Developing a Shared Mental Model: Operationalizing Servant-Leadership

This book examines and identifies underlying assumptions, practices, and behaviors of everyday life in a servant-led organization to better understand leadership development processes that creates servant-leaders. It develops a fuller, more meaningful awareness of patterns of shared assumptions in a servant-led organization. Practices, assumptions, values, and interpretations interacted within the boundaries of the organization to create a servant-leader culture. The deep underlying collectivity-wide assumption found was universal care, which drove the four other overarching themes found during this study: (a) a commitment to growth of people, (b) trust, (c) enacted, shared values, and (d) discourse. The focus on growth of people was found in Synovus Leadership Development programs and in individual opportunities provided for team members’ learning and growth. A high level of relational trust was found to exist among team members. This trust provides the emotional background for shared values that focuses on people to develop and flourish. These practices are bound by ongoing discourse between senior leadership and team members developing shared meaning.