Walk the decks as a ‘servant leader’ - Mark Bevan

Riding a bike teaches you a lot: about the how level the path is, the hills, the sharp bends. You get to know the weather and climate, if the wind is with you or against you. You traverse the landscape using all your senses, as a part of it rather than being insulated from the full experience as you would be inside a car. It’s a great metaphor for leadership and management.

Thinking of Leuchie House’s guests as customers helps staff focus on quality of service and ensures that relevant support is provided

A recently retired Trustee put it like this to me: ‘to command you need to serve, and to serve you must walk the decks.’ It is an idea which I’ve seen recently expressed as servant leadership. The basic idea is that a leader’s role is to create the circumstances which enable their team to deliver their best. This is our approach to management and leadership at Leuchie. It requires balancing management by numbers with walking the decks. But the approach goes beyond how we work with our team and extends to how we work with our customers.

To some it seems odd to describe the people who come to Leuchie House as ‘customers’. We are the only national charity delivering short breaks to people affected by a neurological condition in a country house hotel and with an integrated team of carer workers, allied health professionals and technologists.

Our customer is the guest we welcome, their loved one who will enjoy a break from their responsibility of care and those who fund the services we provide. Thinking of them as customers really helps our team to focus in on quality of service and ensures that the support we provide is relevant. After all, if you don’t know your customer, and don’t walk their journey with them then you will lose them to others who do.

Mark Bevan, CEO Leuchie House

Management books all talk about how Kodak was so focused on developing every more sophisticated camera film that they were completely shocked by the introduction of digital photography. Within a few short years they went from being a world-famous profitable company to declaring itself bankrupt in 2012. They simply forgot to walk their customers’ journey.

Charities and businesses alike can learn from the Kodak story, particularly as we come out of restrictions and customers reassess what they need and want. At Leuchie, we have a loyal customer base, and they are keen to tell us what they want. Accordingly, we are expanding to meet their needs and we are becoming a larger organisation, delivering more, for more people.

We will soon open a beautiful, fully adapted self-catering house on the green in Dirleton, because our customers wanted the opportunity to have an independent short break with extended family. Later in the year, we will be running a cycling weekend for people who love biking but have lost a little confidence as their disease has impacted on their physical abilities. We are using technology to give customers more control in their lives. For example, using voice activated controls to turn on a light, change the TV channel, close curtains or access online healthcare.

The approach extends to the team. If we walk the decks with the team we can learn how to support them and make their work better. This might be by digitising record keeping, which they find tediously time consuming in paper form, or restructuring work patterns to help someone with wider commitments.

Servant leadership is a powerful concept which need not be taken literally, but which can help to deliver more of your purpose, to more people, to greater effect, simply by being present with your team and customers and not insulating yourself from your environment and missing the important things as you speed by to a destination. Enjoy the ride!

Mark Bevan, CEO Leuchie House. Visit www.leuchiehouse.org.uk