Servant Leadership: the Buzzword
When I ask people what they mean by “servant leadership”, most of the answers I get sound like “being selfless”, “leading from behind”, “empowering others”, “taking care of my people”, and “supporting others”.
Notice how none of these are about getting things done or making a difference in the world. None of these are about creating positive change for the future.
Servant leadership is seen as the alternative to telling people exactly what to do and micro-managing. It is seen as a way to have the trappings of power without being mean.
It sounds nice and makes people feel good.
But most of the time, it backfires, creating drama and insecurity despite leaders’ excellent intentions.
Why? And how can we avoid that drama?
The Problem: Mean Bosses
Everyone knows that people leave bosses not organizations.
Command and control leadership is effective in simple situations. One person makes the plan and tells everyone what to do. Everyone knows what they need to do and things get done. When done with compassion and transparency, this can be respectful and good.
But under pressure, command and control leaders tend to become bullies or micromanagers and play favourites.
Command and control leaders under pressure tend to create organizations with high turnover or employees that feel trapped by financial stress, uncertain employment prospects, or high value potential upsides they don’t want to walk away from. Neither is good for productivity or quality.
The Apparent Solution: Nice Bosses
The proposed alternative is bosses who empower their reports, support them, and let them decide what to do and how to do it.
At first, this support sounds great. It feels great to have a boss who listens to you, understands what you want, and helps you get it. But over time, it doesn’t always get things done. People don’t get held accountable for delivery. Missed deadlines come and go without consequences.
Work quality drops.
And leaders pass responsibility for fixing things down the chain of command to people who don’t have authority to make the necessary changes.
What has gone wrong?
The Real Problem: The Drama Triangle
Three Roles in High-Drama Relationships
The Drama Triangle1 is a pattern of unhealthy relationship dynamics. It consists of two high-power positions, Rescuer and Persecutor, and one low-power position, Victim.
In interactions dominated by the drama triangle, people take one of the three roles at any given time.
Persecutor (Villian): The Persecutor is commanding, bullying, angry, and authoritarian.
Rescuer (Hero): The Rescuer jumps in to help others and make everything better for them.
Victim: The victim convinces themselves and others that they are trying really hard, but everything is futile and they can’t do anything.
Each of these roles needs the other. When someone takes on one role, they subconsciously recruit others around them to take on the other roles. When people don’t like the roles they have been recruited into, they tend to jump to other roles on the triangle. If they can’t get off the triangle, eventually, everybody gets tired of bouncing aroung the roles and the drama that gets created and the sense of futility brings everyone to the Victim role.
The Drama Triangle and Servant Leadership
Servant Leadership as it is commonly used is an articulation of the Rescuer role. Leaders see themselves as being good servants because they are so helpful. This is seen as an wonderful alternative to being authoritarian.
But it isn’t.
The Rescuer still needs other people to be Victims.
Employees who work under Rescuer bosses become disempowered by the very people who are trying to help them. A leader or manager who assesses their own success by how much they have helped their reports cannot feel successful if their reports don’t need help.
Rescuers fight themselves as their conscious motivation is to enable others to do great work whereas their unconscious motivation is to create needy people so their conscious self can feel good about being helpful.
Talented people cannot shine in front of leaders like this. They have to hide their capabilities in order to make their bosses look good.
It is not safe to learn and become skilled in such an environment.
Getting Off the Triangle
Getting off the Drama Triangle isn’t always easy. You have to learn how to avoid unconsciously adopting one of the roles. Pressure to adopt one of these roles may come from colleagues who are trying to recruit you, from internal patterns based on how your past has conditioned you to respond, or both.
The easiest way to get off the Drama Triangle as a leader is to reject the status relationships of the triangle.2 The need for status is the heart of the drama.
