Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 6 - Servant Leader

If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together. - African Proverb

Our sixth Leadership Behavior centers around Servant Leadership. I’ve always been inspired by leaders that I’ve worked around and for that excel at this behavior and the energy that they amplify is very positive. Here’s the slide from our internal deck:

A lot of this leadership behavior is really about ‘walking the walk’ as Andy, one of our Rocketeers is a big advocate for.

The Servant Leader Rocketeer Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:

• Acts with humility, relatively uninterested in personal credit.

• Gets the job done with no need to attract attention to themselves

• Leads in a way that others say “we did it ourselves”

• Balances community welfare with short-term profitability

• Lives an ethic of service to others and the world

• Champion for ServiceRocket making a positive impact in the world

Rocketeers that excel at this behavior put others before themselves in the day to day. Note, that this doesn’t mean that they are martyrs. They certainly look after themselves, but they have a high degree of empathy for others and self-discipline. They are honorable and have high integrity, even when nobody is watching.

Back in my IKEA trolley-pushing days, these would of been the type of people that return their carts back to the holding bay vs leave them lying about.

Teams that work for a leader that have strength in this behavior will regularly give each other kudos. They know that it’s not important that they themselves be recognized for every single step - but they call out and recognize others. Paying it forward.

Anti-Behavior: Self-centric

The Anti-Behavior for this Leadership Behavior is: Self-centric

If You Want to Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want to Go Far, Go Together. African Proverb

Our Inspiration

We leveraged the core of this Leadership Behavior from Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams along with it’s anti-behavior. And then we adapted it for our culture and The series of books and research by these authors and the underlying Leadership Circle framework is used heavily at our company and linking these together made so much sense. In that body of work it distinguishes between leaders being in the state of high creativity or high reactivity. The anti-behavior logically has a canceling effect on the creative side.

The sub-points were inspired by our Rocketeer managers along with the Leadership Circle. I’ll write more in a future post how we use this leadership framework in our company across the globe in a scalable way.

Some great resources for this Leadership Behavior include*:

• Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor Frankl

• Mastering Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams

• Scaling Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams

• Principles - Ray Dalio

Why do we have Leadership Behaviors? Isn’t this what Core Values are supposed to do? See my previous post below on ‘When are Core Values not enough?”, but in short Leadership Behaviors give you explicit coachable items to work with your team to help them get better. Telling someone they have fallen on a behavior is much easier to correct and improve, whereas telling someone that they have failed against values is akin to telling them that they’ve been banished from the tribe.

In my opinion, companies need to define these behaviors if they are truly invested in growing their employees to reach their potential. We outline this in our Rocketeer Promise.

When are Core Values not enough?

ROB CASTANEDA

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At some stage around 2007 we got to a stage where we needed Core Values. I remember this moment clearly, Philip, a fellow member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization took my call where I started expressing issues I was having with our business. We were ~60 people at that stage and alignment was a challenge.

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*I have some amazon affiliate codes on book links, I may make billions from these and quit my job.

**Over time these posts will be updated with more links, tweaks and changes as we learn more. Nothing is ever final at ServiceRocket, and we don’t like “unveiling” things.