Imagine if our businesses were meant to serve people and the environment. Do we have the skills in place to do more than generate profit?
Historically, businesses were meant to sell products and services, and promote profit, sometimes ignoring people or relegating them to second place. The results have been unethical: customers suffer from money-saving practices causing them time, annoyance and resentment; employees aren’t given the benefits or pay necessary to feed families, pay bills, and inspire loyalty and creativity; manufacturing and supply chain practices ignore the environment.
It’s possible to care for each other and the environment by making companies change agents into the future: with an intent to serve, our businesses look different, hiring and pay practices have a different purpose, and companies make more money. Imagine if business leaders cutting edge change.
PROFIT VS SERVING?
For some reason, we’ve separated money from people. But we don’t need to. I believe that capitalism is a good place to start to solve some of the problems we face, but it must include people. Fair pay, healthcare, childcare, climate change provisions, and a way to alleviate systemic racism.
Most of us work for others and are the foundation of our economy. Our businesses give people the services, the money to pay for their lives. As such they are integral to our lives. And yet, we use them merely as profit creators.
Indeed, there is a growing rage and cynicism against corporations. As such a vital part of the world, it would be a shame if we didn’t learn to make them part of the global shift to truly enabling humanity to thrive.
What would be different if people were at the core of our rules and expectations? Would you need to train your folks differently? Put Win/Win in place? Pay all employees a living/fair wage and make sure our customers were properly respected and cared for? Make sure change occurred from the inside out? Have transparency so all feel part of the solution?
THE HOW INVOLVED WITH SERVING
As the inventor of skills models that facilitate servant leadership, I have an obvious bias that believes we should offer our employees the competences with which to communicate, serve, lead and care for our customers. As such, I’ve spent my life developing communication and change models that enable serving – the HOW, not merely the WHAT. Because they’re so different from conventional models, they take a bit of training. Certainly they’re not skills we teach in conventional training programs. Let me introduce you to them:
- The sales model is built to place solutions, ignoring serving people. Indeed, by helping them address the change management process they must handle before actually becoming buyers, and with a servant leader hat on, they would actually close a lot more and have far less customer churn. Not to mention be terrific representatives of our companies.
I developed a Buying Facilitation® model that not only closes 8X more business and reduces customer churn by 50%, but truly serves people during decision making, change, discovery, and buy in.
- Leadership and management norms too often promote the requirements of top principals without fully incorporating the needs of the employees. By promoting win/lose rather than win/win, the legacy of top-down control continues, all but ignoring the ideas and loyalty of folks who actually touch customers and do the foundational work that keeps companies in business.
I’ve developed a How of Change™ model that leaders can use to enable everyone involved share ideas, buy-in, to and design change according to their personal norms and values, and enables far more creativity – without resistance.
- Unfortunately, we interpret what others say to us as per our existing neural circuitry. In other words, whatever others say to us gets interpreted subjectively according to our history. Obviously this makes it difficult to accurately understand what others mean to tell us. And because our brains never tell us what it misinterpreted or misunderstood, we’re left thinking that what we think we’ve heard is accurate.
I wrote a book that explains how, precisely, we end up misunderstanding and biasing what we hear others say and how to supersede the circuitry and listen without bias. Imagine if we could all hear each other without imparting our own subjectivity!
To learn how to apply Servant Leadership, go to: Applications
I’d be delighted to lead your company to servant leadership, either as a coach for your leadership team or a trainer to impart wholly new tools. Please contact me to discuss: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com