In an age where much of our daily lives is spent online, the principles of servant leadership are more applicable than ever. Every time we engage in social media, in forums, and across the wider internet, we are presented with an opportunity to lead with service – and to positively impact the digital communities of which we are a part. By turning our online activities into examples of servant leadership, we deprioritize the need to be ‘right’ or to drive our self-validation and instead create spaces that allow everyone to thrive.
Understanding Servant Leadership in the Digital Age
The same foundational concepts of empathy, listening, stewardship, community building, and growing and developing others apply to servant leadership online as in the real world. This perspective on interaction in the digital realm changes the tenor of our interactions and the nature of our virtual communities.
Key Principles of Online Servant Leadership
- Active Listening and Empathy: I strive to listen with sincerity and an open heart, take in the experience of others, and understand before being understood.
- Advancing Learning and Self-Improvement: Spreading knowledge and know-how interpersonally to help someone else learn or improve. Community Building: Helping to create welcoming, respectful, and valuable spaces on the internet. Digital Stewardship: Taking responsibility for the impact of our digital actions and providing leadership to others to improve the health of the digital environment.
Transforming Our Online World Through Servant Leadership
Enhancing Digital Interactions
It asks us to take care in what we do online. Servant leadership wants discourse, respect, and consideration for others. When we speak to post about or engage with others, it asks that we think first and foremost about what they need, what they want, and how they might feel. It wants us to do so that our conversations become good ones and our relationships good ones, too. It wants us all to be better and be nicer online.
Building Supportive Online Communities
Adapting servant leadership principles for online use can foster community among users, making participants feel cared for, respected, and appreciated. In the forum, Facebook group, and other online locales that serve as wellsprings for in-person communities, the principles of servant leadership can provide a crucial framework to engage in productive discussion, offer support, and develop shared understanding together.
Encouraging Positive Digital Citizenship
The servant leadership ethos can also clarify and encourage appropriate and ethical online behavior. If one modeled healthy and responsible digital citizenship by being mindful of others online, they would encourage others to consider the broader impacts of their online behavior and invite them to contribute to what might resemble a kinder, gentler web.
Fostering a Culture of Online Volunteerism
Digital servant leadership includes active involvement in online volunteerism. Whether leading with professional know-how, in mentoring or skills coaching or providing emotional support over an online connection, the internet can empower servant leaders to serve in roles and places that help alleviate the needs of world communities.
The Path Forward
However, online servant leadership must be a deliberate exercise. It must always be a way to conduct ourselves if it is going to be a way to conduct ourselves. By doing so, we have the opportunity, if not the obligation, to contemplate the role we are playing in the digital lives of others.
Conclusion
So, as we cross the threshold into what some are calling the age of digital humanity, the call to embrace servant leadership online is a challenge and an opportunity – to rethink the internet as a space of power and to reimagine ourselves not just as its users, but as servants of a servant web. Servant leadership is crucial in creating an internet of equals, a space where we can all learn to enjoy the powerful gift of connection.
In a world where online interactions all too easily devolve into negativity and divisiveness, servant leadership practices provide sunshine by showing how we can improve the digital world through acts of service, respect, and care – one interaction at a time.
