Published
Servant leadership isn’t “being nice.” It’s a hard-edged commitment to create the conditions for others to do their best work—through clarity, care, and courage. The posture is service; the product is performance.
Principles you can operate on
- Serve first, decide fast: Seek context and remove friction, then make the call.
- Power as stewardship: Use authority to grant access, not hoard it.
- Trust is built by usefulness: Credibility grows when you routinely unblock work.
Behaviors that compound
- Listen for constraints, not complaints: Reflect back the constraint (“We’re missing X to ship Y”), then solve it.
- Model clarity: Turn fuzzy goals into three observable outcomes and one owner per outcome.
- Protect focus: Eliminate low-value meetings; publish office hours for ad-hoc asks.
- Coach in the flow: Micro-feedback within 48 hours: “I noticed… impact… next time…”
- Share credit, own the misses: Publicly name contributors; privately own system gaps.
Operating rhythms that make it real
- Weekly unblocker: 30–45 minutes with a stable agenda: decisions due, cross-team dependencies, risk burndown.
- Service-level promises: Publish response times for reviews, approvals, and tooling requests.
- Decision log: One page, three fields (decision, owner, date). Visibility reduces re-litigation.
- Pulses that matter: 3-question fortnightly check: clarity, momentum, blockers. Act within 72 hours.
Measure what you’re changing
Start with leading indicators: cycle time to decision, % of blockers cleared within one week, meeting hours per FTE, and qualitative “I can do my best work” scores. Lagging indicators (quality, retention, NPS, revenue) will follow.
Common traps (and fixes)
- Martyrdom: Doing others’ work. Fix: Remove the blocker; keep the work with the owner.
- Nice over clear: Avoiding hard feedback. Fix: Be kind and specific about behavior + impact.
- Boundary collapse: Always on. Fix: Publish availability; channel urgent vs. non-urgent asks.
Two-week starter plan
- Ask each report: “What’s the one constraint that, if removed, accelerates you most?” Remove three this week.
- Stand up the weekly unblocker and a shared decision log.
- Rewrite team goals as three observable outcomes; assign single owners.
- Schedule two 20-minute coaching sessions focused on one skill and one behavior.
Servant leadership scales because usefulness scales. When leaders reliably turn friction into flow, people bring energy and initiative you can’t coerce.