Servant Leadership

SuddenPeak
Nov 6 · 8 min read

Is your organisation head over heels? Are your leaders serving the employees? Beside holacracy and SAFe the next methodology knocks on the door to improve organisations, to bring management to the next step. But who’s opening the door?

The simple management formula from the Industrial Age is still present in most companies: employees do work, management tells what to do. The higher up — the more responsibility — the higher the salary. No matter how many studies conclude, that in the Digital Age companies should be organised differently, the hurdle for new concepts seams to be too high.

Power to the people. Power to the employees.

Do leaders clamp on their privileges or do employees overrate their ability to lead a company?

Types of Leaders
How many good leaders have you encountered in your career? By no means we would imply that they are all bad people, we were/are leaders ourselves. At a dinner with friends we compared our experiences with leaders we encountered and grouped them according to the motivation why they had become leaders.

  • The Best/Most Experienced
    Probably the classical engineering leader. He is the best of the team and to honor that he got promoted (because he is so valuable for the company). Soon it gets obvious that being a good leader does not come automatically with being a domain expert. Many lack the ability to delegate, to be a mentor for the team, they still try to do the main work.
  • The Delegator / The I-don’t-like-orders
    They don’t like when somebody tells them what they have to do. They climb the leader ladder because they want to tell others what they have to do. These leaders are excellent delegators! Emails won’t linger long in their inboxes, everything is instantly forwarded to a chosen team member. But because only few have nobody above them, these leaders will constantly attempt to climb higher… (and are in permanent dissatisfaction).
  • The Longtimer / Early-bird
    He joined the company at a time almost no management existed. With the growth of the company he was there when the first leaders were needed. He sort of slipped into the role by chance. As everything was in development he learned most of his leading/managing skills on the job. Most likely all he knows now is outdated as he never felt the need to learn new skills. Sadly they tend to block development of employees — they don’t see the need (completely oversee their own development chance) or they might fear competition.
  • The Money-driven
    In most companies the only way to increase your salary is to change job and rise up in the company hierarchy. Like the ‘Best/Most Experienced’ they move to a leader position with the wrong motivation and do a job they don’t like — but these ones do it out of self motivation. They tend to be a bit selfish, therefore also not really interested to foster employees (the competition fear, again). They do listen to the team‘s issues — often founded in the motivation to secure the need for their role.
  • The alpha-Male
    Mostly they are male but sporadic female versions have been sighted. They see everything in life as a competition! And they want to win them all. Being a leader is just one won competition. If you can’t provide him with a competition, he might not be interested in your issue. Listening is not their best asset — they too soon think they understand the ‘challenge’, hear the inner starting signal, and run.
  • The Boss-buddy / Same smell
    Humans like humans but not all. There is a sometimes hard to explain bounding to some people and an unbreachable dislike to others. Clearly we want to be surrounded with ones we like, if we can we choose only ones with the ‘same smell’. In ‘employees teams‘ the need for diversity is more present as in management teams. Danger is to have a team of turncoats and blind spots on your organisation. It is hard to keep a good culture in an organisation if it is too obvious and you might be at risk to hit an iceberg.

But where are the servant leaders?
When I first got asked to become team leader, I thought I would still be a developer but just do some additional administration tasks for the team. Doing tasks they didn’t like to do, providing them with an environment where they can focus on developing. I had no management style in mind. In the years to come I learned what influence management has on employees motivation, on productivity, on the quality of the product they create.

Only the loud employees can lead and loud people don’t serve.

Let’s face it: not every employee wants to be a leader. It is easy to critique out of the comfort of a group than to stand alone in front of it. It feels like as if there is a natural selection into leaders and employees. Let’s try to match the five must-have principles of servant leadership to the above leader groups:

Support your team
A leader gets tasks from his leader and to fulfil these is his highest goal. Most leaders won’t negate to do tasks for the team, but often these go to the end of the line. Leaders are often not seen as part of the team they lead, instead of a team of peer leaders.

Don’t order what your team can do for you, ask what you could do for your team.

To convince your peers and your boss that the needs of your team are more important than the ones from the others is an energy-sapping job. It is alluring to fall in the comfort of letting the group decide over your team.

Leader groups who might fight for the team:
The Best/Most Experienced

Don’t expect much from these leader groups:
The Delegator / The I-don’t-like-orders
The alpha-Male
The Boss-buddy / Same smell

Grow your people
Growing people is often seen as creating competition. Obviously not every employee can become CEO, but an all CEO company might be unstable as well. As long as your organisation has the shape of a pyramid, growing and promoting employees increases the substitutes bench. Chances that a ‘well grown’ employee quits for a competing company is high.

