The “vision” of the leader of an organization need not be elaborate, in fact your example:
“What do servant leaders do?

* devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members.
* focus on meeting the needs of those they lead.
* develop employees to bring out the best in them.
* coach others and encourage their self expression.
* facilitate personal growth in all who work with them.
* listen and build a sense of community.”

…is an excellent statement of a vision that would work for many types of organizations and groups.

In order to set about meeting this list of goals the Servant Leader would definitely need to do their research about the best ways to serve their particular group, study the practicality of the efforts, and so on.

I am in favor towards the servant leadership style.

(from http://www.leadersdirect.com/servant.html)

What do servant leaders do?

* devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members.
* focus on meeting the needs of those they lead.
* develop employees to bring out the best in them.
* coach others and encourage their self expression.
* facilitate personal growth in all who work with them.
* listen and build a sense of community.

A vision is OK but not really necessary. Leadership in the right direction is absolutely necessary to success because leading people in how to treat their work, their customers and each other has a huge impact on organizational success.

How the boss treats employees dictates how the vast majority of them will be “led” to treat their work. If the boss leads employees by treating them as if they are very valuable to the organization, they will be “led” to become very valuable. If not, they will be “led” to treat their work similarly.

In the first case, being treated as if they are valuable means treated with great respect. This “leads” employees to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation, and commitment on their work. As such, they are at least four times more productive than if treated with disrespect.

The traditional top-down approach to managing people treats employees with disrespect thus leading them to deny the company most of their creativity, innovation,etc. As you would expect the opposite approach achieves the opposite result.

I proved both ends and points in between the ends of this spectrum in my 30+ years of managing people. The opposite approach to top-down creates managerial nirvana, a state where the organization blows away competitors and almost everyone loves to come to work.

Best regards, Ben

Having their buy-in is just as important – and easier to make the movement forward towards the vision.

Usually this leadership vision results in some type of change and people react to change in a positive or negitive manor. To alleviate as much of the negetive reaction to this vision/change, a leader must address the wiifm (what’s in it for me) attitude.

This vision/change requires some skill in selling the vision – it adresses the stakeholders wiifm concerns. A good leader would also need other change agents to talk about the new vision/change and how everyone will benefit from these changes. These change agents also need to be reading off the same page so not to cause confusion or concern as to what is being said.

Tell it and tell it often – Live it – Breath it – every day! If not then the employees will figure that it is a passing trend and if they wait long enough “this to shall also pass.”