Improving Servant Leadership
Correcting an Overcorrection
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic tackles the common tendency to correct destructive leadership behaviors by renaming the goal. This is the challenge with Servant Leadership, where the rebranding is both unnecessary and leads to something just as destructive as what they wanted to avoid. Thankfully, there’s a balancing point we can find to unlock true leadership and reinvigorate our teams.
In the world of Agile Software Development, aka the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the term "Servant Leadership" emerged and quickly gained traction. They define this as: (and yes, they did copyright it, which turns it into a branding exercise):
A servant leader influences rather than commands, focusing on the team’s needs to align outcomes with organizational values. Scrum Master's can choose how to collaborate, ensuring events are positive, productive, and time-bound by facilitating or allowing team members to lead. Rotating responsibilities for meetings is essential to team growth and self-management.
The concept itself was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in “The Servant as Leader”, an 1970s essay, but the concept goes further back, as documented in the Bible:
But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. - Mark 10:42–45
Servant Leadership focuses on humility, stewardship, accountability, empathy, courage, support, and decisiveness when needed. Who wouldn’t want a leader like that? I certainly do. So why do I advocate against the idea?
Simply put, it’s both an unnecessary differentiation and it, all too often, results in passive-aggressive leadership.
Unessesary
Everything described under servant leadership merely retitles the definition of good leadership. Case in point, when you compare the opposite of a servant leader, you uncover what is best described as a command-and-control leader. This type makes decisions unilaterally, assumes they know best, uses authority, hierarchy, and compliance, prioritizes adherence to orders over problem-solving, and manages through fear, pressure, or positional power.
But that’s not a good leader! That’s a tyrant. History is replete with examples of tyranny, and we recognize that style exists but isn’t appreciated. What’s ironic is that history also shows that the best leaders already combine a servant leader model.
Service - They remove obstacles, develop their people, protect their teams, and cultivate trust.
Leadership - They set direction, enforce standards, make decisions, confront problems, and take responsibility.
The catch is that Servant Leadership® emphasizes away from the true leadership element and then pretends it can stand on a single leg of service. A nuanced aspect of leadership compounds this, where, as I defined in the essay How to Identify a Good Leader, where the difference between good and bad leaders is:
A bad leader is liked by their superiors and disliked by their team.
A good leader is one whose team members respect them, are empowered by them, and are able to achieve unexpected results while this leader often doesn’t get along with their peers and superiors.
This is an important element to keep in mind, in that a good leader challenges bad leaders. This challenge doesn’t even have active, as a good leader naturally demonstrates behaviors and outcomes that hold a mirror up to everyone else.
Servant leadership is unnecessary as a separate category because good leaders have always served their teams; the problem is that labeling it as a category enables people to perform service while avoiding actual leadership. The irony of servant leadership is that, in the attempt to overcome tyranny, they embraced passive-aggressive leadership.
Passive Aggressive Leadership
This problem starts with the scrum master training itself, where the sheer number of times ‘servant leader’ was stated became a joke. It was inserted into everything with the emphasis on servant. The result was predictable: any behavior that sounded like setting direction, enforcing standards, making decisions, confronting problems, and taking responsibility was quashed as too directive.
The result is a passive execution that’s loath to state disagreement, avoids providing direction, and rewards conformity. This style presents itself as supportive and collaborative while quietly resisting responsibilities and difficult conversations. They avoid direct conflict, offer vague or indirect feedback, and use ambiguity to dodge accountability. Hence, passive-aggressive. The result is confusion, decision delays, eroded trust, and a culture where dysfunction grows despite the leader’s outward appearance of cooperation.
It also feeds into the misguided notion that anyone can be a leader. Summarized, we all have different personality proclivities, and overemphasizing Servant leadership invites way too many people into positions of authority without arming them with the balance of the second leg of leadership.
Instead of leading, the behavior I most often saw was manipulation. This type models performative behaviors that look kind but avoid authentic leadership. They weaponized humility to avoid making tough calls and elevated niceness over effectiveness. Their primary act of leadership was saying they are a servant leader and turning it from a model of behavior into a mascot of identity.
This is the type of leader I’ve had the most issues with in my career, and you’ll rightly point out that this isn’t leadership at all, which would be true. The problem is that the concept of Servant Leadership gave them the cover to claim otherwise, and that’s something we can work to fix.
Taking Action
The solution to stripping away the destructive behaviors that servant leadership created is simple: Be a Leader. Pure, unadulterated, no modifiers required.
The definition and examples of true leadership exist everywhere, but be aware, there’s no perfect template or framework. SAFe’s attempt to correct one type of bad behavior led to classic overindexing into a different kind of bad behavior, largely due to their branding of Servant Leadership®. The challenge is understanding who you are, tailoring approaches to other cultures, personalities, and environments, and balancing between passive-aggressive and tyrannical.
To kick you off on the adventure, check out Born or Raised regarding leadership proclivities, and then continue with Leading Without Authority, Lazy Leadership, and Leading Complex Systems. As we dig into the foundations of leadership, what are your thoughts and insights that you can add to the conversations for others to learn from? Leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. Becoming a paid member keeps these essays open for everyone. Hurry and grab 20% off an annual subscription. That’s $24 a year or $2 a month. It’s just 50¢ an essay and makes a big difference.
Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
Great, insightful piece. Now I know why I often clashed with my bosses in several jobs. I remember one performance review where I was downgraded because, “your people like you too much.” this, despite the fact that we exceeded every goal given us in a very challenging environment.