Center for Serving Leadership Blog

Robert Greenleaf catalyzed a modern “servant leadership movement” in management philosophy over the last 40 years. His famous quote on the subject was this: “Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

This is the right question to ask. Do the people you lead – do the people you serve – become stronger, gain sharpness, grow in excellence and initiative, and deepen their sense of worth and purpose as a result of your leadership? And just why is this the right question? It’s the right question, simply because the people you serve do all the work. The more awesome they become, the more awesome their work.

When Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, went searching for the secret to company greatness, he told his researchers to not come back and tell him it was leadership. He believed that greatness had to be the result of many people doing great things. There weren’t enough leaders in an enterprise to account for all the great stuff going on. Collins was right that the leaders weren’t doing all the great stuff. However, he discovered that he was wrong in telling his researchers to discount leadership from the equation.

Simply, leaders create the conditions that equip, inspire, support, guide, and encourage people to reach for greatness. Leaders create those conditions, or they create the opposite. Depending on your leadership, people will choose to give their all or they will choose to be utterly miserly in what they do on the job.

A new research study on the impact of servant leadership by the University of Illinois at Chicago backs this up. Published in the Academy of Management Journal, the study revealed that when managers put the needs of their employees over their own – in essence, create a serving leader culture – measurable improvements in job performance and customer satisfaction resulted. In other words, serving leadership is not just a nice thing to do. When leaders authentically serve their employees, the conditions for organizational greatness are created.

When I work with leaders, I teach 15 simple behaviors essential in creating those conditions. These behaviors address leaders’ responsibilities across five strategic facets of their work. Sometimes I’m asked if these 15 behaviors are sequential, or if they have a hierarchy of priority or value. This question is born from a desire to know where to start the work of getting better as a leader.

The truth is that any leader who has some track record and some success is already doing many right things. In other words, you’ve already started. The best thing to do is to (a.) get clear on what “right” looks like, (b.) assess where you’re already strong, and where the low-hanging fruit is to get better, and (c.) work on the next thing that you know you can improve.

That said, let me offer the most elementary behavior that we teach: “Serve Others First.” This is the foundation stone of any business – we serve a customer, or we don’t have a business. It is also the foundation stone of leadership.

Ask yourself this question: “In my leadership, do I want to serve others?” If the answer is “no,” there isn’t much I can do to help, other than to encourage you toward a deep self-examination of what you want out of life. Serving yourself as the chief aim in life cannot lead to good things.

But if the answer is “yes”—that is, you choose to become the kind of leader who will serve others first—I can help in very concrete and practical ways.

Here’s a simple self-assessment that will guide you into an important action plan:

1. Do I know the people I am serving? What do they value? What are their goals? What do they like and dislike about their job? As leaders, we must explore these areas if we are to know our people well enough to serve them!
2. Am I genuinely interested in the success of the people I serve?
3. Am I providing the coaching and the feedback my people need to grow?
4. Am I sharing the information that my people want and need in order to do their job effectively?

If you answered “no” to any of these, try this out: First, make a list of three people you serve—people that you lead. Second, honestly commit yourself to learn as much as possible about them. Third, make a small list of questions you need to ask them. Finally, make a plan—with a deadline—of when you will take them to lunch or for coffee, and really begin to learn what you need to know.

Make it your business to discover what they are seeking, how they are doing, and what they need to succeed. Write it down, put follow-ups in your planner, and take action to serve them in their pursuits. Their progress is your progress.

When I give an executive this assignment, I am frequently told, “This is just common sense.” And, I agree. It is common sense, but unfortunately, it is not common practice.

A bank CEO once sorted through the array of training and coaching offerings I had given him and then selected this exact point of focus – Serve Others First. He set up meetings with his executive assistant, his Chief Operating Officer, and on through his list of direct reports. He discovered he knew close to nothing about what got these people out of bed in the morning. It shamed him, and he took action to correct this leadership gap. Today, that CEO reports that this “common sense” behavior transformed his bank, the lives of many who work for him, and their collective capacity to bring extraordinary service to their customers.

Serving others is the foundation stone of business, and it is the foundation stone of leadership. Who will you serve today?

There’s a famous quote that is just, plain wrong. Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach. We’ve all had the misfortune of bumping into a couple of blowhards who can neither do nor teach. While they’re “teaching,” it’s apparent they don’t know what they’re talking about. But apart from such, the greatest teachers are men and women who live what they teach.

This is especially true about leaders. Let me explain how this works, and why it is imperative that leaders who are good at leading must make a commitment to teach.

Many organizations struggle to identify their “secret” to success. Founders, especially, are unclear about their unique approach that made them successful. They can do the job themselves, but they don’t know how to describe what makes them successful. Great leaders and organizations come to terms with this – they make the effort to identify their success factors and teach them to others.

We Are Responsible to Get Clear on Why We Are Successful

As just stated, founders frequently fail to successfully pass their businesses on to the next generation. As a result, they cannot get the value out of their business that they’ve put into it. This happens because they didn’t prepare their team to know and do what they themselves uniquely knew and did. Likewise, organizations often fail to coach their people to become masterful with “the secret sauce” that made the company successful. Little by little, what was special, unique, and highly valued slips away without anybody’s notice.

We Are Responsible to Teach “The Secret Sauce” To Our Success

“Great leaders are great teachers!” Noel Tichy, the management guru from the University of Michigan, said this. Tichy pioneered the “leader as teacher” research, promoting the principle that all great leaders need clarity on what they are teaching. He called this their “teachable point of view.” And, of course, if you are going to have a “teachable point of view,” you need clarity about your business’s success factors.

People on the front lines can’t perform at the highest level if they do not have a clear understanding and commitment to the success factors. A self-serving leader is afraid to teach the things that produce success, because they’re afraid that their people will end up being able to do the leader’s job. This is tragically ironic since the mark of great leadership is the ability to make others stronger.

We Are Responsible to Remove Waste and Obstacles

Does this sound familiar? You wake up in the morning with the intent to have a “quiet time” before the day hits you broadside. You walk into your study with an aromatic cup of tea or coffee in one hand, and your book of serene meditations in the other. You take your favorite seat and spend the next 20 minutes trying to find a firm surface upon which to set your cup, shuffling down through the layers of memos, bills, half-completed work projects, and mail.

This, in essence, is what “remove obstacles and wasted effort” addresses. Whether the clutter and extra steps are suffered at home or work, they frustrate progress, rob results, and all importantly, discourage people.

One of the best outcomes from (a.) getting clear on why we are successful, and (b.) teaching others how to do these things, is that it frees us to STOP doing things that don’t bring value. We can stop wasting our time on extraneous effort once we know which efforts are the extraneous ones. And we can simplify our day, our desk, our to-do list – removing the waste and the detours – to focus on things that matter most.

Good leaders have figured this out. They become students of their success and accept the fact that they must teach others. Precisely because they CAN, they dedicate themselves to TEACH.

As leaders, this is one of the simplest and most powerful things we can do to serve. Leaders serve by teaching. The result is that people grow, and enterprises flourish.

At the heart of Serving Leadership is a non-negotiable premise: people are your organization’s greatest treasure. This point of view requires a change in leaders accustomed to thinking of people as a tool, function, or cost.

Don’t get me wrong. Employees must be useful. They’re hired to accomplish important work. “What can I do to be more useful to you?” is a fantastic question for a young person to ask a first boss. It is guaranteed to distinguish that new worker from the rest of the pack.

But that’s my advice to workers. My advice for leaders is this: “Help your workers discover what they most love to do, what they’re best at doing, and how they can make their greatest contribution.”

There’s a paradox when it comes to how leaders view employees. When we view our workers primarily as tools to get stuff done, we tend to get less stuff done. But when we view employees as human beings, we have the privilege of investing in and helping to grow, we ironically accomplish more.

Gallup’s Q-12 Survey – 12 questions revealing the level of an employee’s engagement – has proven this. Fully one-third of the questions are about the employee’s experience of being invested in, valued, and grown. Gallup asks:

• Question 3: At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best?
• Question 6: Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
• Question 11: In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
• Question 12: In the last year, have you had opportunities to learn and grow?

When people love what they’re doing, they naturally give it their full energy and passion. Our work as leaders begins with exploring each person’s strengths. There are various tools available to help in this process, but some of the best are free and low-tech. Try talking over coffee. Here are some helpful questions to ask an employee:

• What do you most like about your job?
• What is it about that aspect of your job that makes it so rewarding for you?
• Is anything hindering your ability to do more of what you do best?
• Is there anything I can do to help you grow and develop?

Leading this way does not need to be difficult. Perhaps it’s “common sense,” but it’s definitely not common practice.

Why does leading this way bring better results? The reason is simple. People who know they’re valued and worth investing in are your company’s greatest assets. When valued, and given the opportunity to work from their strengths, employees become more fully engaged. The higher their engagement, the greater the organization’s productivity and profitability. This is what the Gallup study, along with numerous others, have confirmed over the past several years.

There are “Thank God it’s Friday” people and “Thank God it’s Monday” people. When we think of our people as tools, we get more TGIF people. When we think of our people as a treasure, looking for ways to invest in their growth and development, we get more TGIM people.

I don’t need to ask which kind of person we want on our team. The only question that needs to be asked is, “Are we ready to really help our people grow?” They’re looking for our investment, and they have much more to give in return.

Stanford professor of organizational behavior, Robert Sutton, says, “The gap between knowing and doing is larger than the gap between ignorance and knowledge.” I can’t verify Sutton’s observation empirically, but experience seems to bear this out. 

We are prone to cram our minds full of new things to know yet fail to put into practice those few important things we need to do.

Let’s call this problem of knowing but not doing the “application gap.” Every one of us experiences this challenge, especially in our information-driven work world. While it’s true that there’s an ongoing need to learn and know more – you’ve heard the lament, “if I had only known!” – implementing what is already clear is our greater need.

Let me share three quick insights I’ve learned from others that have helped me close the application gap:

1. “Succeed in a few.” This quote comes from one of my close mentors, Bruce Bickel. He said this to me in the summer of 1993 in the very first meeting I ever had with him. I was 34 years old (how’s your math?), and launching the very first of my enterprises, the Pittsburgh Urban Leadership Service Experience (PULSE, now at http://pulsepittsburgh.org). What’s the point? If you have dozens of must-do’s or could-do’s staring at your day, your week, your month, your quarter, your year, it matters that you know which ones to implement with determination. Everything doesn’t matter equally. A few things matter a great deal. Chasing every opportunity assures a major application gap. I’m reminding myself of this as I see opportunities multiplying, and because I’m seeking focus on those few things I must successfully accomplish.

1. “Little is big.” A few years ago, I had the privilege of teaching principles of Serving Leadership to doctoral students in Hong Kong. Over the course of the class, I gave the students the assignment to put into practice the lessons they learned. One student, a president of a large, national Chinese bank, focused his work on two principles: “Serve Others First,” and “Build on Strength.” I was deeply moved as I read through his project. Though his duties were crushingly large, he worked with great care and intentionality on improving his supervisory relationships with three of his inner staff. The impact on them and his bank was both big and beautiful.

1. “Mind the gap.” Dan Sullivan (www.strategiccoach.com) taught thousands of us that we need encouragement in our goal achievement work. If we continuously stare at the gap between where we are and where we think we should be, we live in debilitating discouragement. Instead, he taught us to observe and appreciate how far you’ve come! You aren’t where you want to be, but you aren’t where you were, either. The great insight by Dan is this: the destination we seek will recede into the horizon as we approach it. In one sense, the purpose of a destination is to pull us forward by always moving ahead of us. As we make progress, our destination asks us to regroup and to stretch further. Life, all evidence seems to suggest, is not so much interested in our arriving as it is in our movement forward in the journey. So, celebrate the progress. Be thankful for how far you’ve come. Recognize, and appreciate the growth.

We need all three of these insights as we “mind the gap.” I can do some things but not all things. I need the encouragement to stay focused. Little things are big; closing the gap on the small things is often the most solid way we have to make progress. And progress is actually being made! We’re not where we will be tomorrow, true enough, but we’re also not where we were yesterday.

How do you handle the application gap in your life? Do you know where it’s most important for you to apply yourself? And do you give enough credit to the small things that you can do? And how about your progress? Do you see how far you’ve come? Celebrate that! Give thanks and be strengthened for the next leg on your journey!

A common myth about leadership is that a leader is responsible to “establish a compelling vision.” This is just not true. Many leaders step into an organization that already has a great vision, and they should not try to prove that they are a leader by cooking up some new vision.

Raise High the Vision

It is the leader’s job to make sure everyone understands why the business exists. Leaders aren’t required to come up with a great vision, but they are required to serve a great vision. Leaders who do not raise high a great purpose are throttling the contributions of the people who work for them. Human beings desire purpose. An organization’s vision must provide a compelling and noble reason for employees to care.

Leaders must raise vision high enough for everyone to have a direct sight line to it. Obviously, this demands that leaders communicate what the vision is—which we call Great Purpose. However, people respond to leaders’ actions more than to their words. Leaders must demonstrate the Great Purpose. This work not only includes communicating the vision to new employees, but also daily actions needed to reinforce the importance of the vision.

Great organizations are successful at getting their people to own the vision. As this happens, employees become more engaged and committed to doing their part to serve the Great Purpose.

Create and Sustain Urgency for the Vision

Too often, a vision statement is just words hung on a plaque in the lobby. To be effective, a Great Purpose must create and sustain urgency. Everyday frustrations demotivate people who don’t understand the value of the work they do. However, those who see the urgency of their work apply creativity and collaboration to overcome problems and to improve continuously.

How does a serving leader introduce a good kind of urgency into everyday work? Not by injecting fear and panic! Many supervisors use carrots and sticks to drive performance. Fear produces a short-lived and frightened commotion; fear does not produce a sustained and fearless concentration. Urgency, in service of greatness, comes from a completely different source.

First, serving leaders use important goals and milestones to help people see the progress being made toward the Great Purpose. The more people can personally track their progress on a daily basis, the better focus they have on the ultimate purpose being served for their customers.

Second, serving leaders focus on the positive. They look to catch people doing the right thing and promptly recognize and reward that behavior. And here’s a key: the best reward for a worker is the chance to see, first-hand, how the daily work serves the customer. Assembling a widget in the factory transforms into saving lives and serving people when the end user’s story gets back to the people who did the work.

Third, serving leaders understand the source of true and sustained urgency. Whether your people realize it or not, human beings desire to express purpose for their lives in the service of others. A powerful way to create sustained urgency into everyday work is to provide a compelling and emotional reason to care, a direct connection between the daily work and a heart of service.

Connect the Vision to Each Person’s Job

Work often feels meaningless, but this needn’t be the case. All work matters, whether that work is accomplished in boardrooms or boiler rooms. Many people come home every day from fast food restaurants and cleaning jobs feeling that their day counted. Conversely, many people come home each day from corporate offices and community service agencies feeling their day was a waste. And, of course, we all know that these last two sentences are equally true in the reverse.

A graduate student of mine once protested, “The minimum wage workers I hire to serve roast beef sandwiches are stuck in a menial industry. All I have are carrots and sticks!”

In other words, no full human engagement could be expected from these young men and women! If she wanted performance, it was going to be what I call “beatings and baubles” all the way to quittin’ time.

However, the industry-leading worker engagement scores received by Chick-fil-A refute my student’s protest. Serving a quick chicken sandwich shouldn’t be intrinsically more meaningful than serving a quick roast beef sandwich! And yet, the highly motivated young workers who tell their customers, “It’s my pleasure,” and appear to mean it, make a convincing case that work can be steered toward drudgery or delight.

There is no task, however seemingly noble, that cannot be rendered menial by stripping it of purpose. Conversely, there is no chore, however ordinary, that cannot be rendered meaningful by showing why it is crucial for the accomplishment of a Great Purpose. In either case – work that is experienced as menial versus work that is embraced as meaningful – leadership is responsible.

In The Serving Leader, Admiral Rock Butler tells Mike Wilson, “You were born to make a difference!” We must believe this about each person who works with us. If we believe that each person is born for purpose, it is our privilege to connect jobs with the organization’s Great Purpose helping our people to see what they do really makes a difference. No matter how “small” the job, work becomes meaningful when we understand how our part contributes to a great and worthy cause. Leadership is responsible to connect the dots.

Closing the Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Stanford professor of organizational behavior, Robert Sutton, says, “The gap between knowing and doing is larger than the gap between ignorance and knowledge.” I can’t verify Sutton’s observation empirically, but experience seems to bear this out. 

We are prone to cram our minds full of new things to know yet fail to put into practice those few important things we need to do.

Let’s call this problem of knowing but not doing the “application gap.” Every one of us experiences this challenge, especially in our information-driven work world. While it’s true that there’s an ongoing need to learn and know more – you’ve heard the lament, “if I had only known!” – implementing what is already clear is our greater need.

Let me share three quick insights I’ve learned from others that have helped me close the application gap:

1. “Succeed in a few.” This quote comes from one of my close mentors, Bruce Bickel. He said this to me in the summer of 1993 in the very first meeting I ever had with him. I was 34 years old (how’s your math?), and launching the very first of my enterprises, the Pittsburgh Urban Leadership Service Experience (PULSE, now at http://pulsepittsburgh.org). What’s the point? If you have dozens of must-do’s or could-do’s staring at your day, your week, your month, your quarter, your year, it matters that you know which ones to implement with determination. Everything doesn’t matter equally. A few things matter a great deal. Chasing every opportunity assures a major application gap. I’m reminding myself of this as I see opportunities multiplying, and because I’m seeking focus on those few things I must successfully accomplish.

1. “Little is big.” A few years ago, I had the privilege of teaching principles of Serving Leadership to doctoral students in Hong Kong. Over the course of the class, I gave the students the assignment to put into practice the lessons they learned. One student, a president of a large, national Chinese bank, focused his work on two principles: “Serve Others First,” and “Build on Strength.” I was deeply moved as I read through his project. Though his duties were crushingly large, he worked with great care and intentionality on improving his supervisory relationships with three of his inner staff. The impact on them and his bank was both big and beautiful.

1. “Mind the gap.” Dan Sullivan (www.strategiccoach.com) taught thousands of us that we need encouragement in our goal achievement work. If we continuously stare at the gap between where we are and where we think we should be, we live in debilitating discouragement. Instead, he taught us to observe and appreciate how far you’ve come! You aren’t where you want to be, but you aren’t where you were, either. The great insight by Dan is this: the destination we seek will recede into the horizon as we approach it. In one sense, the purpose of a destination is to pull us forward by always moving ahead of us. As we make progress, our destination asks us to regroup and to stretch further. Life, all evidence seems to suggest, is not so much interested in our arriving as it is in our movement forward in the journey. So, celebrate the progress. Be thankful for how far you’ve come. Recognize, and appreciate the growth.

We need all three of these insights as we “mind the gap.” I can do some things but not all things. I need the encouragement to stay focused. Little things are big; closing the gap on the small things is often the most solid way we have to make progress. And progress is actually being made! We’re not where we will be tomorrow, true enough, but we’re also not where we were yesterday.

How do you handle the application gap in your life? Do you know where it’s most important for you to apply yourself? And do you give enough credit to the small things that you can do? And how about your progress? Do you see how far you’ve come? Celebrate that! Give thanks and be strengthened for the next leg on your journey!

Early-20th-century philosopher and poet, George Santayana, said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” With that in mind, here’s a quick look back at seven world-changing events from 2016 and leadership lessons we can learn from them.

Lesson #1: Don’t Lose Touch with the Needs of Those You’re Leading (Brexit)

On June 23, 2016, surprising the pundits and ruling class, British citizens voted on a referendum to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. Lessons:

1. Leaders can lose the pulse of the people. A commitment to truly serve those we lead presses us to stay close in touch with them, but it’s important to be intentional about this.
2. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. There’s always a group that yells the loudest, but we must not believe that volume equals majority. We must look past the noise to hear what people are really saying, experiencing, and feeling.

Lesson #2: Don’t Allow Gaps in Your Leadership (Syria and Aleppo)

When Russian President Putin gained nearly unfettered access to Syria, he joined Syrian President Assad in crushing resistance fighters and mercilessly decimating territories under contention, Aleppo being but one of those battleground sites. Lessons:

1. When we create a vacuum by the withdrawing our leadership, the vacuum we create will be filled. Stepping back so others can step forward is not, in and of itself, a virtuous act.
2. Brute force, in pursuit of any aim, produces outcomes that are brute.

Lesson #3: Success Requires Focus on the Fundamentals (Rio Olympics 2016)

In spite of the Zika virus, 206 nations and over 11,000 athletes gathered in Rio de Janeiro to compete in the 31st Olympiad. Lessons:

1. The brief film clips of glorious performances by world-class athletes gloss over the thousands and tens of thousands of hours of inglorious work that led to those few shining moments.
2. Triumph requires staying relentlessly focused on the fundamentals, rather than on watching the scorecard. It’s the process and the discipline that counts.

Lesson #4: Never Give Up Hope (Cubs, Cavs and Other Unlikely Sports Victories)

Chicago Cubs fans put 108 years of World Series failure behind them. The Cleveland Cavaliers ended a citywide 52-year championship drought. Across the pond, Leicester City won its first soccer championship in 132 years. Closer to home, Villanova ended a 31-year NCAA title dry spell and Army, after 14 years of defeat by Navy, recovered its dignity. Lessons:

1. While the best predictor of future behavior is prior results, this is not determinative. A long track record can be broken, and any year can be a year of new beginnings.
2. Actions are a powerful way to establish new thoughts and beliefs. More than a century of believing in the “curse” came to an end when the Chicago Cubs won.

Lesson #5: Be True to Your Design (Presidential Election)

The election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States has left many in disbelief, shock, and anger. Others celebrate it as a welcome, hopeful change. In years to come, this election will be mined for leadership lessons, but here are a few for starters:

1. Donald Trump didn’t pretend to be what he wasn’t. The people you lead want to know you for who you are, and that you’re comfortable with being you. Authenticity trumps many other qualities; bigly.
2. Persistence in the face of overwhelming odds can change the odds. Many pursuits have been lost because the contender, seeing that a win was impossible, quit. Triumph is seldom the companion of quitters.

Lesson #6: Own Up to Your Mistakes When You Fall (Hillary Clinton’s Illness and Public Fall)

When Hillary Clinton suffered a health crisis on 9/11 and fell forward as she was being assisted into her vehicle, it became major news. Lessons:

1. Every leader falls (and fails). When that happens, we must quickly acknowledge it and candidly address how we will avoid an encore performance.
2. Nobody expects leaders to be perfect, but our fall/failure is compounded when we try to cover it up or pretend that it didn’t really happen.

Lesson #7: Do The Right Thing No Matter the Cost (Flint Water Crisis)

On January 16, 2016, President Obama declared a state of emergency in Flint, Michigan after findings revealed the city’s drinking water was contaminated with unsafe levels of lead. It was eventually discovered that city officials, in an attempt to cut cost and make up for ongoing financial downturn, used a corrosive water source that caused lead and other heavy metals to leach out of aging pipes into drinking water. Lessons:

1. Leaders do the right thing no matter what the cost, especially when the welfare of human lives is on the line.
2. Leaders get the facts, do the research, and don’t cut corners.

Bonus Lesson: No Matter the Longevity of Your Leadership, It Will End (The Death of Fidel Castro)

After 40 years of dictatorial rule over the Republic of Cuba, Fidel Castro perished. Lessons:

1. Everybody’s time in leadership ends. The question we must ask is never, “can I stay in charge,” but must always be, “will I leave things better when my time is done?”
2. The purpose of leadership is to prepare the future to be stronger and healthier and more vital than the past. No legacy is meritorious when this is not accomplished.

What lessons will we learn in 2017? We will have to wait and see. One thing we know about the year ahead. We will – each one of us – have countless opportunities to learn, to repent and apologize, and to get better. Here’s wishing you a wonderful year of growth and contribution!