Gotta Serve Somebody

Leadership bunkum and other misconceptions

Lily The Pink

I always had my doubts about servant leadership. I could never really say why but there was something about it that felt off to me.

My bullshit detector was not sounding the alarm but it was definitely picking up something and I couldn’t figure out what. On the surface, the concept seemed sound. The behaviours it promoted seemed to be pretty close to my own ideas of leadership, it seemed like something that ought to be right up my street. But I just couldn’t embrace it.

I remember having a chat with someone who’d served in the Army about it. Actually, I started by asking about how the army operates as self-managing teams (I’ll come back to that in a minute) but the conversation moved onto servant leadership. I suspect this was because that was the focus of what he now did as a consultant and he was a passionate and convincing advocate of it. Once again, this looked like an inviting path I should travel down but a little voice somewhere was telling me not to bother.

I have to set this scepticism in the broader context of my general distrust of management and leadership theories, especially those peddled as a general solution to all ills, ‘most efficacious in every way’, as The Scaffold put it. Others have told me that my maxim seems to be ‘It’s all bollocks’. Crude and sweeping it may be but it does have a surprisingly high hit rate. Maybe I was agin Servant Leadership because that is my default position. Or maybe it was because it was still focused on ‘the leader’, it was just another way to fulfil the ‘hero’ role beloved of the type of alpha males that naturally antagonise me (which I accept is almost completely down to me. Well, unless they are arrogant tossers throwing their weight around, in which case it’s a perfectly justifiable reaction.) Maybe I was getting it wrong…

Then I saw a post by Corina Enache that filled in some of the background to Servant Leadership. It followed a familiar story of a sound idea being twisted into something else that was simpler to sell to sell to Corporate America but rendered ineffective in the process. An idea that was neutered so that it looked like change but didn’t alter the status quo.

The concept was created by Robert Greenleaf in 1990, drawn from the story of a Herman Hesse novel. He defined a test as whether the servant leader had been successful: do those served become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous? This test contained a highly subversive idea because the only way you could pass it was to give decision making power away. It was a direct challenge to conventional power structures and the self-image of those in charge, who saw themselves primarily as decision makers.

Guess what happened next? Yep, someone wrote down the ten attributes of a servant leader that Greenleaf had identified but dropped the test. Instead of being a way to set employees free, it became a set of behaviours to be adopted (or at least simulated) to get more out of those employees.

The power structures remain in place, the leaders still make the decisions and the system remains focused on extraction rather than creation. But now they get to look like the good guys at the same time! Unsurprisingly, they lapped it up.

I told you it was all bollocks.

Army Dreamers

Corina shares my scepticism about leadership frameworks and highlights Servant Leadership as a prime example of what’s wrong with them. They don’t change the power structures, which are the root cause of the problems and the dysfunction (largely because holding power changes people).

She sums it up as follows:

“So if you want to work with power healthily, humility is not enough. Power needs to be held lightly, contextually, and ideally not for long. You hold it, yield it with integrity, and release it back into the system, which only works if the system is actually built to pick it up again. Otherwise “releasing power” is just one more beautiful story.”

In my view, a system that enables power be held like this is one that grants autonomy through self-organising teams, enabling employees to ‘become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous’ (the conditions of Greenleaf’s test).

Which brings us back to how the Army organises. We generally think of the army as being a strict command-and-control organisation with a clear hierarchy and unquestioning obedience in following orders. In Laloux’s model of organisational evolution, one of his metaphors for a Brown (Traditional) organisation is an Army. But that’s not how the British Army is organised in practice.

Superficially, it is a traditional organisation, with levels and ranks and titles and chains of command. They have formal uniforms and identifiers of rank, after all. However, when the army fights it does so with self-organising teams, where the troops on the ground have a high degree of decision making power but within clearly defined constraints.

Essentially (and I am in danger of exposing my deep ignorance here, so I’ll keep it at a high level!), a unit is given an objective, a set of resources they can call upon, and rules of engagement. Take the enemy position on that hill, here’s the artillery and air power you can use, here’s the window of actions you have to operate in (like complying with the Geneva convention, for example). Within that envelope, the unit have control over how they do it.

