In this chapter we will be looking at leadership as a way to serve others. This does not mean leaders must fulfill the want of others, but to treat everyone with love and respect.
James Hunter describes leadership as a form of loving others, Agape love. It's referred to as a verb, not a noun. Agape can also be translated to charity, rather than love which makes it a little easier to understand. The list of behaviours that imply Agape are the following:
- Patience - Showing self control
- Kindness - Giving attention, appreciation, and encouragement
- Humility - Being authentic and without pretense or arrogance
- Respectfulness - treating others as important people
- Selflessness - meeting the needs of others
- Forgiveness - giving up resentment when wronged
- Honesty - being free of deception
- Commitment - sticking to your choices
As people, we would naturally love and respect our family members. Here, we learn that effective leadership comes when the above characteristics and behaviours are used to treat everyone. Therefore, to be a congruent leader one must align his actions with intentions. This goes far to prove that people cannot always control how they feel about other people, but they certainly are in control of how they behave towards other people.
George Washington said the following about kindness: “Be kind to others. How far you go in life depends upon your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in your life, you will have been all of those.”
Deep down, every person feels unique, important, and wise. Therefore, paying attention to people and making them feel important is a strong trait to have. Active listening is one of the easiest ways you can practice to empower others.
Active listening requires a disciplined effort to silence all the internal conversation while we’re attempting to listen to another human being. It requires a sacrifice, an extension of ourselves, to block out the noise and truly enter another person’s world - to see things as the speaker sees them and attempting to feel things as the speaker is feels them. This identification with the speaker is referred to as empathy and requires a great deal of effort.
It is important to know how a leader deals with wrongful behaviour of others while addressing them in a way that is meaningful. As leaders, we must be assertive. Assertiveness behaviour is being open, honest, and direct with others but is always done in a respectful manner. By being respectful, we must love. And to see what James Hunter means by love, we can revisit the list of traits above and apply them to times we are building relationships.
As an example, forgiving behaviour is dealing with situations as they arise in an assertive manner and then letting go of any lingering resentment. As a leader, if you are not able to let go of the resentment, it will consume you and render you ineffective.
There it is steemians. I hope you have enjoyed my summaries of this chapter of the book. I will be back with my final thoughts on leadership.
AZ