Marcel SchwantesMore Info
Lean more about Leadership from the Core online at www.leadershipfromthecore.com
More Info
Leadership From the Core› Founded: April 2015› Co-founders: Marcel Schwantes and William Davis› About the leadership: Schwantes is the architect and chief visionary behind the business. He has 20 years of experience in organizational behavior and talent development and holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and a master’s degree in organizational behavior.› The pitch: Schwantes hopes to get $50,000 in venture capital so he can put his Leadership From the Core program in an online, E-learning format so it will “scale,” or reach a wider audience. Currently, the business’ consultants do trainings in person.
How many of you have ever had a bad boss?
When Marcel Schwantes asks that question to an audience, usually 80 percent to 90 percent of the hands go up.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Schwantes, the co-founder of Leadership From the Core, an Ooltewah-based management consulting business centered on the concept of “servant leadership,” or putting employees’ needs first.
“Our whole reason for existence is we’re here to eliminate bad bosses,” Schwantes said in late January to an audience at the Co.Lab’s Pitch Night event.
The idea of servant-based leadership gained favor in 1970, he said, when Robert K. Greenleaf published an essay titled “The Servant as Leader.” Greenleaf, a former AT&T executive, died at age 86 in 1990. But his ideas live on in his writings and through the Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership in Atlanta.
“He brought that to the corporate world; he’s the guy,” Schwantes said.
While lots of businesses offer management training, he said, few teach servant leadership.
“Nobody’s talking about servant leadership because people see it as a religious concept,” Schwantes said. “It’s still kind of stuck in the churchy world. I’m certainly informed by that faith tradition, being Christian myself.”
Leadership From the Core has boiled the servant leadership concept down to what Schwantes calls a “special sauce” of six parts: valuing employees, developing employees, building community, sharing leadership, providing leadership and being authentic.
Leadership From the Core offers companies testing to see how well they’re doing in these six key areas along with training and coaching, accountability panels and mastermind groups to keep businesses on track.
Schwantes co-founded the business in April of 2015 with William Davis, who lives in Utah. Leadership From the Core has associates around the country who travel in person to give trainings, including one recent seminar at a San Diego-area hospital.
Schwante hopes to get the business to “scale,” or reach a wider audience. That’s why he was at pitch night and took part in Co.Lab’s Fall Accelerator for startup businesses. He hopes to raise $50,000 in venture capital to put his servant leadership training on an online E-learning platform.
Schwantes writes a column about servant leadership for Inc. Magazine and gets thousands of views on LinkedIn blog posts about it, said Alex Lavidge, Co.Lab’s entrepreneur in residence, so Schwantes has branded himself well as a “thought leader” on the subject.
Getting a business’ culture right is critical for its success, said Lavidge, who helped Schwantes hone his business plan during Co.Lab’s Fall Accelerator program.
“If you don’t have the right social environment, what could have been a great business ends up not doing so well,” he said.