Pyramid organisations get brittle with time, circular organisations get stronger with time.

A well known fact of pyramid organisations is, the higher the leader the more meetings, decisions, events and stress he gets. They don’t have time for continuing education, little time for strategic work and hardly time for a personal exchange with employees. Lots of marriages fail while the job eats all days. Splitting their area of responsibility or delegating to a well formed team is not an option for them. A circular organisation would solve some of the employees and management needs. Sadly enough the majority supporting this kind of organisation are not the leaders but the employees.

Leader groups who might see an employee’s talent and grow it:
-

Don’t expect much from these leader groups:
The Best/Most Experienced
The Delegator / The I-don’t-like-orders
The Longtimer / Early-bird
The Money-driven
The alpha-Male
The Boss-buddy / Same smell

Listen
If you select leaders on behalf of their ability to talk, they will lack to listen. Managers tend to be spokesmen, good small talkers and salespersons. The bigger the company gets the fewer the informal conversations get. Listening to employees would reveal differences in the organisation before they brew and harden. The same applies as well to customer and supplier.

Yeah, yeah I know we should… I write it down…

Leaders need enough time to listen. Unfortunately listening is mostly seen as unproductive time. Today solution is that leaders plan 1–1 meetings with their inferiors. Where they pass down information and orders. The way up is a much harder road. It’s easily said: ‘we need employees input, they know the business best’. Most of this input goes into leaders’ notebooks (tablets nowadays) where they remain. We see that leaders need many many equal inputs till they form the need for an issue and present it as their own idea… Leaders often lack catching up good ideas at first sight — this would require overly trust in employees.

Leader groups who will listen to employees:
The Best/Most Experienced
The Money-driven

Don’t expect much from these leader groups:
The Delegator / The I-don’t-like-orders
The alpha-Male
The Boss-buddy / Same smell

Build a community
Probably the easiest of the five principles to tick off — you’d think. Almost every company does

  • give news of company/team happenings
  • organise company/team-wide (philanthropic) initiatives
  • celebrate employee’s birthdays
  • share employee bios and stories
  • spur friendly intra-company/team competition

Almost all leaders will initiate community initiatives. But often they don’t participate the community or don’t invest time in it (it is something that can be delegated). Watch out for alibi actions! Employees feel if it doesn’t come from the heart and if it has no significance in the company/team it won’t last.

Leader groups who will foster communities:
The Best/Most Experienced
The Longtimer / Early-bird
The Money-driven
The alpha-Male

Don’t expect much from these leader groups:
-

Reflect and learn
Probably the most challenging principle of the five, humans are not good at self-reflection. We easily spot avoidable errors on others but not on themselves. What we think, what we did is so much better than what other do. We learn from errors when the effect was dramatic. Else we tend only to learn when we don’t have to change. It gets even harder when it comes to reflecting our decisions. If we made a good decision in the past we will keep making the same decision even if the circumstances have changed completely. We call it The old man of the Cuban Revolution fallacy. These leaders’ minds stay back in a time (the good times). Only when the old men die/quit the door is open for the future. Unfortunately you can go on for a long time without updating your mind. We are in a phase with lots of game changing shifts and we see a lot of leaders running from one incident to the next.

Leader groups who will reflect and learn:
-

Don’t expect much from these leader groups:
The Delegator / The I-don’t-like-orders
The Longtimer / Early-bird
The alpha-Male
The Boss-buddy / Same smell


We agree this might sound a bit doom-mongering. Lots of start-ups/small companies do a great job even if they wouldn’t say their leaders are servants. If the company size is bigger than 100, the family feeling shrinks and the stressful moments rise.

If your business depends on people and not on machines, you have to ‘oil’ your employees and do regular maintenance on your organisation!

If leaders would work continuously on supporting the teams, growing the employees, listening to the employees, building solid communities in the company, reflect the actions and learn as much as possible, companies of any size and domain will prosper.

If you are a leader who is not afraid of challenges, you might want to look at Larry Spears’s formulated 10 key servant leadership traits — commitment to the growth and development of people, listening, building community, awareness, empathy, stewardship, foresight, persuasion, conceptualisation and healing. Nowadays a leader needs passion for the product and the employees. Otherwise consider leading machines.

SuddenPeak

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