It isn’t about giving without limit.
Here’s an example of getting it wrong.
Jane (not her real name) was at the end of her tether. She’d busted her guts to get everyone nice, new office furniture.
Nearly everyone was grateful. And they let Jane know:
Thank you, this is so much better.
It feels good to come here now.
It looks nice and is comfortable too.
With one exception. Betty.
As usual, nothing seemed to please her. Instead, Betty said, in a grumpy tone, as if she was being majorly inconvenienced:
I’ll have to put my things back how they were now.
Jane was sick of this. It felt like Betty was the one bad apple spoiling the bunch. Jane’s desire to serve her team was starting to feel like servitude.
A definition
Deflated, Jane asked me what I thought of servant leadership during one of our executive coaching sessions.
I’m a fan of servant leadership. I even drew on the idea in my PhD. The term was coined in the 1970s by Robert Greenleaf, who wrote The Servant as Leader.
The idea is that, as a leader, you see your role as helping people grow, develop and do their work well, within the boundaries of their abilities and the organisation they’re in.
That’s a long way from command and control. It’s a far cry from “I’m the boss and you exist to do my bidding”.
But that’s not all there is to servant leadership at work.
Where servant leadership is often misunderstood
What often gets missed is that servant leadership still operates within organisational constraints.
You’re at work to do a job. The work still has to get done.
Not everyone will get what they want, in the way they want it. What individuals prefer and what the organisation needs won’t always align.
Servant leadership doesn’t mean absorbing every complaint or trying to satisfy every preference.
It’s about creating conditions where people can do good work, develop, and contribute, while meeting organisational goals.
That means limits.
It means some decisions won’t be popular.
It means some frustrations won’t be resolved.
And it means the organisation has to win, or no one does.
Otherwise, you don’t end up serving anyone. You end up a slave to servant leadership. And eventually, out of business.
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
