Servant Leadership
Servant Leadership says the leader's job is to serve the people doing the work first, and the authority to lead follows from that service rather than the other way round.
Ten traits sit in a row, one per card, each spelling out a different way to put others first.
Reach for this when…
- A leader is technically in charge but the team doesn't trust them.
- Command-and-control is getting short-term results and long-term turnover.
- You need a leadership model that isn't built around the leader's own ambition.
How to run it
- Introduce the ten characteristics: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualising, foresight, stewardship, commitment to people's growth, building community.
- Have the leader rate themselves honestly on each.
- Identify the two or three least developed.
- Design specific practices to build each one.
- Anchor the shift with a concrete story or case, not just the theory.
A worked example
Situation. Marco Ferrari ran Tessuti Ferrari, a textile manufacturer in Bologna, Italy, and led the way he'd been led: give the order, expect it done. Turnover among his best supervisors kept climbing.
Applied. Rated against the ten characteristics, he scored lowest on listening and stewardship. He started closing his office door less and walking the floor asking questions instead of giving instructions.
Result. Two supervisors who'd been about to leave stayed. The change wasn't dramatic, but the floor started raising problems to him before they became crises.
The catch
The ten characteristics are broad enough that almost any leadership behaviour can be justified under one of them, which makes the model easy to claim and hard to falsify. It also asks a lot of self-honesty in the rating step, which not every leader is ready to give.
Serving the team is not the same as never disagreeing with them. The servant leader still has to make the hard call.
Origin: Robert Greenleaf (originated the concept); Larry Spears (distilled the ten characteristics, 1992)