by Dale Shumaker
4spirit@gmail.com
Lead with LUV by Ken Blanchard and Colleen Barrett (President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines)
reveal through dialogue her secrets of being a Love Manager. Southwest Airlines, with LUV as its stock market symbol, lived in a love relationship with each other, customers and stock holders. During Barrett's servant leadership as president until 2008, Southwest's culture was all about love.
As Southwest's LUV leader and followers of the Golden Rule, her VP of marketing said this of Colleen. "Colleen teaches us that love is what matters and that you have to lead with your heart and know that the heart will take you in the right directions."
Servant leadership is about love. Although this view is seen in the corporate world as a soft idea. Love is a powerful driving force. Loving your mission, customers, your people, yourself, so others can be magnificent. The true servant leader deals with vision/direction, strategic leadership to see that everything goes in the same direction.
The servant leader has a triple bottom line. Treat your people right as your most valued customer. the employees then treat the passenger (the customer) as their most valued person in warmth, caring, and a fun spirit. The customer tells others and comes back, so then the shareholders benefit from this love cycle. As the employer of choice, the provider of choice, the investment of choice, the triple bottom line yields the financial bottom line.
Make your people your business partners in every way.
Servant leaders run with a compelling vision which includes a significant purpose (what business are you in?), a picture of the future (what it will look like if successful?), clear values (what guides your behavior and decisions daily?). It tells you who you are, where you're going, and what guides you in getting there. People admire your strengths, but they respect your honesty regarding your vulnerability.
Servant leadership is love in action. How are you defining love?
Patient. Patience is helping people down on their luck, rebuilding self-confidence.
Kind. Kindness seeks to be useful, and searches for opportunities to do good.
Generous. Generosity rejoices over others' success, recognizing and rewarding acts of courage, determination, sacrifice, or goodwill.
Courteous. Courtesy is to be love in little things, promoting the happiness of all.
Humble. Humility does not call attention to itself, bloat up with self-conceit, take credit for ideas. People with humility don't think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less.
Unselfish. Unselfishness never neglects others. Consider others, their welfare, satisfaction and advantage to be above its own. Never advancing, aggrandizing, enriching, gratifying itself at the cost of others.
Good temper. Love restrains passions and is not exasperated, never angry without a cause. Anger cannot rest in a heart where love reigns.
Guileless. Love thinks no evil, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action.
Sincere. Love takes no pleasure in doing injury or hurting others, or broadcasting someone's miscues. It doesn't gossip or bear false witness, taking time to thank people for their worthwhile contributions.
The true test of a servant leader, who maintains a healthy culture, one with everyone involved in feedback, is to have other servant leaders who are wiser, freer, more autonomous, healthier and better able themselves to become servant leaders.
In summary, Colleen loves this company, loves the employees, the customers.
Commonly referred to as a fun-LUVin company, leading with love is a different (and fun) way to create success.
"Every dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
Ken Blanchard's website:
http://www.kenblanchard.com/
Oswald Chambers is a classic prolific inspirational writing. His devotional My Utmost for His Highest reflect his insights to vibrant Spiritual living. Ponder these excerpts from May 22 through May 29. Current daily devotionals appear at
http://utmost.org/
God reveals in John 17 that His purpose is not just to answer our prayers, but that through prayer we might come to discern His mind. Yet there is one prayer which God must answer, and that is the prayer of Jesus. . . that they may be one just as We are one . . ." Are we as close to Jesus Christ as that?
Jesus prayed nothing less for us than absolute oneness with Himself, just as He was one with the Father. Some of us are far from this oneness; yet God will not leave us alone until we are one with Him— because Jesus prayed, “. . . that they all may be one . . . .”
Jesus summed up commonsense carefulness in the life of a disciple as unbelief. If we have received the Spirit of God, He will squeeze right through our lives, as if to ask, “Now where do I come into this relationship, this vacation you have planned, or these new books you want to read?” And He always presses the point until we learn to make Him our first consideration. Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion. “. . . do not worry about your life . . . .” Don’t take the pressure of your provision upon yourself.
Many of us do not continue to grow spiritually because we prefer to choose on the basis of our rights, instead of relying on God to make the choice for us. We have to learn to walk according to the standard which has its eyes focused on God. And God says to us, as He did to Abram, “. . . walk before Me. . .”
Our thinking about prayer... The correct concept is to think of prayer as the breath in our lungs and the blood from our hearts. Our blood flows and our breathing continues “without ceasing”; we are not even conscious of it, but it never stops. And we are not always conscious of Jesus keeping us in perfect oneness with God, but if we are obeying Him, He always is. Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer. “Pray without ceasing . . . " maintain the childlike habit of offering up prayer in your heart to God all the time.
The attitude of receiving and welcoming the Holy Spirit into our lives is to be the continual attitude of a believer. When we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive reviving life from our ascended Lord.
If anything is a mystery to you and is coming between you and God, never look for the explanation in your mind, but look for it in your spirit, your true inner nature, that is where the problem is. Once your inner spiritual nature is willing to submit to the life of Jesus, your understanding will be perfectly clear, and you will come to the place where there is no distance between the Father and you, His child, because the Lord has made you one. “In that day you will ask Me nothing.”
“. . . whatever you ask the Father in My name . . .” “That day” is a day of peace and an untroubled relationship between God and His saint. Just as Jesus stood unblemished and pure in the presence of His Father, we too by the mighty power and effectiveness of the baptism of the Holy Spirit can be lifted into that relationship—”. . . that they may be one just as We are one . . ."
Put trust in God first. Being one with Him, we have all His ever expansive universe as part of our life as we live to be His instrument on earth.
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