Servant Leadership

Opinion: by James Manktelow, CEO of Mind Tools

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“Servant Leadership” is one of the approaches to leadership which contributed to the way that people lead today.

Developed in Robert Greenleaf’s 1977 book “Servant Leadership”, it was a reaction to the autocratic approaches to leadership that were normal in the middle of the 20th Century and earlier.

Servant Leadership's focus was on the leader as a servant, with his or her key role being in developing, enabling and supporting team members, helping them fully develop their potential and deliver their best.

Key ideas from the book include:

• “The servant leader is servant first.”
  
• “If one is servant… one is always searching, listening, expecting that a better wheel for these times is in the making.”
  
• “Acceptance is receiving what is offered with approbation, satisfaction or acquiescence…. The servant leader always accepts….”
  
• “The first order of business is to build a group of people who, under the influence of the institution, grow taller and become healthier, stronger, more autonomous.”

Certainly, parts of its message are aligned with the modern view of leadership: You can’t be autocratic in today’s sophisticated and intelligent workplace without setting yourself up for failure – the world’s just too complex for one person to have all the answers, all of the time. And certainly leaders need a level of humility, because people in most modern workplaces are sufficiently well-educated not to stand for arrogant treatment.

Yes, as a leader you need to listen carefully. You need to be attuned to people around you, and empathically understand what they’re thinking. Yes, you need to tune into what inspires and motivates them. And yes, you need to help remove barriers and help people be the best they can be.

Followers may like the idea of servant leadership – there’s something immediately attractive about the idea of having a boss who’s a servant leader. And people without responsibility for results may like it for its obviously democratic and consensual approach.

However:

• Leaders need to lead. They need to set direction and lead followers in that direction. Sometimes they need to hold followers to account. Sometimes they need to take tough decisions which followers won’t like. And sometimes they need to push people to excel, and often this is not comfortable. If leaders don’t do this, teams and organizations quickly get too “cosy”. They lose their edge and start to fail their customers – the real reason teams and organizations exist.
  
  
• Yes, leaders need to listen. However they also need to know when the time for discussion is over. And they need to know when to preserve things that are good without floundering around in a constant storm of questioning and reinvention.
  
  
• Leaders don’t always accept. They set and maintain standards, and sometimes this needs rejection.
  
  
• And the first orders of business are to serve the customer and make a profit (even in non-profit-making organizations, the first order is to serve the people for whom the organization exists). Often, this needs sacrifice from team members. And yes, team members must be helped to grow and become more effective, but with the view of improving service to the customer or increasing profit. That’s why people are “compensated” for their effort: If work was always nice and rewarding, people wouldn’t need to be paid to do it.

Leaders have to create visions of the future which engage the people around them. They have to inspire and motivate their teams. They have to maintain focus and control distraction. And yes, they support and enable and build people, but they do this from a position of strength and self-confidence, not from a position of weakness (or of “service.”)

The theory of “Servant Leadership” is a risky one in that it encourages people (even if only on a two-word reading of the concept) to adopt an approach to leadership that may be wrong for the situations in which they find themselves.

While in some cases (perhaps in voluntary organizations?) it’s an approach that may be valid, in others it is likely to lead to an approach that is too passive, probably overly-consensual, and most-likely ineffective.

More than this, the servant leadership approach is likely to take leaders’ attention away from the people who really matter: The organization’s customers.

Seen in its historical context, servant leadership had value in countering the autocratic ideas about leadership around at the time of writing (1977). However, leaders in the early 21st Century need to be extremely careful in adopting this approach – in many situations, a stronger and more self-confident, active, and energetic approach is likely to be much more effective, particularly where there’s a need for wide-spread organizational change (as there often is in this world of technological change and globalization.)

James Manktelow is co-author of “How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You”, which teaches the 48 key skills needed to lead effectively in 21st Century businesses. Click here to find out more about “How to Lead”.