The Cosmopolitan Servant Leader
ALLEN H. QUIST
This paper introduces a need for a cosmopolitan servant leader to successfully engage and deal with today’s changing cross-cultural emerging world. Among others, the works of Winston and Patterson, Spears, and Marquardt and Berger, provide a platform to synthesize the characteristics of a servant leader and a cosmopolitan leader. Fromthe synthesis, the research provides four core competencies for the cosmopolitan servant leader relative to the follower: valuing, preparing, focusing, and activating followers. The cosmopolitan leader is like a gardener who has the big picture of the completed garden and knows each and every plant. Anything the gardener does not know becomes a point of intentional and applicable discovery and understanding. The cosmopolitan servant leader is fully a leader who does leadership activities, fully a servant who is concerned for the welfare of the follower, and fully a cosmopolitan who comfortably lives out values and responsibilities in a cross-cultural and complex world.
Imagine yourself on a cross-cultural and global business team made up of you an American, a Dutch, and an Australian, all from individualistic cultures. Imagine yourself, raised in a small American community surrounded by a large interdependent family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Your family discussed everything. They even discussed where you should go to college and what you were to study. They lived what they believed—that each person is responsible to and for everyone else and that it isunwise to step into uncertainty without hours of contemplation and group discussion.
Your leader assigned your team the task to create a strategy to start a new project in Chennai, India, with a due date in only one week. The only way to achieve the task is to break the assignment into individual pieces with each team member taking one of the sub-assignments. Your part of the task is to determine the specific location of the work. You have only 4 days to fly to India, examine several locations, select the best one, contract with the owner to lease the property, and report to the team. You have been on similar teams in the past, but it was always the team that made the final decision. The thought of going solo on this assignment terrifies you. You could be wrong and embarrass the team. You need more time to prepare choices and to consider each carefully. You need to be able to take your findings back to the team for their review and decision. The risk of being wrong overwhelms you. You feel trapped. You could quit the team and protect yourself, but that would let the team down. How could your leader put you in this predicament? You wish one of the leaders had taken the time to know you as a follower, to learn a little about you and how you think and feel. They would have understood you are different from the accepted dominant American cultural norm—that of being an independent leader, able to decide issues alone even amid major areas of uncertainty. What you needed was a team leader who understood that you are like you, a unique person with unique dreams, hopes, and fears.
Our story shows the need to develop relationally effective global and cross-cultural cosmopolitan leaders; leaders committed to understanding each follower as a unique life, rather than basing their judgment on broad research of cultural norms. Based on the research of Winston and Patterson, the writings of Spears, and the work of Marquardt and Berger, this paper introduces the cosmopolitan servant leader, one who knows and understands dominant cultural norms and yet moves past those norms to focus on and serve the cross-cultural follower, honoring his or her uniqueness. Cross-cultural leadership must move beyond a start-and-stop learning experience based on cultural averages. We need leaders—continuously learning cosmopolitan servant leaders—committed to learning about each follower as a unique life. We need leaders who are like gardeners with the big picture of the completed garden, yet who know every plant in the garden and anything they do not know becomes a point of intentional discovery.
The Cosmopolitan Servant Leader
This paper introduces the cosmopolitan servant leader as a person with the characteristics necessary to lead in a global organization. It presents a researched and synthesized definition of a leader and then discusses what it means to bea servant leader and a cosmopolitan leader. It concludes by synthesizing these characteristics into a cosmopolitan servant leader.
The cosmopolitan leader feels athome as a global citizen and atease with individuals around the world, even those holding widely divergent values and beliefs from the leader.The cosmopolitan leader easily engages and interacts with diverse people, being insightfully aware of others, and creative in all relationships.These leaders leverage diversity as they uphold a learning approach in all relational encounters, especially during times of change. Cosmopolitan leaders deal flexibly with situations and people, adapting to meet the need. Cosmopolitan leaders can keep a balance of owning and understanding their own culture while accepting the diversity of other cultures, because they keep their orientation centered on the unique individuality of people. Cosmopolitan leaders are “person centered.”Gudykunst and Kim suggest a summary of a cosmopolitan perspective: “respect for all cultures; understanding of what individuals in other cultures think, feel, and believe; and appreciation for differences among cultures.”
Marquardt and Berger provide a list of eight forces changing the workplace for leaders and a list of the competencies necessary for a cosmopolitan or global leader to deal successfully with those forces. The first “transforming force” is globalization. To be successful, the cosmopolitan leader needs to be able to see the whole work environment from the micro-workplace perspective while also viewing it from a macro-global perspective.The second force, the change to the knowledge era, requires the leader to experience and model continuous learning while teaching diverse employees from his or her knowledge base, coaching from experience, and mentoring from awareness of employees’ needs.
Because of the third force, a continual changing nature of the workplace, a cosmopolitan leader serves those he or she supervises by engaging the worker from a holistic view. The leader provides a secure team environment which helps the follower grow into greater participation in leadership. The leader realizes that he or she stewards the worker’s life for someone or something else, such as the organization. In other words, the leader is not the worker’s owner; the cosmopolitan leader is a servant and a steward.
Because of the fourth force, rapid changes in organizational structure, cosmopolitan leaders need competency in systems thinking and doing many projects at one time. The cosmopolitan leader needs to go beyond looking at symptoms to discover real causes. This leader must grasp complexity as it develops over time, seeing a process rather than just a picture.As a result of the fifth force, environmental needs and growing awareness of our responsibilities, cosmopolitan leaders engage the workplace at a higher level, addressing issues of life and work meaning, core values, and personal and organizational responsibilities. They work to increase a sense of ethics in their own lives as well as in the workers’ and the organizations’. The sixth force, the current trend in technology, requires leaders with the ability to leverage technology. They need to know the positive and damaging influences and power inherent in our new technology. Simultaneously, cosmopolitan leaders understand the confines of technology—what it will not do. Given the seventh force, the rapid change in what the market wants, cosmopolitan leaders think in the future, look for new products and services, and display a strong comfort with uncertainty. Cosmopolitan leaders must be creative and opportunistic, leveraging the greater intelligence of a diversified team. They regularly ask the question of a 5-year-old child, “Why can’t we do that?”Finally, the eighth force, because of the increasing speed of change, the leader envisions the future, motivating and inspiring followers with that vision. The cosmopolitan leader thinks above the day-to-day planning and reacting. He or she pulls people together to both evaluate today and set direction for the emerging (and yet to emerge) tomorrow.
Marquardt and Berger argue that organizations will find the true cosmopolitan leader out of those people “whose primary motivation is a desire to help others . . . [it] must be a leader’s number one priority.”This number one competency is a servant’s heart. This and other leadership characteristics are shared by the leaders described by Winston and Patterson and Spears.
Subject: The Cosmopolitan Servant Leader 
Tue Mar 25, 2014 9:15 pm