The Rescuer and Persecuter roles see themselves as frenemies, working against each other to have dominance, and sharing the need for superiority over the Victim. The Victim adopts a low status postition with regard to the Rescuer and Persecuter, and can only claim a modicum of status by trying to be the most Victimy Victim or taking a Rescuer or Persecuter role with regard to other Victims.
Getting off the drama traingle means committing to equal status with each other. The key is seeing each other as collaborators with different skill sets and different perspectives but equal worth, dignity, and agency.
Co-leadership in service of a challenge that exists outside the interpersonal relationship between you.
Ironically, the original source material on Leadership as service is useful here.
Servant Leadership: the Source Material
It is unfortunate that the phrase Servant Leader has come to be used this way. The original concept has much to offer that would improve psychological safety and reduce workplace drama.
In 1970, Robert K Greenleaf,3 wrote his article “Servant as Leader” in which he set forth a vision of a leader who:
Wants to make the world better for others,
Intuitively foresees patterns of future development,
Is followed by those who choose to follow them, and
Relates to followers with acceptance of their imperfections and empathy.
It is only after describing the vision of the leader as builder of the future that Greenleaf turned to the organizational structure and relationship with followers.
The organizational structure he called for involved an oversight body that assures that the organization’s leaders remain focused on service rather than accumulation of power.
He insisted that leaders treat followers as fully human agents, model being of service, and only follow other servant-leaders.
Able servants with potential to lead must lead.
Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader
Most importantly, though, he insisted that people who wished to be of service step forward into leadership and create a good social order, understanding that the majority of people willingly choose to sacrifice freedom for order, even when delivered by a brutal leader, to avoid chaos.
Therefore the servant-leader will beware of pursuing an idealistic path regardless of its impact on order. The big question is, what kind of order? This is the great challenge to the emerging generation of leaders: can they build better order?
Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader
Servant Leadership and Psychological Safety
The style of leader championed by Greenleaf listens to learn what others need, senses the trends toward the future, and steps into leadership to shape those trends into a better future for others. Such a leader starts with being of service. Organizations allow for coordination of efforts with those who would follow such a leader. Organizational structures facilitate the organizations work doing good in the world while simultaenously creating order for those who would follow in ways that honour their autonomy, agency, and feelings.
It is the choice of how to be of service to those outside the company that avoids the drama and instability of inward-facing service.
It is the combination of acceptance and empathy for the humanity of those within the organization and service to those outside the organization that creates psychological safety within the organization.
Stephen Karpman, "Fairy tales and script drama analysis". Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 26 (7): 39–43, (1968).
Another approach to getting off the triangle is featured in this video from the Conscious Leadership group.
Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant as Leader, Center for Servant Leadership (2008).
Kate thanks.
As for anything in life, death, and all else, I speak only for myself.
I've been traumatised and grown by leadership since my 1960s childhood.
My leadership of myself has nearly killed me several times, because of my addiction to responsibility and reward.
For me, leadership is infinitely dimensioned, and the merging of cybernetics with love is to me very significant.
I love that I am living in times where transcendent leadership is being designed in an emergent way, as if by energies that are beyond words, language, and 'science', and beyond and all other human constructs of the past few centuries.
Given that I believe that traumatic growth, especially via suicidal disintegration, has enabled my own peace and self-love (instead of self-destructions of the past 60 years), then it's no surprise that I tend to value and aspire to leadership that is guided by each person's own path to peace, which is their own truth and meaning; not mine nor anyone else's.
To me, there are many paths to peace, and perhaps we inhabit many different universes at the same 'time' and we always have.
I believe new sorts of leadership are emerging that transcend anything we can imagine previously existing.
For me, transcendence, via showing, inspiring and sharing a sort compassionate loving example to others, is happening.
Dance and song, nature and laughing, gratitude and abundance, creating and channelling energies (money, love, whatever - since everything is energy to me) - and anything that switches fear to love - are what's happening.
To me, energies are infinite, and leadership that's able to show this to others, and enable the cascading and amplifying of this infinite abundance, is very real.