As international educational leaders we are interested in cultivating a motivational environment in which our teams flourish.
The term ‘servant leadership’ was coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1972.
Removing obstacles is one of major outcomes of servant leadership: ‘alleviating … pain’.
Maslow’s hierarchy agrees: impediments block access to maximum human potential.
Daniel Pink in his seminal work Drive maintains that we reach our full potential via three factors: mastery , autonomy and purpose.
Here is a 10 minute RSA animation that clearly distills Pink’s main points.
Recognizing that servant leadership is a conduit for international educational eco-systems to progress toward self-realization, mastery, autonomy and purpose, potential open-ended questions remain, such as: how can we become better servant leaders in times of conflicting viewpoints? And how can we help develop future servant leaders in our schools?