Mission: Growth

The Bridge to Growth- How Servant Leaders Achieve Better Results and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever – Jude Rake – (Skyhorse Publishing)

“Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders,” - leadership guru Tom Peters.

A few years back, charged with leading a seminar on leadership, I found the Tom Peters quote above as part of my planning and I shared it with the class. It was one of those quotes that stuck with me and I have used it often since then, because it just makes so much sense for how I approach leadership.

Some have dubbed it servant leadership, but it’s just the way that I determined a long time before I became a leader, that I was going to conduct business as a leader. Now veteran business leader Jude Rake has encapsulated servant leadership and it’s direct connection to business growth in his new book, The Bridge to Growth- How Servant Leaders Achieve Better Results and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever.

Rake boils things down to 9 principles of servant leadership:

•        Grow leaders and difference makers, not just followers.
•         Build and orchestrate high-performance teams more powerful than the sum of their parts.
•         Focus the organization on strategic priorities, simplify operations, and accelerate progress.
•      Champion the people who purchase and use your products and services.
•         Cultivate a performance-based culture of innovation.
•         Communicate relentlessly.
•         See the world through the eyes of others.
•         Be the model you want emulated.
•         Coach people to achieve more than they thought possible.

These are spot on; grow leaders is straight up Tom Peters, communicate relentlessly; you simply cannot over communicate when it comes to mission vision and values. Culture should always be a priority, it’s been proven over and over again, yet some still resist moving it to the head of the line.

Rake does a nice job of spelling out how you can expedite this transition in your business and he serves it up in bite size, bullet-pointed chunks that you can implement starting today. The format makes this a great resource to keep within reach.