestyle and approach to lead from that place of being a servant to other people.

In today’s organizations, it really makes sense to be a servant leader because the basic idea is that if you invest in other people, then they will help you build a better organization. And that’s why you see servant leaders developing other people, essentially bringing out the best and other people, getting them the best training, treating them well, making sure they’re fully satisfied at work so that they can contribute and reach their full potential. 

Obviously people are still in charge. They’re still the leader but they’re leading by serving, by thinking about how they can benefit the people that are under their care.  Servant leaders are known for their good treatment of the people that are under their care and they’re known for cultivating collaboration, trust, and empathy. 

Servant leaders demonstrate some of major attributes, all of which can be developed like – Listening, self-awareness, foresight, empathy, persuasion, stewardship, healing, conceptualization and building a sense of community.

In nutshell the servant leadership is an attractive effective and proven approach that should be the choice for those interested in transformation at an individual and organizational level.

Top 51 Servant Leadership Quotes

1.    In giving us children, God places us in a position of both leadership and service. He calls us to give up our lives for someone else’s sake – to abandon our own desires and put our child’s interests first. Yet, according to His perfect design, it is through this selflessness that we can become truly fulfilled.    —   Charles Stanley
       

2.    A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.    —   Jim Rohn
       

3.    My philosophy of leadership is to surround myself with good people who have ability, judgment and knowledge, but above all, a passion for service.    —   Sonny Perdue
       

4.    Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a trumpet call to self-importance.    —   J. Donald Walters
       

5.    Real leadership is leaders recognizing that they serve the people that they lead.    —   Pete Hoekstra
       

6.    Actually I think this is one of the most profound changes that more openness and transparency brings: It puts more weight and importance on building better social relationships and being more trustworthy.    —   Mark Zuckerberg
       

7.    A good leader cares enough to give his or her best people feedback…. And that’s how I’d describe my leadership: servant leadership…. I’ve always been trained with the inverted pyramid, where the customer is on top.    —   John Donahoe
       

8.    A noble leader answers not to the trumpet calls of self promotion, but to the hushed whispers of necessity.    —   Mollie Marti
       

9.    As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.    —   Bill Gates
       

10.    But perhaps the greatest threat is that we lack the mechanism of consensus, a way of making up our collective minds.    —   Robert K. Greenleaf
       

11.    Ego can’t sleep. It micro-manages. It disempowers. It reduces our capability. It excels in control.    —   Robert K. Greenleaf
       

12.    Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve….You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.    —   Martin Luther King, Jr.
       

13.    Good leaders must first become good servants.    —   Robert K. Greenleaf
       

14.    I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.    —   Albert Schweitzer
       

15.    If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.    —   Booker Washington
       

16.    In a servant leadership culture we learn by choice or example that if we want to be great, we have to serve others respectfully.    —   Vern Dosch
       

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17.    I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.    —   Mahatma Gandhi
       

18.    It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.    —   Robert K. Greenleaf
       

19.    It has generally been my experience that the very top people of truly great organizations are servant-leaders.    —   Stephen Covey
       

20.    It is high time the ideal of success should be replaced with the ideal of service.    —   Albert Einstein
       

21.    It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself….Serve and thou shall be served.    —   Ralph Waldo Emerson
       

22.    It’s not about trying to find something to help you be a more effective leader. It’s about trying to be a better person. The other will follow.    —   James A. Autry
       

23.    Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders.    —   Tom Peters
       

24.    Life is an exciting business and most exciting when lived for others.    —   Helen Keller
       

25.    Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?    —   Martin Luther King, Jr.
       

26.    Organizations exist to serve. Period. Leaders live to serve. Period.    —   Tom Peters
       

27.    Our duties naturally emerge form such fundamental relations as our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, our state or nation. Make it your regular habit to consider your roles—parent, child, neighbor, citizen, leader—and the natural duties that arise from them. Once you know who you are and to whom you are linked, you will know what to do.    —   Epictetus
       

28.    People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.    —   John C. Maxwell
       

29.    Servant leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you; you work for them.    —   Ken Blanchard
       

30.    Servant leadership is easy for people with high self-esteem. Such people have no problem giving credit to others. They have no problem listening to other people for ideas. They have no problem in building other people up.    —   Ken Blanchard
       

31.    Service is the very purpose of life. It is the rent we pay for living on the planet.    —   Marian Wright Edelman
       

32.    Serving others prepares you to lead others.    —   Jim George
       

33.    Serving people means growing their capacity and implies that everyone can contribute.    —   Juana Bordas
       

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34.    The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.    —   Woodrow Wilson
       

35.    The first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is severely limited.    —   Robert Greenleaf
       

36.    The goal of many leaders is to get people to think more highly of the leader. The goal of a great leader is to help people to think more highly of themselves.    —   J. Carla Nortcutt
       

37.    The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires but in his integrity and in his ability to affect those around him positively.    —   Bob Marley
       

38.    The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.    —   John Ruskin
       

39.    The king [leader] is a paid servant and enjoys the resources of the state together with the people.    —   Chanakya
       

40.    The servant-leader is servant first… Becoming a servant-leader 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… 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 the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they,    —   Robert Greenleaf
       

41.    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.    —   Robert K. Greenleaf
       

42.    The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.    —   Peter Drucker
       

43.    The true heroes of the new millennium will be servant leaders, quietly working out of the spotlight to transform our world.    —   Ann McGee-Cooper
       

44.    True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not to enrich the leader.    —   John C. Maxwell
       

45.    Twenty-first-century leadership relationship dynamics are from the bottom up rather than the top down; from the outside in, rather than the inside out.    —   James M. Strock
       

46.    We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead.    —   William Arthur Ward
       

47.    What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world, is and remains immortal.    —   Albert Pine
       

48.    When you choose the paradigm of service, looking at life through that paradigm, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift.    —   Oprah Winfrey
       

49.    Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.    —   Robert K. Greenleaf
       

50.    Your rewards in life will be in direct proportion to the value of your service to others.    —   Brian Tracy
       

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