Caring is showing how you can help. Let's rethink servant leadership.

For many years now, servant leaders, also known as good people you should be grateful to have as your manager, have used this one sentence to close conversations with their directs: "let me know how I can help".?

The intent is laudable: leaders that openly say they want to help; leaders that communicate their availability, willingness to support their employees; leaders that say "my job is not to tell you what to do but to help you achieve your goal". How would not want that kind of boss (who would hate the label "boss" and would rather be a "coach", a "mentor" or a "go-to")? Isn't that the brilliant insight behind Steve Jobs famous quote "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."??

While I applaud the intent and the philosophy behind servant leadership (or however you want to call this perspective on leadership), I don't think this is good enough. Or not good enough?now. Here is why.?

I saw the first cracks in the "let me know how I can help" (aka "LMKHICH") approach to managing people a few years ago. On a team call, a senior leader is introduced to the group as the exec sponsor for a project. In his introduction, he goes on and on about his experience, CV, credentials, etc., and uses the word "executive" about 5 times to refer to himself. After all that he closed the intro by - you guessed it - "let me know how I can help". Well, if you have so much experience with that kind of project, why don't we talk about the risks, the challenges, and what you will bring to the table besides your senior title? Don't you have any questions or guidance? It felt like something was off.?

What bothered me, in that case, is the low cost/high signalling nature of LMKHICH. In just seven words, you signal to the world that you are a true supporter of your people and you will be there for them. But action speaks louder than seven words. To be clear: many, if not most, people who use that sentence do mean it. But it's an inexpensive way of looking like a servant leader - just like wearing an environmentalist badge does not mean you are doing anything for the planet. If I learn one thing of D&I training, it's the distinction between intent and impact. In the end, your impact on people is more important than your intention.?

Beyond the LMKHICH philosophy lurks an unspoken assumption: it's the direct report's responsibility to figure out the problem, its possible solutions and what the manager could do. Once you've done all that then you go to your manager and ask for something that would help (another version of "come to me with solutions not problems"). I'd like to challenge this. In a leadership position, it's perfectly fine for people to come to you with problems that they cannot solve, and ask for your help without telling you exactly how?you?can help. Maybe your direct report does not know it, you as a manager don't know it, but through collaboration, joint reflection and inquiry, you can figure it out. Or maybe you faced that same challenge in the past and you can help your employee. It's not unreasonable to expect leaders to be interested and knowledgeable of employees' situations and challenges and use that knowledge to help them.?

I saw another crack in the LMKHICH school of thought in the last few years. After the shock of George Floyd's death and the surrounding events, it became clear that as a white person, asking a black person to educate yourself on the challenge of racism is insulting.?It's not enough that we live through discrimination, now we need to explain it to you??The responsible thing to do was to learn more about racism and discrimination and act appropriately, not asking victims of discrimination to tell others what they can do to help. The same logic applies to sexual harassment - as a man you have to educate yourself and call out inappropriate behaviour, it's not on women to teach you about it. With the same logic, anyone managing people should understand their employees and be on the lookout to help - whether it's about workplace discrimination or where to find a specific document on the intranet.?

The final blow to LMKHICH came during the pandemic. Having to work from home without prior notice has been a challenge for many people: schooling kids, taking care of family members, working without a proper office, sharing a small working space with roommates - there are many scenarios in which improvising a home office could be a challenge. And the zoom fatigue, isolation, loneliness, presenteeism, stress, uncertainty, burnout just added to the pile. Asking your employees to tell you how you can help started to sound strange "sure boss, can you add more windows to my apartment and tell my roommate to leave while reminding my dog not to bark while I'm on a call?". The right move is to educate yourself about mental health, coach your employees on best practices for remote work, guide them on using your organisation's policies and resources with different work arrangements, schedules, etc.?

All these examples reinforced my belief that managing people is caring: caring about their wellbeing, their success, their performance, their life. If you care, you will learn about better ways to care. Anybody who has children or pets will relate: when we care about other living beings, we learn about their needs and we try to figure out how we can help them - just look how many books about parenting or dog ownership there are. I chose to care rather than ask people to figure out how I can help them.

I may ask the question out of habit, but what I really mean is "let's talk about what?you?need".??