What is Servant Leadership?
- Servant leadership is one of the most popular leadership models around today.
- The concept was developed by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970.
- The servant leader serves the people he/she leads which implies that employees are an end in themselves rather than a means to an organizational purpose or bottom line.
What do servant leaders do?
- devote themselves to serving the needs of organization members.
- focus on meeting the needs of those they lead.
- develop employees to bring out the best in them.
- coach others and encourage their self expression.
- facilitate personal growth in all who work with them.
- listen and build a sense of community.
Servant leaders are felt to be effective because the needs of followers are so looked after that they reach their full potential, hence perform at their best. A strength of this way of looking at leadership is that it forces us away from self-serving, domineering leadership and makes those in charge think harder about how to respect, value and motivate people reporting to them.
Looked at critically, however, we have to ask whether the idea of employees as partners might not be better than the idea of leaders as servants. It's just as paternalistic to switch from controlling boss to nurturing boss. Treating employees as partners is even more respectful and valuing. Serving people's needs creates the image of being slavish or subservient, not a very positive image. In addition, leaders need to serve the needs of shareholders ahead of those of employees. Surely, it makes more sense to say simply that leaders should CONSIDER the needs of employees not be a servant to them. Shifting metaphors from leaders-as-autocrats to leaders-as-servants is going from one extreme to the other. Neither end of the spectrum is very revealing about how organizations function. The principles of servant leadership are admirable. It is the image of SERVANT with its slave-like connotation that is problematic and misleading. See my Critique of this idea for more on my objections to servant leadership.
Selflessness
Advocates of servant leadership emphasize two factors, serving employees and being selfless. The latter is a valuable trait, but we don't need to call it servant leadership to advocate selflessness. A good example of being selfless is a political leader who champions an unpopular policy, like eliminating carbon waste by a tight deadline because he or she feels it is in the best interest of the country. The leader who campains mainly on the basis of popular policies like cutting taxes is really just buying votes. This person is more interested in getting elected than doing what is best for the country. We naturally take a cynical attitude toward such people and question whether they ought to be regarded as leaders at all. The selfless leader is willing to risk his or her own fate in order to do what is right. This is real leadership, like that of Martin Luther King who risked going to jail and being killed in order to stand up for what he believed in. Of course, many professionals are also selfless without being leaders - many doctors and nurses, for example. So, it is not only leaders who are selfless. In any case, selflessness is possible without being a servant.
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.
For more on this topic see Critique of Servant Leadership with replies to typical objections to such criticisms.
See also my two latest articles on servant leadership: (1) Sevant Leadership: A Bad Idea and (2) Against Servant Leadership.
When you think of leadership do you have a particular ideal in mind? What is your image of the ideal leader?
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