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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Bernie Maloney on Servant Leadership and Bringing out Human Potential

Bernie Maloney on Servant Leadership and Bringing out Human Potential

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Bernie Maloney of Persistent Systems about servant leadership and bringing out human potential.

Key Takeaways

  • Servant leadership is about compassion and empathy
  • Servant leadership is necessary in the complex business world of today
  • Servant leadership is about creating a space through which other people can succeed and stepping back to let them do so
  • The way of organizing work for known problems and predictable solutions doesn’t work for complex problems
  • Agile approaches tap into human capability and make “twice the value in half the time” possible but it takes reframing our reality

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  • 0:37 Introductions
  • 1:25 Being inspired to explore and practice servant leadership 
  • 2:03 Servant leadership matters because of empathy and compassion 
  • 2:28 When identifying personas for products empathy with the customer is crucial to success
  • 2:37 Creating cross-functional teams puts people out of their comfort zone and it is necessary to create a space for people to succeed 
  • 3:07 Servant leadership is actually really good leadership 
  • 3:29 It’s about creating a space through which other people can succeed and stepping back to let them do so   
  • 4:03 Exploring the need to bring out human potential referencing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow
  • 4:26 The difference between the amount of information available to us and the rate at which our brains can process it
  • 5:02 Helping make the shift from “we can’t do that” to “how can we do that” 
  • 5:20 The story of helping someone overcome fears in a short coaching session
  • 5:48 Agile approaches tap into human capability and make “twice the value in half the time” possible but it takes reframing our reality
  • 6:12 This is about questioning and challenging your assumptions   
  • 6:58 “Doing the right thing” can result in more complex solutions than are needed 
  • 7:46 Exploring scenarios complexity as a way to identify the nature of work and ways of organizing 
  • 9:15 The frequent response of “That’s exactly what I asked for, but what I really needed was…”
  • 9:34 The way of organizing work for known problems and predictable solutions doesn’t work for complex problems 
  • 10:05 Organizations that don’t change to the new ways of working are being disrupted out of existence 
  • 10:35 At a societal level we are moving faster – reference Power of Pull
  • 10:52 Value in the modern world comes from the shared network of information 
  • 11:20 We need to learn new ways of working – collaboration over individual specialization 
  • 11:40 Quoting “Specialization leads to lack of accountability” 
  • 12:25 Implications for leadership in organizations – this is radical change 
  • 12:30 The MBA is only about 100 years old and the technology behind the MBA programs was the shipping industry in the late 19thcentury 
  • 13:08 It’s really scary for leadership to let go and let teams become self-directed 
  • 13:28 Explaining the jump from first to second level management and how this is such a hard jump for most managers 
  • 14:08 There are no models and structures in place to help leaders make the jump to letting go and trusting their teams to do the work – this is new territory and adopting agile makes that transition necessary for first-level managers 
  • 14:20 Advice to managers – find a mentor, someone who can explain their experience of moving from first level to second level management 
  • 14:30 As your teams become self-directed managers need to let go and that is really scary for many managers 
  • 14:40 In a situational leadership model this is a coaching and mentoring style 

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