Twenty-five years ago, as a young safety professional, I struggled to find a set of leadership practices I could call my own. In 1996, I wrote about many of the leadership practices I was already using but found more clearly established in Servant Leadership (Sarkus, 1996). Since then, I’ve helped my client’s leaders better understand and use servant leadership as a powerful base of influence and some of the results have been nothing short of remarkable.
Generally, servant leaders look out for others before taking care of their own needs. They typically place their agenda aside – they’re not self-serving. They principally choose to serve others through a vision for safety, listening, empathy, persuasion, and the empowerment of others. The selfless dimension of servant leaders helps them to better influence the safety-related attitudes and actions of their followers because they aren’t manipulative. Trust is critically important to the servant leader, particularly at the worker-level, and evolves into greater efficiencies and an improved safety climate (Goh & Low, 2014).