FOR most people, they have the tendency to think first and act accordingly as oppose to thinking and feeling your way first, and then act. It is two different ways of how you want to start leading your business and you have to decide which one you do advocate.

When you are faced with problems in your business, either you jump in and fire-fight or think thoroughly what the problems are, then start planning and coming up with solutions and checking them and acting them out.

It is imperative for a business person who wants to bring his or her business to the next level to properly plan and develop a culture of excellence within the organisation. For the sake of a long term existence in business, firstly you must develop the principles of values and beliefs of the company and be clear about purpose of its existence.

You delve deeper into the human systems of the company. In reality, however, systems involving people are complex, information systems and communication alone will not change how the company performs. To develop a culture of excellence, you must change the people, their values and beliefs in accordance with your work or organisation's culture. The least you could do is to identify some common core values and beliefs about how work gets done, and these of course are to be deeply shared amongst team leaders and team members.

This is what it truly means to have the integrity to respect people, develop them, and encourage them to improve. This effort requires you to have a high level of patience and commitment, a long term view, a focus on process, and the ability to understand where the individual is in his or her development and where his or her talent lies. It is easier to lay out the office equipments and industrial machines in a reasonable flow as to learning on how to rigorously think about the people and their problems and finding deliberate ways of developing people and problem solving.

Setting up and moving machines may just take minutes but changing the way people feel, think and act takes longer. The way ahead for your business is your long term results and its sustainability. The key to it is investment in people. The people are the heart and soul of your company, the determinant of its rise and fall.

In most cases, the way people feel, think and behave is deeply rooted in the way how the company was shaped up in the first place. If the calling for doing business is as much as a calling for the greater good, for the advancement of the people and the future sustainability of the country's economy, then at the very core of it, it is all about sincerity and integrity, respect for people, engaging them in continuous improvement and making them deeply understand the core set of principles and practices at the workplace and about teaching them on how to think, feel and act to work together to reach a common goal.

How do you select and develop people and get them committed to the mission of your company? What about team work, leadership and communications within the company? These are important questions which may help you think and feel before acting them out. At the end of the day, it is about leadership and leadership is about "amanah" (trust) and there is already physiological contract between the leader and his or her followers.

People follow a leader because they want to they are drawn to the leader. They seek the leader's directions, believe in their leader, want to learn from their leader and relish the time they spend with the leader. The most effective leaders are those who can influence a group of people and move them in the same direction by having common beliefs and common goals that lead to lasting commitment and higher performance. Not only leaders are good talkers but they are also active listeners. Leaders do their best work through developing in others the values, beliefs and capabilities to be personally responsible and accountable. They invest authority, responsibility, and accountability in others.

The concept of "Servant Leadership" is certainly not new but definitely it is not the traditionally top-down organisation where the capacity and the imagination is limited to only a few leaders at the top.

The key insight of servant leadership is that the further someone is from the value stream, as in the case of upper management, as a senior leader, the less that person can directly add value. As leaders, you can only add value by supporting those who are actively involved and adding value to the stream, and these people are the ones who matter most. Everybody and everything else is to support them and give them what they need to do their job.

Truly, Servant Leadership is a Spiritual Leadership, it is the reverse where you are never the boss but the leader, and you have more people to serve and support because you sit at the bottom of the inverted pyramid and your team members and customers are at the top. As a result, the organisation can actually draw on the collective capacity and imagination of a larger pool of individuals.

Leaders develop the capacity that allow suppliers, team members and customers, team leaders, group leaders, managers and assistant managers to improve on what needs to be done. Servant Leadership is an important value in your leadership culture because the leaders' roles are to support these people, to make their jobs more efficient and effective by providing them with clear business strategy, long term planning, training and continuous developments.

In this culture of excellence, there are four core values that will drive the leadership's daily actions. The foundation of your company culture will be based on the four famous noble characters of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) which are: SIDDIQ (trustworthy), AMANAH (integrity), TABLIGH (communicative) and FATONAH (intelligence). Leaders who develop and carry the four pillars of Rasulullah SAW noble characters in their souls, thoughts, words and action are leaders who encourage participation, keeping strongly in values and actively supporting the commitment to continuously improve.

Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him) said: "The best among you are those who have the best manner and character." (Bukhari) These leaders practice the concept of servant leadership is where the higher the leaders go, the less direct power they have and the more they have work hard to support and serve the value added workers.The Brunei Times