Servant Leadership — Power Used to Make Others More Powerful

A VP told her team 'I'm here to remove your blockers'. Then she scheduled herself into every meaningful decision the team had to make. Servant leadership isn't a slogan. It is a calendar choice, an authority-handoff choice, and a courage choice — and almost every leader who claims it fails the calendar test.

Why it matters

Robert Greenleaf wrote his original essay in 1970 after years inside AT&T's management hierarchy. His argument: the leaders he had genuinely served under reversed the typical equation, using their authority to multiply others rather than themselves. Modern research (Liden, van Dierendonck, and others) links servant leadership to lower turnover, higher OCBs, faster team learning, and stronger trust scores — particularly in knowledge work where autonomy and discretionary effort are the real outputs.

It also matters because it is one of the most miscoded styles in practice. 'Servant' gets read as 'soft', 'consensus-seeking', or 'will-do-anything-for-the-team'. The real version is the opposite — it requires harder accountability, more honest feedback, and more no's. Greenleaf's whole point was that service requires strength, not its absence.

The flip

Most leadership models start with 'what should the leader do to get results from the team'. Greenleaf flips it: what should the team get from having had this leader? The right question to ask yourself at year-end isn't 'did I hit the number' — it is 'are the people who worked under me more capable, more confident, and more autonomous than they were a year ago?'

“The best test... is: do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

10 behaviors

• Listening — deeply, before responding.
• Empathy — assuming good intent.
• Healing — restoring trust after conflict.
• Awareness — of self and surroundings.
• Persuasion — over coercion.
• Conceptualization — long-term thinking.
• Foresight — anticipating consequences.
• Stewardship — caretaking the org.
• Commitment to growth of people.
• Building community.

Servant vs Soft

Example

Cheryl Bachelder's turnaround of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen (2007–2017) was textbook servant leadership. She explicitly subordinated executive comfort to franchisee economics, then to team-member development. She wrote it down, made it the strategy, and held senior leaders accountable to it. Stock 6x'd over the decade. Not despite serving — because of it.

Compare the failure mode: a CTO I worked with adopted the language ('I'm here to clear blockers') but kept every architecture decision on his desk. The team disengaged within 18 months. Servant talk over directive systems reads as theatre; teams smell it within a quarter.

Apply on Monday

• In every 1:1, ask 'what's one thing in your way I can remove this week?' and actually remove it.
• Block 20% of your calendar for unblocking work — defend it like a board meeting.
• Send credit upward and outward; absorb criticism downward.
• Say no to one decision you're in but shouldn't be — return it to the team.
• Once a quarter, ask each direct: 'are you growing under me? Where am I in your way?'

Common mistakes

• Mistaking servant for soft — it requires more candor, not less.
• Doing the work yourself instead of unblocking.
• Performing service in public, withholding it in private.
• Avoiding hard accountability conversations in the name of 'serving'.
• Saying yes to every request — generosity collapses into chaos.
• Confusing 'serving the team' with 'serving every individual whim'.

Reflection prompts

1. Whose growth this quarter is genuinely my responsibility?
2. Where am I still holding decisions I should hand down?
3. What blocker have I left in place out of convenience?
4. When did I last say no in a way that served the team?

Takeaways

• Year-end test: did your people grow under you?
• Service requires strength, not softness.
• 20% of your calendar for unblocking is the cheapest leverage you have.
• Performed service is detected and discounted by teams within a quarter.