You might have heard the notion of leader as servant. I imagine that it might be based in concepts from Christianity, but I don’t know for sure. At any rate, I’ve had a chance to learn about the concept and apply it to my leadership in volunteer groups and the workplace.
You’d like to think that the idea is simple:
- A leader’s results are delivered because of the work the team does.
- The leader can help his team to deliver those results by helping to remove obstacles and facilitate action.
- As a result, the leader can be the most value by thinking of himself as a servant of the team.
But this is just a starting place, it’s not the full story.
The problem is that this isn’t the complete picture of what a leader does. In fact, leaders and managers are expected to set direction, make tough tradeoffs, and assess performance. Yet our general image of a servant is to NOT do these things.
| Interested in this idea? I wrote more about it from a spiritual point of view on my Sacred Music Coach blog. |
Your people need a strong and compelling direction in order to make decisions easier and to give value to their work. It’s true that a direction which is (at least partially) created by the group ends up having more emotional impact for them, but it’s still your role to make the decision, and to keep the team’s goals at the top of mind.
You can serve your team well by helping them to make the tough tradeoffs. This is a place where stepping up for accountability will make decisions much easier, and reduce time wasted on differing points of view pushing an unclear decisions process in random directions.
When you assess performance, you’re also serving the needs of the team, but in a way which might have some short-term pain. Going to the dentist isn’t exactly a pleasant experience for me, but I understand that my long-term health is going to be much better if I identify and fix issues early.
So is the concept of the Servant Leader useful or not? Based on my own experience, I tend to say yes. But it ends up being more of an internal model for your own behavior than something that you’ll use as an organizational model for your team. OK, go ahead and turn your org chart upside down if you like, putting yourself at the bottom. Maybe that makes a useful point for your folks, I don’t know. But that must not result in a team with no leader or no way to make a clear decision.
But this idea can help you to get up every morning and ask yourself: “Am I doing everything I can to help my people to deliver their best results?”
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