After three cum laude master's degrees and various practical training courses, such as fitness & personal trainer, heartmath and mindfulness, Inge Nuijten obtained her PhD at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, in 2009 on the subject of servant-leadership. She also coached a number of golf teams to national championships.

In the Netherlands, Inge Nuijten is the No. 1 speaker on servant-leadership and bestselling author of the book "Real Leaders Serve.

Self-interest

As a leader, putting people first. A piece of cake right? Unfortunately, this is often far from easy. During an absence interview, Inge sees that the leader often puts his own interests first. People are not yet aware enough of how they treat each other.

So servant leadership is very important! It focuses on the human being who will ultimately achieve the results in the organization. In addition, as a leader, you will work on yourself. This will energize you and from there you will be an inspiration to the employees.

Agile

In previous podcasts, it has been discussed that innovative and successful companies are more successful because they are very agile. That also touches heavily on the role of servant leadership because it includes looking at what is needed and how can one help.

Inge: "If you want to be agile and innovative, that requires you to be open to the fact that things can come your way that are completely different from what you've been doing so far. For that, you have to be firm in your shoes and be willing to see that if something is different from what you expected, that you can say, 'hey, I've got progressive insight, it is what it is, we'll go that other way.' And that takes an awful lot of courage from a leader to admit 'oh we misjudged it'. In addition, in servant leadership, one is allowed to make mistakes. You are not going to judge or punish people. This makes them feel safe to share their knowledge and insights with you and to share information that may be sensitive or contradictory to what you have always thought, also with you which in turn allows you to make better decisions."

Wondering what else Inge has to say? Then listen to the episode!

Links

More about Inge Nuijten.

Check out the book "Serving Real Leaders" here.

More about the Working Professor

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