Why Servant Leadership? Keys To Leading In A Complex World.

Servant leadership was first introduced by Robert Greenleaf in a 1970 essay “The Servant as a Leader”, which focused on moving leadership from a traditional authoritarian focus to sharing power and helping others reach their full potential.

It’s a concept that has been widely misunderstood. Paul Whiteside presents concerns people have had including:

• It doesn’t make any sense – leaders serve the organization, not the employees
• It robs leaders of authority – leaders need to be the ones in charge
• It’s demotivating - good leaders need to take control and rescue employees when they get in trouble
• It limits vision – leaders need to be separate from employees to have the vision to change the organization

Why Servant Leadership Is Needed

These questions miss what servant leadership is and why it’s so important. To get that understanding, it helps to have some history. Organizational management has always focused on production. Companies need people to create the goods and services customers will buy. Going back to the early 20th century with Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor, production was focused on simple tasks. Leadership was focused on understanding and speeding these tasks up.

That work has become more complex in the last 100 years, and more so in the last 20 years with automation and robotics. As we hand repeatable tasks to computers, people can focus on more complex work.?However, leading this type of work requires two important changes in leadership.

The most important of these has to do with knowledge. In simple manufacturing, leaders knew more about the work than those being led. This still may hold true with lower managers where managers have deep experience in their field. However, our world has become so complex that there is a limit to how much any leader can know.

A manager will have deep knowledge in their area. The director is likely to have deep knowledge in a portion of what people are doing. A vice president will have a deep knowledge of even less, and in a larger organization, there is no way for a CEO to have a deep knowledge of every aspect of the company. This concept likewise applies to cross functional teams. It is extremely difficult for a team lead working with HR, Finance, IT, and Supply Chain to have a deep knowledge of each of those areas.

The second concept has to do with motivation. In a simple environment where innovation and creativity isn’t needed, people can be motivated to work faster with simple rewards or punishments. However, in his book Drive, Pink discusses how these same motivation structures are demotivating and counterproductive when innovation or creativity is needed.

Pink found in an innovative environment, individuals are motivated by three elements:

• Autonomy – feeling like you get to control the work rather than being micromanaged
• Mastery – feeling like you have the support and ability to become excellent at what you do rather than being limited in how far you can grow
• Purpose – feeling like what you do matters and makes a difference in the lives of others, rather than just making the company money

Interestingly, this motivation aligns well with improved organizational performance in complex environments. Since leaders above a manager position can’t know everything about the organization, they are better off pushing decisions lower. This provides more autonomy to those who are closest to customers or the information, improving decision quality. Increased worker skills benefit the entire organization. Having the skills and freedom to make decisions isn’t going to matter if employees don’t understand the core goals and purpose of the organization ensure their decisions align.?

Turn the Ship Around

David Marquette provides an excellent example of these concepts in Turn the Ship Around. As a submarine navel captain, he was expected to know every aspect of the boat and spent a year studying to prepare for his first command. At the last minute, he was assigned to a completely different submarine. Once he got on board, he realized the crew knew more than he did, and the traditional approach wasn’t going to work.

• Instead of asking for direction on every task, he trained his crew to think about the best option and then let him know what they intended to do, providing the risks he should consider to sign off on the decision.
• He pushed decisions lower in the organization so the person with the best knowledge would make the decision.
• The crew was forced to move quickly, and didn’t have time for formal training, so he focused on learning through taking on new work and on job mastery.
• He made sure everyone on the boat knew what the sub was doing and why, to give every member of the crew the right information they needed to make the best decisions.

The changes quickly paid off. When issues arose, instead of waiting for direction from the captain, the crew quickly jumped into action, everyone having the power and knowledge to do what was needed. After one year of putting the changes in place, the ship received the best review score of any submarine ever graded.

New Skills

While this leadership approach makes sense in our new complex world, it requires a different set of skills, which is where servant leadership is focused.?Instead of giving orders and having the right knowledge, leaders need to be able to listen to those around them and ask the right questions. They need to focus on growing the right skills in those they lead, so they understand not just what to do, but why it needs done and how to apply the skills to other situations.

Leaders also need to create a safe environment where others are willing to admit when they are wrong, so everyone has the ability to learn. They have to create a sense of community where everyone is focused on the team and the good of the whole. As Stanley McChrystal explains in Team of Teams, leaders have to move from chess masters focused on seeing every spot on the board and every pawn is in the right place, to gardeners who are see where the organization needs to go and are creating the right environment for others to develop the skills to get there. This change starts at the top. Leaders have to change their own mindset, leading with the same behaviors they want others to use.

This does not mean leaders still don’t need to make the right decisions. As Jim Collins discusses in Good to Great, leaders have to make sure the right people are in the right seats. Sometimes that means moving someone around. Other times it means they aren’t the right fit for the organization. It also does not mean lowering standards. Servant leadership is focused on improving the effectiveness of everyone in the organization. That should push higher performance, not lower. This requires understanding where the company can go and setting what Collins called a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”, a seemingly impossible goal that will help the organization do more than it thought possible.

There is no question that the world is getting more complex. Leadership styles and concepts that worked before the digital world are not going to move us forward. Servant leadership provides a framework to help leaders navigate this new environment. The concepts shouldn’t be new. Leaders have always served, either the leaders above them, owners of the organization, or at the end, the people as a whole. The difference is that servant leadership provides a better framework of the skills needed to be more effective in the role. ?