The Service Years: Learning to lead

How serving others led me to leadership

David Elliott MCMI
Jul 23, 2017 · 7 min read

Service. No experience is more humbling, refining and purposeful than giving to those who can’t pay you back simply with yourself and your time. As I step away from leadership and management within the charity sector; spanning 4 years, 3 teams and 2 organisations; I look at the 1 value that took me from retail to a founder & CEO; from frustration to practitioner; from lost to found; from idealist to leader.

Service is built upon service, which requires trust. Whether it’s the private, public or third sector; the ability to serve others is built upon trust. Therefore I’ll be looking at the development of my ability to trust and the leadership principle it helped me develop.

Year 1: Trust yourself — Restore what you did not take.

It was a deal I did with my brother; he was 13 and had just been told that he had an opportunity to trial for the academy of a British Premier League football team. I had also been approached about voluntarily managing a group of under 13 boys, by the mother of a school-friend of his. She made me aware that the team was suffering and hadn’t won a game in 3 years since they were formed. Knowing my brother and the quality of his aspirations and his ability to reach them; knowing that I’d partially trained him in his early years; she approached me directly and said, “these boys, they need a brother type figure. Sometimes you have to be a father, friend or brother to them to get the best out of them”, a truth I was all to aware of.

The deal with my brother was, if he got into the academy then I would take the management position. He got in. I began managing. Three weeks later, (the boys who had lost just 4 weeks earlier 23–0 and still hadn’t won a game, 2 weeks into their 4th season) won three games in a row!

The difference? I gave them belief, confidence, discipline, faith, hope and purpose. Things they had not experienced but trusted me to provide. Why? Because as a leader, you must often give that which you did not take.

Year 2: Trusting them is trusting yourself — Patience is what you do whilst you’re waiting

Year 2 of my leadership experience. It’s the 2nd season with the boys, I’m officially a ‘FA Licensed Coach’, but I’m having issues translating my vision for the team into execution. We’d gone on a bit of an inconsistent run that had taken us from the top of the league to mid-table. The problem was in training, not on the pitch.

I was also serving as a volunteer in a secondary school for an education charity. They’d given me my first official ‘mentor’. I told her about my about my problem; I think she could tell I was a bit of an unrefined ‘control freak’. She simply said to me, “trusting them is trusting yourself”. Their results were a reflection of my inability to believe in myself, encourage who they were and trust them to both excel and to correct their own mistakes in their own way.

That would require me to be patient with the process; but not being the most patient person in the world with high expectations, it was my manager from the charity who told me the most practical principle of patience I have ever heard. See I used to confuse ‘waiting’ with ‘patience’; I told her, “I’m not the most patient person, I’m not a fan of waiting”, her profound response, “patience isn’t waiting. Patience is what you do whilst you’re waiting”. Trust requires patience for people to develop the abilities to be able to fulfil their responsibilities. They will make mistakes but they will also feel empowered by the grace and faith you show in them to improve. But you have to trust that you’re doing a good job, prioritising them and doing all you can to support them in becoming their best selves.

Year 3: They trust you — They need to know you care.

My first professional role was as a manager within the Third sector. I was to be managing a team of young adult volunteers within a school. Discipline, purpose and experience was all on my side; however the most crucial ingredient of all great leaders was missing, love. I had explicitly made my team aware of the strict boundaries I would have. This was to protect myself from over-investment in their year long personal and professional development, whilst also protecting myself from burnout; by making it clear that we would not be “friends”. I was adamant that we’d be solutions focused, practical and hopeful in everything that we did and experienced. However, without love, they had a manager and not leader who was simply there to make sure they did their jobs; which when you’re volunteering isn’t exactly the type of person you want supporting you.

This hadn’t exactly gone down well with everybody at first. I sought my own manager for support and he simply said to me, “if you win their hearts, then their minds and spirits will soon follow”. I had to develop compassion, empathy and to help them find the answers within themselves. Recognising this and creating a good balance early on led to two things happening; the team asking for more trust after having reached and consistently surpassing my (high) expectations, so they could have an even better impact; but my team also encouraged me to remain myself as they could see that I had grown but was potentially at risk of compromising what they appreciated and valued within me as a leader. They trusted me to see and help them achieve the best in themselves; even with high expectations, a strong sense of discipline and purpose; if done with an in love was acknowledgement of me giving them my best.

My manager asked me towards the end of the year, “if there was one thing you could’ve told yourself at the beginning of this year, what would it be?”. I simply replied, “you don’t have to be friends, but they do need to know that you care”.

4: Trust together — Excellence is achieved when others contribute & you surround yourself with people better than you.

I’ve always wanted to be the best at everything I’ve done. Not at others expense, simply in a way that ensures that the best way to have the biggest building, is to build it. Before that could happen, I had to get my new team of volunteer mentors, architects, to help me build a vision for what that building would look like and to invest in it themselves. The building was to be named ‘Excellence’, I called for it and they answered. I was professionally more confident as, I knew the personalities, purpose and skills within my team and wanted them to all be stakeholders in our impact.

From ‘Law’ to ‘Psychology’, they were all incredibly educated, but then I was personally hit by the death of my Dad. This required me to take an extended time away from service, and to get to a stage where I was in the right frame of mind to make decisions and prioritise my team. In my absence, they flourished under the pressure. They accepted the leader from within the team who I asked to step up, who despite the pressure grew into it naturally; whilst supporting him with their professionalism and expected excellence. The phrase, ‘we don’t do basic’ became a team slogan.

Upon return from my absence, I thought to myself, ‘how could I have made this even easier for them?’. Simply put I gave them a more refined sense of responsibility and trusted them explicitly, with different operations that impacted the team. Coaching, strategy, and logistics; to name a few; all had specific team members who I would trust and consult with regarding decisions and tasks within their area of expertise.

In my most difficult year of leadership, it was arguably the year that the building reached its highest. Between their impact and their development, I realised three things; firstly, that it takes a team to run a team, not just a good leader or manager; secondly, my manager helped me realise that “power comes from surrounding yourself with people who are better than you” and finally; that trust is empowering.

Out of John Maxwell’s ‘The 5 levels of leadership’, due simply to service I have grown from Level 1 to 4 and have begun to set foundations for attaining level 5. This is the level which is often unattained or takes a lifetime to reach. How? I served and understood the power of trust. Service will do that to you, maximise and refine your potential whilst exposing you to principled growth. The great and yet ironic thing is that by serving others with nothing but myself and my time, I have learned more about myself and been given more time to be the best version of myself, and do better for myself, which allows me to do better for others.

David Elliott MCMI

Written by

Founder of Elliott Shepherds; teacher and speaker, passionate about education, leadership and careers. Listen to #LeadYourLegacy podcast on Spotify & iTunes.

Elliott Shepherds

Helping people lead their personal and unified legacies.

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