It’s not a perfect example of autonomous teams, there’s still a clear hierarchy, orders are given by the highest rank and must be followed (this is in an active fighting situation, after all, they’re not deciding on the next marketing campaign for pepperoni-flavoured yoghurts). However, it is radically different to how many corporates operate and to the way most people perceive the Army to work.

It’s another example of how the story we are being told about and by organisations doesn’t align with reality. And why starting with the assumption that it’s all bollocks is actually a sound approach (as long as you then find out why).

Listen To What The Man Said

Servant Leadership makes a lot of sense in the Army environment but that is, by design, an atypical one. The context in which it operates is unlike any corporate environment in deeply significant ways, which means the way it is implemented is not reproducible outside of that.

In fact, I don’t think there is that much we can learn and apply from military services in corporate contexts and as I’ve already ranted about this before (and it was one of my most popular LinkedIn posts) I’ll share it again here.

If I read another ‘Leadership’ book that talks about the Navy Seals, I’m going to throw up.

Or any other elite combat group.

Or a leading sports team.

I get why people write about these. If you’re going to sell your book, it’s got to sound interesting and a bit sexy. These groups have a cachet, name recognition, reputation. All useful things for an author to co-opt.

But they have almost zero relevance to the work experience of most people.

However, they do have a lot in common with each other.

Firstly, they are self-defined elite groups with a high bar to entry, usually some level of individual excellence. Their members are, by definition, exceptional.

Secondly, they have clear and defined goals and an obsessional desire to achieve them at almost any cost.

Thirdly, they are engaged in a life or death struggle. It’s real for the military units, symbolic for the sports teams but psychologically similar.

Fourthly, they are engaged in a finite game. Rules of the game for sports teams, rules of engagement for the military, with clear boundaries and objectives.

Fifthly, they are detached from the everyday existence, the mundane, the parochial. They live in a rarified atmosphere, a bubble of status and privilege.

Does that sound like any work team you’ve been involved with? Or want to be involved with? (And if you answered yes to either of those, you really need to go and have a word with yourself.)

These leadership guys seldom write about the dark side either. The broken relationships, destructive behaviours, unhealthy coping mechanisms, addictions; the abuse, discrimination, and breakdowns. These are the side effects of the personal and collective obsession.

These are unusual people in an abnormal situation behaving in exceptional ways (both positively and negatively).

How relevant are they to the marketing team of a toy manufacturer, the accounts team of a car rental company, or the customer service team of an air conditioning company?

Whilst we are all unique, most of us are not exceptional. We’re not in the top 5%, we’re not extraordinarily gifted.

In fact, by definition, 50% of us are below average.

Work is not our obsession. We want to enjoy other aspects of life like family, hobbies, community. We want a blend.

Whilst we might like to imagine ourselves as Navy Seals or footballers for Liverpool FC, we’re really not willing to make the sacrifices, to narrow our life experience to be like them.

A more useful reference is how they do things at Timpsons or Cook!. Those are places we can aspire to match, places where ‘ordinary’ people do ordinary things, but better than many others. Tell us stories about how they lead, how they create high quality workplaces, how they enrich people’s lives, because that’s relevant.

We’re going to learn a lot more from them than we are from trained killers or overpaid sports stars.

In fact, we’d learn more from looking at Wernham Hogg*.

(*Dunder Mufflin Paper Company, for our N. American readers)

Read All About It

Over on my other substack, Surviving Corporate, I write about the fallout of the crapified workplace, based on my own personal experiences and what I’ve learnt from being in corporate, falling out of corporate and recovering from the damage it did to me.

The motivation for the writing is much the same as for this one, to try and figure out what on earth is going on, how the hell did we get here and what the buggery we do about it. Here the focus is on the organisation, whereas for Surviving Corporate, it’s on the individual experience and actions. The two are intertwined and so I hope these two substacks compliment each other. Go and have a look and find out.

Besides, I accidentally put the Decrapify Work post for two weeks ago on the Surviving Corporate one … so they really are intertwined now! (Don’t worry, I’m not going to waste it - you’ll get it soon!).