What is Servant Leadership

“Can you define servant leadership?” 

This question has come up a lot lately because it is such a buzzword. Servant leadership is challenging to define because it is a mindset, an approach, and a philosophy that is different than many traditional hierarchical systems. When you search for “servant leadership definition” you get a lot of jargon about structures and power and relationships, including a popular one from Greenleaf, but none of them really get at the core of it or address the benefits for organizations in 2022.

Our definition of servant leadership:

Servant leadership is a people-first approach that prioritizes the wellbeing, growth, and empowerment of employees as the most important focus of the organization. 

This is a radically different approach than traditional systems that have viewed employees as assets. A lot of organizations prioritize profits or growth above all else. Some organizations value hierarchy and structure. But servant leadership realizes that people and teams are the most important aspects of any organization, and that the long term benefit of making people your top priority, creates incredible synergies between the employees and the organization itself.

Why is servant leadership so important?

There are three key reasons that a servant leadership approach leads to better long term results:

1. Empowerment

When you trust employees and give them authority and power, they will grow. Over time, your organization will improve because each individual is growing and improving. Because employees are growing, they are much more likely to stay with your organization.

In a time of the “great resignation,” maintaining talent is a huge priority. One of the biggest drivers of dissatisfaction is stagnation – the feeling that employees are stuck or have no path to advance or grow. When you take a servant leadership approach, there is are many more opportunities for individual growth, and more opportunities to talk about those opportunities because leadership prioritizes the wellbeing of individuals first.

Every CEO has lost sleep over the potential to lose an indispensable employee.  By diversifying knowledge across individuals and teams, organizations become less dependent on one or two key individuals. This diversifies risk if any of those key individuals leave. 

2. Innovation
In the servant leadership approach, teams are trusted with ownership-level information. This empowers them to help find solutions that may not be obvious to management. Very often, teams find better solutions because they are closer to the work itself. And, because teams are empowered, they can implement immediate solutions. This speeds up the process of innovation and learning.

Teams will almost always outperform individuals. A great management team of 5 individuals can be incredible. But those 5 individuals can never outperform an organization of 200 empowered employees working as a team. Ever. 

3. Scale
Small organizations often inherently have a servant leadership style. Everyone works together to solve challenges. As organizations grow in size, teams fragment and specialize. This is natural. The problem is that there is a tendency to maintain decision making amongst a small group of managers, which then creates a logjam and slows down the entire organization. Way too often, management has to run around and make decisions all day, which means they are not being proactive, not focusing on improving the skills of their teams, and likely not making the most informed decisions. This is not good for the organization, the teams, or the individuals.

The way to scale using the servant leadership approach is for managers to focus on working with their direct reports and teams so that they constantly improve. Teams are empowered to make decisions, work across other teams, learn, and get feedback. There also needs to be clear rules and guard rails within internal process and teams to ensure a system that works for the entire organization.

3 core tenants of servant leadership