With servant leadership, a leader's primary role is to serve
employees. Everyone from Lao-Tzu to Max De Pree thinks this a wonderful
model. Why then, asks Professor Jim Heskett, is this style so rare among CEOs?
Servant leadership is an age-old concept, a term loosely used to
suggest that a leader's primary role is to serve others, especially
employees. I witnessed a practical example of it at a ServiceMaster
board meeting in the 1990s when CEO William Pollard spilled a cup of
coffee prior to the board meeting.
Instead of summoning someone to clean it up, he asked a colleague to
get him cleaning compound and a cloth, things easily found in a company
that provided cleaning services. Whereupon he proceeded to get down on
his hands and knees to clean up the spill himself. The remarkable thing
was that board members and employees alike hardly noticed as he did it.
It was as if it was expected in a company with self-proclaimed servant
leadership.
Lao-Tzu wrote about servant leadership in the fifth-century BC:
"The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are
barely aware…. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his
task is accomplished and things have been completed, all the people
say, 'We ourselves have achieved it!'"
It is natural, rightly or wrongly, to relate servant leadership to
the concept of an inverted pyramid organization in which top management
"reports" upward to lower levels of management. At other times it has
been associated with organizations that have near-theological values
(for example, Max De Pree's leadership at Herman Miller, as expressed in
his book, Leadership is an Art, that emphasizes the importance
of love, elegance, caring, and inclusivity as central elements of
management). In that regard, it is also akin to the pope's annual
washing and kissing of the feet as part of the Holy Thursday rite.
The modern era of servant leadership began with a paper, The Servant as Leader,
written by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. In it, he said: "The servant
leader is servant first … It begins with the natural feeling that one
wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to
aspire to lead … (vs. one who is leader first…) … The best test, and
difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons … (and
become) more likely themselves to become servants?"
Now it appears that a group of organizational psychologists, led by
Adam Grant, are attempting to measure the impact of servant leadership
on leaders, not just those being led. Grant describes research in his
recent book, Give and Take, that suggests that servant leaders
are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not
only feel better about themselves at the end of the day but are more productive as well.
His thesis is that servant leaders are the beneficiaries of important
contacts, information, and insights that make them more effective and
productive in what they do even though they spend a great deal of their
time sharing what they learn and helping others through such things as
career counseling, suggesting contacts, and recommending new ways of
doing things.
Further, servant leaders don't waste much time deciding to whom to
give and in what order. They give to everyone in their organizations.
Grant concludes that giving can be exhausting but also
self-replenishing. So in his seemingly tireless efforts to give,
described in the book, Grant makes it a practice to give to everyone
until he detects a habitual "taker" that can be eliminated from his
"gift list."
Servant leadership is only one approach to leading, and it isn't for
everyone. But if servant leadership is as effective as portrayed in
recent research, why isn't it more prevalent? What do you think?
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