My work life began at the age of fifteen. With my father, it was the thing to do. After all, he was raised on a working farm in Nebraska. His many stories of waking up, or rather being awakened by his father, on those bitter cold Midwest mornings have been heard time and time again. At that time of my life, I wasn’t working to pay a mortgage or raise a family. Nope, I simply wanted to save money for the more important things in life like a car, a cassette tape of the newest artist (dating myself here), or a new plastic model to put together.
My Dad did teach me that you go to work, work hard, don’t complain and do the best job you can do, whether you like it or not. A number of years after my first car purchase that first job helped to buy, and then upon graduation from college, I went to work as a housekeeping manager for Marriott. I brought that strong work ethic with me, and darn it, I worked hard and certainly didn’t understand why everyone else didn’t work as hard as me – ‘whether you like it or not.’
Needless to say, when you are responsible for ‘managing’ others, you find yourself with many additional layers of responsibility. After all, it isn’t just the hard work YOU put in, it becomes all about how one motivates others to get them to do their best. Of course, back then it was all in the interest of making oneself look good, and to get that much-deserved promotion. For the life of me, I could not get my staff to work as hard as I seemed to. Did they not care about being the best at their job? Did they not see the benefit of working faster and more diligently? What the heck was going on here? All of a sudden, the harder ‘I’ worked, the less success ‘I’ had.
Fast forward to today, I’m lucky to have had some amazing mentors in my work life, who I now consider friends. While I would certainly still love to have the good looks and naiveté of my youth, among other things, I wouldn’t permanently go back to that time, no matter the price, or possibility. However, I would go back to that time in my life, if only for short while, so that I could talk to every member of my housekeeping staff at the Courtyard Marriott in Tallahassee. I would take the time to speak to every one of them, individually. I would ask about their children and grandchildren. I would ask what makes them happy, and what frustrates them. I would want to know all I could about them so that I could serve them more fully, and remove barriers, NOT manage them. Not so that I could get to that ‘next level,’ but so I could help them become more fully actualized in their own role. After all, what I have realized as an adult, is that there is so much more to life than just trying to get promoted. And the best part is, by focusing upon serving my various teams over the past 20 years, there’s been more growth in myself, and my career.
That is how I perceive the role of a servant leader, as simply as that. Our goal is to help everyone achieve their best, and to become the most successful THEY can be. For if one chooses to lead their folks, versus managing their ‘hard work behavior,’ everyone thrives. Had I known that way back then, my housekeeping department would have been far superior, and the folks would have been infinitely happier every day they came to work, and I would have as well.