I love the Hostmanship approach to organizations that originated in Europe. I have written about it previously on this site.
Service is the first foundation of Hostmanship.
To engage means a willingness to serve. Read the following description of service from Hostmanship.
Serving someone else is an often misunderstood art in the time we live in. Being misled, we have begun to believe that service is the same thing as voluntarily act as a doormat, to let someone “place himself above” and let us “sit below” the other person.
Let us now reclaim the word and return to it its proper meaning. To serve is to be there for someone else. To listen, to understand and to ask oneself: “What can I do to make you feel better right now?’ To help someone reach their goals and thus become successful in life.
A characteristic of the serving organization is that is has a serving leadership. Leaders who serve their employees. Where they primarily care about the world and daily life of their employees, so that the employees themselves shall feel free enough to serve when meeting others.
How many servings of employee engagement are you receiving?
- Are you there for your peers and your customers?
- Is someone there for you?
- Do you focus on what you can do to make someone feel better by reaching goals and becoming successful?
- Do you have a serving versus a self-serving bias in leadership?
- Does your organization’s leadership care about your world and your daily life?
- Are you freed up to have energy and time to be of service to others?
Click here to read more about the art of Hostmanship.
Hostmanship is the art of making people feel welcome. Hostmanship is about the empowerment of people on all levels in the organization that strives for excellence. It´s about faith and trust in peoples’ capacity and will to perform well in their relationship with colleagues and customers.
During these uncertain times there is a genuine need to make people feel welcome within organizations and to ensure we are all of service to each other. We don’t need doormats or hierarchies or people motivated by fear and survival. We need strong communities that care about each other and their daily lives. We need to demonstrate trust and faith in each other as we we find, create, and sustain authentic connected ways to strive for excellence.
Be a good host — order up an extra serving of employee engagement excellence.
I think trust is important and related to service.
There’s two flavors of trust. One is about trusting that somebody will behave a certain way. The other is about vulnerability-based trust.
I’m a fan of vulnerability-based trust. It’s a culture where people have your back and it’s OK to make mistakes. It’s a learning organization with smart risks.
Asking the question, “who’s got your back?” says a lot about your culture. It takes away anxiety. If you’re among a bunch of people, but everybody is on their own without support or without service, it’s a lot of wasted energy, worrying about the wrong things. When people feel safe, they stretch, grow, and go from surviving to thriving.
J. D.
I was reading the comment and thought this is thoughtful and helpful. Then I looked and saw your name and said of course. You are a very gifted writer and I expect lots of good things from you in the years to come.
David
“Service” is often great language. On other occasions–as a number of my technology clients claim–calling themselves service providers to internal clients is quite a negative experience–and that’s putting it mild.
So, they’ve switched all the internal vendor, service language to “support” language. It works differently. They found that support language results in being treated more respectfully, and also making it possible for them to make more valuable contributions.
Then too, “service” language is out of the religious metaphor tradition–just as “mission”–that term organizations use when talking strategy. I must confess that with my religious background, I consider service–at least on occasion–to be a smarmy, ingratiating relationship of unequals. That doesn’t work for my business which is focused on collaboration.
I’ve learned–context determines all, including the language that is most useful.
Dan,
Thanks for the equal support. I appreciate your points so much. It makes me rethink a term I quite liked but had not looked at in the light you shone upon it. I feel more comfortable with equality and collaboration. Your comments were most helpful.
David