Servant Leadership

What servant leadership is

Servant leadership (القيادة الخادمة) is a philosophy of leadership which holds that the leader’s first role is to serve the people the leader leads. The leader puts the growth and needs of those people, and the quality of their working environment, ahead of the leader’s own standing and authority. A servant leader does not start from the question “What do I want from my team?” but from the question “What does my team need in order to work and to develop?” The concept is attributed to the American writer Robert K. Greenleaf, and the literature associates it with his essay “The Servant as Leader” of 1970 and his book “Servant Leadership” of 1977.

The concept concerns leadership style inside an establishment. What follows is an explanation of the concept and of its limits. It does not claim that servant leadership is the best leadership style, or that adopting it raises performance or satisfaction.

Where the concept comes from

Researchers attribute the concept to Greenleaf, who wrote about it in the 1970s. According to secondary summaries, his idea is that leadership begins with a wish to serve that comes before a wish for power. The test of a servant leader is the condition of those served: whether they grow as persons, whether they become more autonomous and capable, and whether they themselves become more likely to serve others.

This is a short description in our own wording. We did not read the text of the essay or of the book, and we did not verify whether Greenleaf’s text includes lists of traits, so we quote nothing from them and do not claim that our wording matches theirs.

Lists of traits of the servant leader, and instruments for measuring them, circulate in the literature, and they are attributed mostly to later researchers. We present none of their details.

What distinguishes a servant leader in practice

The practice is described in a way close to the following. It is a summary of the idea and not an approved list:

• Listening. The leader learns the employees’ needs and what obstructs them before deciding.
• Caring about individual growth. The leader sees in each employee potential that develops, and arranges opportunities to learn and to try.
• Removing obstacles. The leader counts it as part of the job to open the way for the team, for example by providing resources or resolving a conflict between priorities.
• Giving decisions to the one who holds the information. The leader passes part of a decision to those who are closer to the work.
• Crediting the team with success. The leader puts the team’s achievement ahead of the leader’s own visibility.

The leader still carries responsibility for results and direction. Serving the team does not mean abandoning goals or going without decisions. It means exercising them with the intention of benefiting the team.

How servant leadership differs from other leadership styles

The concept overlaps with other styles in the literature and differs in where it puts the emphasis:

• Decision making. Involving employees in decisions is the core of participative leadership, so its emphasis is on how a decision is made. Servant leadership emphasises the leader’s stance toward serving the team, and a leader can serve the team and still decide alone on a particular matter.
• Inspiration by vision. A vision with which the leader inspires followers to go beyond their personal interests is at the centre of transformational leadership. Servant leadership starts from the needs of the followers themselves.
• Matching style to the situation. A leader who changes style according to the maturity of the employee follows situational leadership. That is a framework for choosing a style by situation, and not a philosophy about the purpose of leadership.

Managers choose among several other styles according to the situation. Servant leadership can be treated as a perspective on the leader’s purpose that can coexist with the decision style that suits the situation. An approach that asks what stands in the way of an employee reaching a goal, and which leader behaviour removes that obstacle, is set out in Path Goal Theory.

How servant leadership shows in daily work

A manager needs no special programme to move toward this perspective. It shows in practices that are described in other terms:

• Time in which an employee talks about what obstructs the employee and what the employee wants to learn, instead of a time for review alone, is what a one on one meeting can provide.
• A manager who assigns tasks to employees with the necessary authority is practising delegation, and that develops the employees’ abilities if support goes with it.
• Questions that open an employee’s thinking, together with monitoring of what the employee commits to, make up coaching.
• An employee who can raise a mistake or a question without fear of punishment works in conditions of psychological safety, a condition in which listening can be real.

A hypothetical example: time spent serving the team and the numbers of its growth

Take a hypothetical manager of a team of eight employees at a hypothetical establishment, who decided to give each employee 30 minutes a week for a one on one meeting. The total time is 8 × 30 = 240 minutes, which is four hours, and its share of a working week of 40 hours is 4 ÷ 40 = 10%.

Over a quarter the manager tracked how many members of the team had been given a new responsibility. They were three of eight in the previous quarter, which is 3 ÷ 8 = 37.5%. They became five of eight in this quarter, which is 5 ÷ 8 = 62.5%. The difference is 62.5 minus 37.5 = 25 percentage points.

That difference does not prove an effect of the meetings. The number is small, and the increase may come from a new project that opened room for responsibilities, or from an employee leaving the team and vacating a position. The example shows how a leader’s stance can be turned into something that can be tracked: whether the employees have room to grow. The figures are hypothetical and set to illustrate. They do not represent an establishment or a study, and the example does not mean that 30 minutes or 10% of time is customary or sufficient.

The difference between serving and indulging

Some managers confuse serving the team with laxity. The difference is that service aims at the employee’s growth and the quality of work together, while indulgence aims at the comfort of the moment.

A manager who serves an employee states clearly that the employee’s performance is below what was agreed, helps to close the gap and sets a date for review. An indulgent manager postpones the conversation to avoid embarrassing anyone, and the problem grows. Disciplined frankness can be more useful to an employee than a courtesy that leaves the employee unaware of where the employee stands.

Questions for a leader’s own practice

A manager can review practice with simple questions. They are our suggestion and not a measuring instrument:

• What is the biggest obstacle in front of my team this week, and what have I done to remove it?
• Who in the team has had no chance for some time to learn something new?
• Have I taken decisions that someone closer to the work was better placed to take?
• Do I credit the achievement to the person who made it?

These questions need no programme, but they need honesty in answering and time set aside for them.

Where the concept is limited

• A vague standard. The word “service” has several meanings, and two managers will find it hard to agree on what a servant behaviour is in a particular situation.
• No rule for decisions. The concept does not say when to decide alone and when to consult, or how to settle priorities that conflict.
• A poor fit for some situations. In a crisis that requires a quick decision, the team may need clear direction more than consultation.
• Dependence on the behaviour of one person. Where systems that support growth are absent, such as time, budget and career paths, the perspective stays a wish with no effect.
• An essay as its source, not empirical research. The concept comes from a writer’s reflection on management, and attempts to turn it into research followed.

How servant leadership is misunderstood

• Assuming that the leader obeys the team. Service means serving the growth of the team and the goal of the work, not carrying out every request.
• Leaving performance without accountability. A servant leader also confronts weak performance, because leaving an employee undeveloped is not a service to the employee.
• Adopting the concept as a slogan. A manager announces a commitment to serve the team and changes nothing in the manager’s time or in the distribution of tasks.

The role of human resources

Human resources can prepare an environment that supports the perspective without imposing it. It can allow managers to set aside time for their employees within their schedules, adopt indicators in their appraisal that include the growth of their teams and not only individual results, and train them in listening and feedback.

How an establishment prepares its leaders is described in leadership development programme. Training alone does not change behaviour if the manager’s incentives reward the individual result at the expense of the team.

Is there proof that servant leadership raises performance?

We state no measured effect of servant leadership on team performance or employee satisfaction. In the sources we reviewed, we found no published figure that we adopt for such an effect, and we propose no figure of our own.

The concept is treated as a perspective on the leader’s purpose and role, tested in each establishment by what actually changes in it. Do employees find wider opportunities to learn? Does the quality of decisions close to the work improve? Do the agreed results rise? If none of this appears, the concept remains a description of intention and not of practice.

Servant leadership remains a way of looking at a question that managers can pass over: does my work leave room for the growth of the people who work with me? It points to a place for reflection on leadership style, and what is decided afterwards rests on the nature of the work and on the need of the team.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.