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Servant leadership: In Hour of Need for Businesses in the time of Corona

Novel Corona virus has radically reshaped a lot of aspects in our day-to-day life. Businesses are no exceptions.

Recently, I went to a hotel situated in my locality to down breakfast. Dine-in space was blocked off. Only takeaway service was available. Customers could collect their food by waiting in the hotel’s facade.

Hotel’s owner was looking after the billing section. There were only three waiters who were busy delivering the food ordered to the awaiting customers.

And there came a customer who ordered coffee. When one of the waiter rolled up his sleeves to prepare it, owner asked him to look after the orders that are queuing up and got in the groove to brew the beverage.

In the past two months, I’ve stumbled upon few more servant leadership instances as above.

And then, of late, I read a ‘Fast Company’ article, which briefs the shift in the public perception of CEOs during the pandemic, based on a report by the WPP plc.-owned New York-based marketing consultancy ‘Group SJR’.

The report ‘THE CEO LEADERBOARD: COVID-19 REPUTATION RANKINGS’ unveils the ranking of brand perception across Fortune 100 CEOs – measuring how they were perceived before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic and how their reputation has changed in the subsequent weeks.


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The ranking is based on the assessment of the publicly available digital data, spanning across Facebook posts, Tweets, LinkedIn posts, Instagram posts, YouTube comments, News Sites, RSS Feeds, Blogs, around the Fortune 100 CEOs between January 1st, 2020 and April 15th, 2020.

The LEADERBOARD lists top 25 from the Fortune 100 CEOs who came out on top in this most democratic and existential crises.

Also, it puts down the top 10 CEOs across industries like tech, retail, healthcare and finance.

The ‘Fast Company’ article concludes with the ‘Group SJR’ co-founder and CEO Alexander Jutkowitz mentioning that the leaders with highest scores in the ranking were those who were highly visible in the crisis, communicated clearly and been empathetic.

His statement, “Servant leadership really has come to the fore” vastly sums up the need of the hour.

With all is said and done, from the scenario that I observed in the hotel to the bottom line that the Group SJR’s Leaderboard underscores, servant leadership has become one conspicuous attribute of business leadership going forward.

Pic Courtesy: Fotor

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