In the article titled “Servant Leadership: Developing Others and Addressing Gender Inequities,” recently published in HR Strategic Review , Dr. Maureen Andrade offers the following insights:

• Servant leadership provides a compelling model for helping others, especially women, grow and advance and leave legacies of their own.
• Servant leadership emphasizes altruistic values to engage followers in behaviors that encourage their growth (Greenleaf, 1977), such as listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, commitment to growth, and building community.
• Servant leadership can facilitate the development of women. Leaders in all organizations who are knowledgeable of servant leadership and adhere to its practices, recognize the need to develop women leaders by mentoring and empowering them and ensuring equitable practices for promotion and pay.

To leverage servant leadership to help address the broken rung in women’s leadership, leaders should:

• Make the career development of followers a priority (Ghahremani et al., 2022).
• Provide necessary critical feedback to help followers grow and develop (Liden et al., 2022).
• Create a caring psychological climate that shows what managers value (e.g., followers’ career progression as opposed to financial profits) (Ghahremani et al., 2022).
• Actively signal caring related to followers’ careers to show that employees are valued and will receive the support needed to progress (Ghahremani et al., 2022).
• Examine organizational culture for unconscious gender bias and ensure that promotion criteria is open and transparent (Thomé, 2021).
• Mentor and facilitate women’s progression by encouraging their self-belief; helping them develop interpersonal skills, add value and take on new responsibilities; and training them to be assertive in terms of quantifying their accomplishments and impact (Tobias and Kirby, 2022; Zalis, 2019).
• Model servant leader behaviors to train and encourage the adoption of associated soft skills, many of which fit feminine stereotypes, thus encouraging leadership attainment for women (Goldberg et al., 2022).

To learn more, access the fullarticle here.