Servant Leadership Principles Of Starbucks

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One of the leading organizations that follow the servant leadership style is the coffee giant, Starbucks. The basis of the company’s organizational culture is the servant leadership principles. These principles pervade every aspect of their business. The company believes in caring their employees first, as they are the one who takes care of the customers (Ferguson, 2015). The hiring and management of the staff, the way the staff work and interact with one another, serving the customers all represent the organizational culture, their policies, and operations.
Implementation of the of Servant Leadership Principles in the Organization
The basis of Starbucks’ operations and policies is to connect with the staff so that they can better the organizational …show more content…

The main stakeholders of Starbucks include the employees, customers, suppliers, investors, environment and the government (Thompson, 2015). Starbucks gives priority to their staff and ensures that they are happy with the provision of better working conditions, job security, and higher wages. Thus, the company builds the community, facilitating the growth of the employees. The company listens to their customers to improve the quality of service and products. For instance, Starbucks creates a warm and friendly relation with customers to satisfy their social responsibility with this stakeholder. By ensuring their suppliers are properly paid through their Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFÉ) program, Starbucks fulfills their commitment to the suppliers through awareness. The company creates eco-conscious stores (Starbucks Corporation, 2016) and ensures to follow environmentally sound business practices using their foresight. Starbucks supports the emergency relief services. In 2005, they helped rebuild the Hurricane Katrina struck areas (Adams, 2007). Through their high financial performance in the industry, the company meets the interests of the investors proving the ability to conceptualize. Being an international company, Starbucks remains respectful of the people’s perspectives from the respective governments. Thus, they satisfy their commitment and …show more content…

In 2014, the Starbucks offered the free college education for the employees (Lichtenwalner, 2014). Starbucks used empathy, awareness, and foresight to nurture the spirit of the staff to help build a community with empowered people through this move. This action demonstrates that the company continues to follow the principles of servant leadership.
This move might have caused conflict within the organization about the profitability. This is because the people could just join the company for the free tuition and leave which would cost the company great losses (Rooney, 2015). However, by taking such a prominent step by the leadership, the company 's stock has only risen consistently since then. This denotes that, the attempt of leadership to assist the employees with the higher education helped raise the company to greater heights.
Benefits for the Organization The quality of any organization that uses servant leadership improves, because of the organization’s continuous efforts on development. These efforts help create more efficient, content, empowered and innovative teams to generate more profitability (Schmidt, 2013). Starbucks’ employee satisfaction rate has increased and they have markedly grown since 2014 with their attempt to build a community by offering the free college tuition (Business Wire,

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