What Ever Happened To Servant Leadership? Has It Died?

Authoritarian leadership will underperform over time.

What ever happened to servant-based leadership?

Several decades ago, there were leadership books that talked about the leader as a servant—leaders as people who support the team or the organization, leaders who listen and take care of people, leaders who empathize, leaders who admit their faults.

In fact, these are the leaders that we emulate in Ted Lasso, one of the most popular TV shows of today.

In my experience traveling around the world, visiting many countries and many companies, I have found that some of the most enduring organizations—lasting decades to hundreds of years, not just ten years—do have quiet, unassuming, intelligent, thoughtful servant leaders.

I've also found that European companies, which tend to be much older than those in the US, are more likely to operate this way. Europe, if you can generalize, is different from the United States in that sense—there's a much greater belief system around taking care of the people and building a collective team, not just holding each individual accountable and firing people who don't perform or don't fit in.

For some reason, right now, we seem to have exited the idea of servant leadership and are focused on an authoritarian view. And I’m not talking about everyone, but if you look at leaders like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg as examples (read Careless People for the latest) —you can see that there is not a lot of servant leadership under the covers here.

This is a leadership focused on highly accountable, winner-take-all behavior. These leaders seek out employees who are loyalists, passionate, hard performers—people who will work 80 hours a week and do whatever the boss says. In some sense, it's a form of subservience where you, as an employee, give up your sense of autonomy in the interest of this boss or company’s needs, with the hope that maybe you’ll make a lot of money or get a big title out of it at the end.

If you read the new book about Facebook—it’s really striking how people like Sheryl Sandberg do not appear to be at all what we thought.

So, I have to ask myself, as an analyst and a consultant more than as a business leader myself: Is this a meaningful trend? A shift? Or just a fad?

My suggestion is that it’s just a fad. And maybe, coming out of the Pandemic, we all wanted “strong men” to save us from the virus.

Over the long run, I don’t think it works.

If you look at all the companies I’ve worked with and studied over the years—from large companies like IBM and Exxon to small ones and startups—the ones that last a long time tend to have leaders who truly understand the strengths of the organization. They don’t pit people against each other.

In the political sense, for example, I don’t know if Donald Trump really understands the power of the United States. He understands what it takes to get elected. But the United States' power comes from the heterogeneous nature of our culture—the fact that we all work together despite coming from different backgrounds. That is a big difference between the United States and almost every other country in the world. And if we shatter that culture, we lose our most important strength.

I think the same applies in business. If you start holding people accountable only as individuals and create a competitive culture where only the strong survive, you may end up with a smaller company. You may end up with a higher stock price for a while. But over time, the company will struggle because it doesn’t have the inner strength necessary to grow.

The reason I believe this is true is that if you look at very successful companies that last a long time, the one thing they are exceptionally good at, above all else, is adaptation.

And that is very, very hard. Because no matter what you do for a living as a business, once you’re good at something, you don’t want to change it. That product, that strategy, that initiative—it’s working. If you’re Apple, you don’t want to redo your design concepts. If you’re IBM, you don’t want to undo your mainframe legacy. If you’re Cisco, you want to keep making routers. If you're Facebook, you want to keep growing your user base and collecting data.

But if that game suddenly changes, it can shatter your perception of identity.

So, if you want to be a long-term company, not just a short-term one, you need to build endurance. And enduring companies don’t always have the highest stock prices. They may over time—but if you look at companies like American Express, UPS, IBM, Microsoft, they last a very long time. Yes, they’re sometimes eclipsed by new players like Google or NVIDIA (who is also an enduring company), but maybe that’s ok.

Because longevity—that strength, that inner core—is what makes them great for long periods of time.

And I would argue that as a country, an economy, and a people, we should want organizations that endure. Because they’re good for us—as employees, as workers, as citizens. Because we can rely on them.

I recently had conversations with some leaders at Boeing, and interestingly enough, they are a company in pain. My sense from those discussions is that they know what happened. They feel personally hurt by the behavior that took place. They’re not blaming anyone but themselves, and they do believe they have a rightful place as an icon in the American economy. And I think they do. There certainly isn’t anybody else like them at the moment.

However, their sense of endurance was challenged when their leaders chose to run the company as a financial machine rather than an engineering machine. And so, servant leadership was lost—and with it, much of the organization’s strength.

The enigma to this, of course, is Elon Musk.

Some might argue that Musk’s single-mindedness, energy, and authoritative behavior are perfect for stock investors. And, so far, that certainly seems to have been true.

But I think—from my experience—that only lasts so long.

Bill Gates had to step away from Microsoft. Facebook will outgrow Zuckerberg. And I think Elon’s ability to build a long-term organization has yet to be proven.

But in my opinion, the takeaway is clear: If you aspire to be a leader, if you are a leader, if you influence leadership in any way—revisit the books on servant leadership.

And make sure that you haven’t forgotten what they say.