Resurrecting Servant Leadership

With Zenefits and Uber falling from grace, can we finally agree that the dictatorial leadership style that characterized the last 10 years in Silicon Valley has to change? After a decade watching tech leaders try to be the next Steve Jobs, I’m convinced there’s a way to deliver near term results while building an organization that is sustainable over time. I’m going to prove it by reviving servant leadership at Evernote.

Servant leadership is the idea that managers exist to help their teams achieve their full potential, instead of employees existing to execute the leader’s decisions. In this model, managers are facilitators of their decision-making instead of autocrats. Beyond all the empirical evidence about how an empowered workforce drives results more than anything other factor, the selfish benefit of servant leadership is reduced stress for me — I don’t have to be right all the time anymore.

The problem with trying to make all the decisions is that every leader is wrong ... a lot! We tend to romanticize the times where micro-management worked such as Jobs’s resurrection of Apple, but Jobs developing the Macintosh in a “pirate” style created Apple’s struggles in the first place. There are unequivocally instances when command and control is required: crises and turnarounds where time is of the essence come to mind. Maybe the first days of a company’s life qualify as one of these times, but by the time you’ve added an employee who doesn’t work directly for you, this management style isn’t workable. Servant leadership is the opposite; it distributes decision-making pressure in a model that is both repeatable and scalable.

When I become obsolete as a manager because my team functions as well without me as with me, I’ll have done my job as a leader. Each day, I try to get closer to that point of obsolescence by thinking of two things:

When I become obsolete as a manager because my team functions as well without me as with me, I’ll have done my job as a leader.

1) The Golden Rule of Leading - Because all managers have managers, we have the benefit of knowing both sides of the manager-employee-relationship. In the spirit of “everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten,” I constantly ask myself: how would I want my manager to act in this situation? Whenever I find myself leaning out in a meeting, checking email or reading news, I think about how it felt when someone did that in the last meeting I was leading. Or when someone brings me an issue in a 1-to-1 and I immediately want to jump to problem solving, I try to remember that’s usually not what I’d want. More times than not, a leader will listen while a boss will talk. While the times I’ve had some idea to drive revenue may have a more quantifiable ROI, the email below reflects the time I had the most impact:

2) Be Effective, Not Right - As much as I sometimes believe I know the answer and as much as there are times when I know my team just wants me tell them what to do, that’s not my job. As a servant leader, it’s not my responsibility to be right or make products. My product is an organization that delivers results. These results don’t come from getting to the perfect answer but from getting the organization to work together on an answer. So I try not to spend time looking to see if people did what I would have done, but instead look to see if they did something smart. And more importantly, that they did it together.

Most everyone I have met wants to be a leader (sometimes only with a small "l" instead of having formal, capital "L" Leadership responsibilities), but I don't think anyone wakes up in the morning and says "I can't wait to do some following today." Servant leadership lets everyone be that small "l" leader and it means that having the capital L is a much easier job.