LEAD 4013 Module 2 Servant Leadership Application Example

Seven Dimensions, One Contact Center Manager: Applying Servant Leadership Characteristics to a Real Leader and Her Team

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD4013: Strategic Servant Leadership

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

Module 1 compared servant and transformational leadership using two managers at a credit union member services center. This paper looks closely at one of them, the manager I will call Denise, whose leadership came closest to the servant model. Denise is a composite of leaders I have worked with, and identifying details are changed. The paper uses a published model of servant leadership with seven dimensions as its framework, gives observed behaviors as evidence for each, examines how her approach shaped the team and identifies where it fell short. I worked on her team for three years before becoming a supervisor, so the evidence comes from daily observation.

The Framework

Liden et al. (2008) built and tested a questionnaire that breaks servant leadership into seven parts: emotional healing, meaning sensitivity to others' personal concerns; creating value for the community; conceptual skills, meaning understanding of the organization and its tasks well enough to help others; empowering followers; helping followers grow and succeed; putting followers first; and behaving ethically. The model suits this analysis because each dimension can be observed in everyday behavior. For each, I describe what Denise did and rate the strength of the evidence as strong, moderate or weak.

Emotional Healing: Strong

Contact center work exposes representatives to members who are frightened, angry or grieving, for example after a spouse's death leaves accounts frozen. Denise noticed when a representative came off a hard call. She would walk over, ask how the representative was doing and, if needed, give them ten minutes off the queue. After the fraud surge she met individually with two representatives who had been badly shaken and arranged for the employee assistance program to hold an on-site session. Representatives described her as someone who "sees you."

Creating Value for the Community: Moderate

Denise linked the team's work to members' lives, reminding representatives that resolving a fraud case quickly might mean a family could buy groceries that day. She volunteered the team for the credit union's free financial literacy evenings at a local library. Her community focus was real but occasional, and it did not shape daily priorities as strongly as other dimensions.

Conceptual Skills: Strong

Denise knew the work. She could handle any call type, understood how the fraud team, card processor and branches connected and could explain why a policy existed. During the surge, that knowledge let her identify within a day that complex fraud cases were clogging the queue and arrange for a specialist to take them, a change that helped everyone at once.

Empowering: Moderate

Denise gave experienced representatives authority to waive certain fees up to a set amount without approval, which let them solve members' problems on the first call. She asked the team for ideas on scheduling and adopted several. However, she sometimes stepped in to resolve difficult calls herself, which was kind in the moment but meant representatives missed chances to build confidence in handling them.

Helping Followers Grow and Succeed: Strong

Denise held monthly development conversations with each representative, separate from performance reviews, about what they wanted to learn. She arranged job shadowing in the loan department for one representative who later moved there and coached another through a team lead application. Three people from her team were promoted in two years, more than from any other team in the center.

Putting Followers First: Strong

Denise took calls herself during surges, worked the least popular holiday shifts and defended the team when senior managers pushed for shorter average handle times, arguing that rushing fraud victims would harm members and burn out staff. She treated the team's capacity to serve members as something to protect, not something to spend.

Behaving Ethically: Strong, With One Tension

Denise was transparent about decisions, admitted mistakes and refused to pressure representatives to sell products members did not need when the credit union introduced a cross-selling goal. One tension appeared: her protection of the team occasionally meant she did not share bad news, such as an upcoming schedule change, until late, which some representatives later felt was less than candid.

Effects on the Team

Among the restaurants of one chain, servant-leading managers were found to build a culture of service inside their units, and that culture went hand in hand with better unit results and with staff serving customers more attentively (Liden et al., 2014). Denise's team showed a similar pattern. Its member satisfaction scores were the highest in the center, voluntary turnover was about half the center's average and representatives regularly covered for one another without being asked. The serving culture she modeled appeared to pass from her to the team and from the team to members.

Checking My View Against the Team's

My ratings are one person's view, so I asked eight current and former members of Denise's team to rate her anonymously on a short form with one plain-language statement for each dimension, scored from 1 to 5. The averages broadly matched my assessment. Putting followers first and helping them grow scored highest, at 4.8 and 4.6. Emotional healing and conceptual skills followed at 4.5 and 4.4, and ethical behavior at 4.3, where two people noted the late sharing of a schedule change. Empowering scored 3.6 and creating value for the community 3.4, the same two dimensions I rated moderate. The agreement gives me more confidence in the analysis, though eight people who chose to respond may be more positive than the whole team.

Where Her Practice Was Weaker

Two dimensions, empowering and creating value for the community, were weaker, and the ethical tension around delayed bad news is worth noting. Servant leadership is sometimes misunderstood as protecting followers from difficulty, but a review of the field emphasizes that it includes developing followers' own capacity and directing their concern outward to others (Eva et al., 2019). Denise's habit of stepping in on hard calls and holding back unwelcome news, though kind, limited her team's growth in exactly the ways servant leadership aims to encourage.

What I Take From Denise

As a supervisor of eleven people, I can borrow most of what Denise did. The development conversations, the check-ins after hard calls and the willingness to work the queue myself during surges are within my role. The lessons from her weaker areas matter as much: I will let representatives work through difficult calls with coaching rather than taking over, and I will share unwelcome news early, trusting the team to handle it. Serving people well includes trusting them with difficulty.

Conclusion

Applied to Denise, the seven-dimension model shows strong servant leadership in emotional healing, conceptual skills, helping followers grow, putting them first and ethical behavior, with moderate strength in empowerment and community value. Her team's service culture, satisfaction and retention fit research on servant leadership's effects. Her weaker areas suggest that serving followers well sometimes means letting them handle difficulty themselves. Module 3 examines ethics, integrity and accountability in servant leadership more closely.

References

Eva, N., Robin, M., Sendjaya, S., van Dierendonck, D., & Liden, R. C. (2019). Servant leadership: A systematic review and call for future research. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(1), 111-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.07.004

Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Liao, C., & Meuser, J. D. (2014). Servant leadership and serving culture: Influence on individual and unit performance. Academy of Management Journal, 57(5), 1434-1452. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.0034

Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., Zhao, H., & Henderson, D. (2008). Servant leadership: Development of a multidimensional measure and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly, 19(2), 161-177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2008.01.006