Service Essentials: Components of Servant Leadership
In my experience, blocking out the noise is a lot harder than wellness apps, and social media feel-good posts lead you to believe. If you're like me, you've grown so accustomed to the distractions that they're considered a necessary part of the process. While noise and other mental blocks, doubts, and anxieties can serve a purpose, they more often pull us away from our goal(s). Ultimately hindering progress and our ability to make a lasting and positive impact.
The truth is our community's needs, and our willingness to fill them must outweigh our fears. If not, we risk failing our communities spending more time planning, neglecting the work needed to move our communities and us forward.
TDR needed to reassess service to avoid this detrimental cycle of continuous planning many well-intended servant-leaders and organizations find themselves in. Honestly, we were not immune to this either, something we learned early on when developing TDR Ideas.
We curated the Essentials of Service, which became the guiding lens for doing our work. TDR's Essentials of Service focuses on Individual Re-education, Community Context, and Resource Awareness. We believe that no one service essential alone is enough to make a lasting and positive impact. When combined, the three results in a mission, program, and organization that is innovative in its approach to service, provide sustainable community resources, and is relevant to the community and its needs.
Here's how we define each component and use it as a driver behind the work we do for our communities at TDR.
Individual Re-Education: The act of service begins is personal and requires a commitment to life-long learning. TDR believes individual re-education is a cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning. We must learn new things to meet the needs of the communities served steadily. We must find new ways to adapt under different conditions as we face novel challenges. We must unlearn the biases and notions that limit our abilities to center and humanize other community members. We must also understand our relationship with our environment and other interdependent systems to create different contexts for different communities. Most importantly, we believe Individual Re-education is a radical step for servant-leaders to ground themselves in their mission, in addition to eschewing moments where power and egos interfere with impact.
Community Context: Despite the idiom, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. TDR defines Community Context as formal (quantitative) and informal (qualitative) assessments and understanding of the state of the community served, both present and historic. Proper Community Context for TDR includes local voices, experiences, and truths, in addition to codified forms of assessment and consulting. TDR's services seek to develop better understandings of communities, the factors that influence decision making and limit choices, relationships of power and position that persist, and implement human-centered models to create comprehensive solutions to ongoing community challenges.
Resource Awareness: Resources change, and consequently, so should a servant-leader's/organization's relationship, use, and knowledge of said resources. To create a positive and lasting impact, we servant-leaders and service-driven organizations must have relevant, up-to-date, and community-informed assessments of available and needed resources.
We can often face deadlines, uncertainties, and other roadblocks, especially during high-stress situations that often challenge our expertise and beliefs.
If you or an organization you serve is overwhelmed by the noise, schedule a call with us to start applying our Service Essentials. Let TDR Ideas help you build solutions to meet your organization, mission, and programmatic needs today!