Extreme Servant Leadership
I had the opportunity to connect with a friend recently and discuss our careers. He asked me what I thought might be different about the workforce today, why did so many workers seem less engaged these days. Rather than answer his questions, I asked a few of my own.
Snippets from our discussion:
Me: Are you seeing this trend across your company?
Friend: No my team seems pretty engaged but we had a company event a few weeks ago and hardly anyone was there.
Me: Well this is Metro DC so with traffic, in person events during the work week are always going to have lower attendance. But did you notice any trends in who did and did not show up?
Friend: My whole team was there. A few other of the leaders did not come and neither did their teams. I do make a concerted effort to connect with my (entirely remote) team as often as possible and know them on a personal level.
Me: Employees tend to take cues from their leaders. Why do you think your team showed up and the others didn’t?
Friend: I take an extreme servant leadership approach that many do not. I feel the success or failure of each of my team members is on me. I need to get them everything they need to be successful. If I haven’t and they fail, that’s my fault.
Me: What about personal responsibility? What if they do not have the right skills?
Friend: Then I should have been paying close enough attention to either get them the right training or to let them go. Either way it is my fault.
Me: I think you have answered your own question. Leaders create the space for engagement to flourish. The more space they create by their actions, higher engagement is possible. The difference was you. This has been much harder for many leaders in hybrid and remote environments. You closed the physical distance and recreated exactly what you would have if you were all together. The circumstances changed and you as a leader rose even higher to the challenge.
Wow. This revelation stuck with me, and I consider myself a servant leader. The passion and vehemence with which my friend described their approach was so wonderfully refreshing. I thought if we could only teach that to more leaders, how transformational could that be to the work environment? However, I am not sure this is something you can really teach as it needs to come from an authentic place inside of the leader to have impact.
But just perhaps we could do a better job of identifying these leaders, rewarding their efforts, and elevating their visibility as what great looks like. Not good leadership but great leadership.
#leadership #servantleader #employeeengagement #remoteteams
