WHAT IS SERVANT LEADERSHIP ALL ABOUT?

What does it mean to be a servant leader? It was first described as a concept by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970’s, “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.”

Greenleaf advocates that there are two extremes of leadership, servant first, and leader first — he suggests that leader first is driven by the need to have power and acquire material possessions. I would argue that isn't a leader, but he provides an interesting viewpoint.?

According to The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, set up to promote Greenleaf’s vision and leadership style, servant leadership is about ensuring those around the leader, or 'served' by the leader, are growing. That is the end result desired by servant leadership. Certainly a good aim.?

"Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“ — Greenleaf

Now the reality is, as Greenleaf alludes to — the majority of leaders of somewhere on the spectrum between the two.?

And we've all worked for organisations where the focus is on customers and/or shareholders/investors only. Make one or both of those groups happy, and the manager suggests that the employees will reap the rewards. But the emphasis is always on making the shareholders and/or customers the highest priority beyond anything else.?

It's sort of akin to trickle-down economics, where the political assumption is that if you invest in the big corporations and the rich, then their money will trickle down through society. It's a prevalent belief that simply doesn't follow through, and yet is adopted by the majority of governments internationally.

The same applies to our companies. When the only emphasis is on anything other than the employees, on the basis that employees will reap the rewards when the business does well because of the external focus, you actually lose.?

Because at the end of the day you need your people - your employees to make that all happen. So if you take your focus off them, we end up in the black hole of unhappy employees, and ultimately high turnover, followed by either no workforce or a team with such high turnover that there is no depth of knowledge of buy-in.

So that's one end of the leadership spectrum — external-focused leadership.?Actually, I personally wouldn't call that leadership, as to me the word leadership needs to encompass the human element. But that's a nomenclature debate for another day.

Greenleaf's servant leadership, which as he acknowledges isn't a new concept, he just wrote it down and formalised it, is the other end of the spectrum. The employee-focused leadership, where basically everything is on 'how can I help those I lead and serve grow'. Actually, Greenleaf goes further and advocates for them to become servants themselves.?

It's an admirable antidote to the early 20th Century attitude, that is still prevalent today of 'I'm in this role because I was meant to be', and instead embodies a method of leadership that is all about uplevelling others so that everyone can uplevel, and ultimately level the playing field.?

And working in the field of tech where there is a definite lack of a level playing field, especially for women and minorities, then well, yeah, it sounds great.?

Now the reality is, as with all 'spectrums' that (1) most people sit somewhere along the spectrum — it's a sliding scale and (2) the reality is a lot more complex than a linear line.?

At the end of the day, all leadership models, as with any other model for anything else (heck I'm a physicist by training, everything can be modelled, but if I remember anything from my education it's that the biggest thing you need to remember about a model is the limitation of its usage. It's why we need relativity even though Newtonian mechanics is a great model for the majority of life, and it's why modelling a cow as spherical (yes that was a thing I did in a physics problem) is great, up to a point!). And Servant leadership is just the same — it's a model, and we have to know its limitations.?

And that's what I want to dig into.

Because what I want for all you reading this is to find your unique style of leadership. I want you to be informed, I want you to understand the pros and cons of your style, learn to read the people in front of you, and adapt and grow based on the needs of the situation you are in. And one model to help inform this, provided you know the benefits and limitations of the model, is servant leadership.?

Many people who haven't studied servant leadership will tell you it is 'employee first' and that is true. But this simplifies what it is all about. Employee first is often about ensuring a leader focuses on creating vision and values that employees understand, coaching and developing employees, and ultimately supporting employee success with the expectation of business success as a result.?

And while that is true with servant leadership, technically Greenleaf's definition of servant leadership simply states:

I serve because I am the leader, and

I am the leader because I serve

The first 'I serve because I am the leader' is the altruistic approach (the selfless concern for the wellbeing of others) — putting others first. The second part 'I am the leader because I serve' is about the individual leader deciding they want to be a leader and therefore serving.?

But this leaves an awful lot of room on the table for what servant leadership is. And over the last 4 decades, it has been adopted and written about, as well as researched so that there is no one core philosophy. And quite possibly this is the biggest problem with it. While there is an underpinning thread of employee first results in better business, there are many interpretations of what this means.?

That isn't necessarily a bad thing — indeed it is one of the joys of the human race that we can and do hold many different ideas and opinions. But it hopefully highlights to you that there is no one perfect way of doing any of this. If there was — someone would be screaming it from the rooftops and telling you that you must do it (ok so some people are, and that is kind of what I'm warning you about! But if this was valid, everyone would be following!).?

Every leadership expert I've ever spoken to, starting with the very first leadership trainer I met in my first leadership training at my first job, has had a different opinion of what servant leadership is.?

This includes:

Larry Spears's 10 characteristics of the Servant Leader. Similar to other leadership experts, Spears believed that Servant Leaders should have these 10 traits: empathy, listening, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community.?

Joe Iarocci, the author of Servant Leadership in the Workplace, identifies three key priorities (developing people, building a trusting team, achieving results), three key principles (serve first, persuasion, empowerment), and three key practices (listening, delegating, connecting followers to mission) that distinguish servant leadership in the workplace context

And many others, with the research still going on today. The most recent study being:

Sendjaya, Eva, Butar-Butar, Robin, and Castles' (2019) [17] 6-item composite of the Servant Leadership Behavior Scale (SLBS-6) which uniquely contributes a spiritual dimension, a distinguishing feature that makes servant leadership a truly holistic leadership approach relative to other positive leadership approaches.

Which brings us to the key thing: what can we learn, and what do we need to be careful of if we want to adopt some or all of the servant leadership concepts and frameworks.?

The biggest and most widely accepted problem with servant leadership is its misapplication. At its core, servant leadership is a philosophy not a manual. But all too often, when we are changing the way organisations are run, or training leaders who have been managing in a specific style their entire lives, into something new, the problem is misunderstanding. And this couldn't be more true than with servant leadership.

I've heard people complain it's complex, that it is more time-consuming. Sure there is upfront effort, but as with many great leadership attributes it is an upfront effort that ultimately saves time down the line by creating better outcomes, with fewer issues.?

The other issues come from people adopting servant leadership without really knowing how they need to show up. Servant leadership truly requires authenticity, and yet authentic leadership is massively misunderstood.?

It is also perceived as being negligent to the business needs, when actually nothing could be further from the truth. Putting people first shouldn't be neglecting business needs, but instead aligning business and people needs. It's why concepts such as ethical businesses and b-corporations exist — to solidify and document that alignment.?

Now, I challenge you to shift your mindset. There is nothing stopping you from adopting servant leadership with your team unless your management style is being micromanaged. At the end of the day, as long as you are achieving business objectives, how you get that done shouldn't matter. But there will be an adjustment phase, which is where this mindset moment comes in because it is where you are most likely to stumble.?

The mindset shift I want you to keep front and center is to believe in trust with your team. To a large extent, a lot of the underpinning actions of servant leadership come about because you trust your team. You trust that they can be empowered, delegated to, that they will take action if you share with them a why that resonates. You need to trust and have faith in them and their actions when no one else does. I've talked about trust as a fundamental leadership trait many times before on the podcast, and really that's the #1 thing you need if you want to step more into servant leadership.?

The second mindset shift is to recognise this is a journey, and a spectrum, and a model. There is no one size fits all, and you are going to need to listen to your instincts and take uncomfortable actions. And from there, great things can happen. But don't shrink back, just because it's uncomfortable unless there is a real genuine negative impact coming down the line.?

https://tonicollis.com/episode62