Influence and Servant Leadership

You could object to these criticisms of servant leadership by arguing that serving the needs of followers is actually the best means of influencing them.

But, do all forms of influence count as leadership? No, saying that leadership is influence is not helpful in itself unless you clarify what kind of influence. Bribery is a form of influence, so is salesmanship and a mother persuading her son to do his home work but none of these is leadership. To count as leadership, influence must be directed towards an external purpose. It cannot be for the sole good of either the person leading or the person being led. The former is too self directed while the latter serves the purpose of developing people. Influence is only leadership if it has, as its purpose, to motivate the achievement of an external group goal such as building something that serves an external purpose.

It is essential in understanding leadership to see the difference the leader's PURPOSE makes. If servant leadership is just about nurturing people, you have to include a teacher's activity and that of a mother developing her child since both could be intending perfectly well to serve the needs of the person being influenced. A definition of a concept that does not differentiate between things that fall under that concept and those that do not is a poor definition. What differentiates a leader of an organization from a teacher and a mother is that only the leader influences, in the first instance, to further an organizational purpose. For a leader, the development of people is at best a means to that end, not an end in itself. So, if a leader does indeed serve the needs of followers, that is only incidental, except perhaps in religious organizations. Saying that leadership is influence and stopping there is about as helpful as saying that a whale is a mammal. If you stop there, you fail to tell us anything really differentiating about whales because you don't tell us how whales are DIFFERENT from other mammals.

As with whales, therefore, you need to differentiate between forms of influence that actually count as leadership and those that serve other purposes. Someone whose primary purpose is to serve the needs of followers (servant leader) is doing what is normally called nurturing. To try to smuggle nurturing into the concept of leadership is simply to water down the latter and trade on its appeal to the gullible. Nurturing is an important enough activity without needing to elevate it to the status of leadership. Even those leaders who achieve organizational results through serving the needs of followers still do so as a means to the end of serving the organization. We cannot DEFINE leadership in terms of serving followers as a first purpose. The leader, the teacher and the mother might all use the same FORM of influence or persuasion. Hence why we cannot rely on the form of influence alone to define leadership - which is why we have to turn to the influencer's primary purpose as the differentiating factor. And when we do this, we see that servant leaders, mothers and teachers could well all have the same purpose whereas true leaders have as their primary purpose to achieve an organizational goal and they will not sacrifice this goal in order to serve the needs of followers. On the contrary, they will recruit new followers instead. That is a singular difference.

All pages written by Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. and copyright © Self Renewal Group 1996-2008