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✍️ By: Team BC1.NL
What is New Leadership?
Koos Groenewoud explores this theme in a series of videos. What does New Leadership actually mean? What is "unbossing," and is it really only relevant to employers? In the first video, Koos explains exactly what "servant leadership" means.
What's in the Charter of New Leadership?
The Charter was created by Bas Blekkingh together with 120 high potentials at Nyenrode. He asked these young people two things: what kind of leaders would you want to work with, and what kind of companies would you want to work for? The result was a 16,000-word document, one Koos considers so valuable that he had it translated into English and distributed worldwide.
According to those 120 respondents, a leader must lead by example. Walk the talk, practise what you preach. You can't announce that millions need to be saved while pulling up in a brand-new car yourself. A leader should also steer by trust rather than power and top-down control, consider stakeholders rather than just shareholders, and show restraint when it comes to personal income. You can't lay off 200 people and then go home with a huge payout yourself.
What is servant leadership?
The concept of servant leadership was developed by Robert Greenleaf. Having worked at several large multinationals, he concluded after retiring, fifty years ago, that things really should have been done differently. It rests on ten qualities: listening, empathy, healing, self-awareness, persuasion, conceptualisation, foresight, stewardship, commitment to people's growth, and community building. In short, you facilitate, help, and support your people, the old "I'm the boss here" mentality no longer applies.
In the video, Koos explains what "healing" means in this context. At first he didn't quite grasp that quality, until he coached a manager who'd fallen out with an employee, a conflict the manager himself had caused. Koos told him he should apologise. The manager was reluctant, worried the other person would take advantage of it. After some persistence, a good conversation finally happened, and the employee was genuinely moved. That's when it clicked for Koos.
Isn't servant leadership too soft?
Koos disagrees with that idea. Dr. Inge Nuijten wrote her doctoral thesis on servant leadership and found it actually translates into hard numbers, better revenue, higher customer satisfaction, higher employee satisfaction, lower staff turnover, less sick leave, and lower recruitment costs.
What trends does he see in leadership?
By his own estimate, Koos has spent five to seven thousand hours studying this subject and keeps track of the shifts he sees. From head to heart, from thinking to feeling. From power-driven leaders to servant leaders. From control to trust. From management thinking to leadership thinking, where a manager focuses on the bottom line in a spreadsheet while a leader looks toward the horizon. From shareholders to stakeholders. And from Anglo-Saxon to Rhineland thinking. Unbossing and self-management fit into that same shift, all pointing toward letting go and trusting people.
He illustrates the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Rhineland thinking with the story of a lifeguard in America who was responsible for lane 1 but noticed someone drowning in lane 2. He dove in without hesitation and saved the person, only to be fired afterward because lane 2 wasn't his responsibility. A perfect example of following the letter of the law instead of its spirit.
Koos Groenewoud
Koos is a coach, interim manager, columnist, reviewer, and speaker, and an expert in New Leadership, giving him a strong foundation for helping managers become better leaders and drive better results.
He started his career as a cook. Driven by curiosity and a hunger to learn, he's always paid close attention to the world around him and kept developing himself. In the Kantelboek, Koos describes his own journey, including five turning points that helped him realise his dream of becoming a speaker and writer.
New Leadership series
In this series Koos Groenewoud talks in four videos about the opportunities and possibilities. Want to know more? Watch the other videos in this series as well:
