Week 4 Day 1: Servant Leadership Is Not Weakness

The phrase 'servant leader' makes some people cringe. It sounds soft. It sounds like you are supposed to be everyone's assistant. That is not what it means. A servant leader removes obstacles, provides clarity, and creates the conditions for the team to succeed. That is not weakness -- it is architecture. You are designing an environment, not carrying everyone's backpack.

I used to think leadership meant having the answers. When someone came to me with a problem, my instinct was to solve it. Fast. Decisively. And I was rewarded for it -- people said I was responsive, helpful, available. But what I was actually doing was training my team to bring me every problem instead of solving problems themselves. The shift happened when a senior engineer told me, 'You are the bottleneck and you do not see it.' That stung. But he was right. Every time I jumped in to fix something, I was reinforcing a pattern: bring it to Scott, he will handle it. Servant leadership is not about being the person who solves everything. It is about being the person who makes sure the team has what they need to solve things themselves. That is a fundamentally different job, and most leaders never make the switch.

Robert Greenleaf coined the term 'servant leadership' in his 1970 essay 'The Servant as Leader,' but the concept has been significantly developed since then. Research by Jim Laub at Florida Atlantic University developed the Organizational Leadership Assessment (OLA) which measures servant leadership across six dimensions: valuing people, developing people, building community, displaying authenticity, providing leadership, and sharing leadership. A meta-analysis by Eva et al. (2019) published in The Leadership Quarterly, reviewing 285 studies, found that servant leadership has a stronger positive relationship with team performance and organizational citizenship behavior than transformational leadership -- the model most MBA programs still teach as the gold standard. The mechanism is trust: when team members believe their leader genuinely prioritizes their growth and removes barriers rather than managing optics, discretionary effort increases measurably. The research is clear -- servant leadership is not a softer alternative to strong leadership. It is a more effective one.