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“Servant-leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you, you work for them.” – Ken Blanchard

Have you heard this leadership quote from Ken Blanchard?

Ken is a well known author and coach in the leadership field, having authored over 60 books including the 13 million best seller – “The One Minute Manager”.  Most recently Ken’s thoughts have turned to servant leadership, where the leader serves the team.  This really contradicts most modern managers and thinking, where people believe the team should serve the manager.

In fact, both are true – read on to the end to find out why.

The Rise of Servant Leadership

With the advent of Agile and Agile project management and leadership methodologies, we have seen a greater focus on Servant Leadership.

In an Agile environment, Servant Leaders have a few roles.

Servant Leaders Facilitate

Rarely do Servant Leaders dictate to the team.  Instead they facilitate discussion and encourage participation.  What does this look like?  It looks like a leader sitting down and collaboratively deciding outcomes or goals with the team.  It looks like a leader checking in every day to see how things are going.  It looks like a leader sitting with the team and asking “What’s working well, what’s not working well?” and then putting that feedback back into the process.

Servant Leaders Remove Blockers

In her groundbreaking research on employee motivation and engagement, Teresa Amabile found that employees were at their happiest when they were making progress.  And it makes sense, doesn’t it?  Now think about your own job.  How many times have you been blocked and stalled for reasons beyond your control?  You might be waiting on another person or department, on a customer or a payment or in many cases on a manager themselves.

Servant leaders check in with their team every day, ask what is blocking them from achieving their collaboratively set objectives, and help them put the pieces in place to remove those blockers.  Maybe it is connecting them with another person, maybe it it having a conversation with a higher level of manager within the organisation, maybe it is improving the process itself, maybe it is raising an issue to be fixed with another relevant team.  Either way, servant leaders help their team make progress, and that progress makes people happy.

Servant Leaders Are Coaches, not Bosses

Lastly, servant leaders coach their team.  They don’t boss people around, they don’t give orders.  As a coach, they don’t need to.  But what is the function of a coach?  Let’s think about it.  A good coach will give you a playbook – they will give you the moves on the field of play and   A good coach will give you feedback on your process – not on you as a person, they will not judge – but they will tell you when you’re running the wrong way or if your stride needs adjusting or your pass is on target.  They will help you adjust your process so you can continually get better at the game you are playing.

And that leads to Mastery

Lastly, you might be wondering, what is the point of all this?  Improving your game, removing blockers, constant practice and improvement – all of these things lead to one of our core driving forces called Mastery of a task.  You see – people will go to great lengths to master something they love, are passionate about or are good at, even when they are not being paid.  So money has nothing to do with it – they are being motivated by the process of mastery itself.

That’s why people play video games, do woodwork or stitchwork, play sports.  It’s also why they take pride in being “that person” who knows how to use the database, or the system, or the sales method.  They have spent many hours mastering it and can take pride in their work.  And that pride leads to engagement, and that engagement leads to profit.

– David McLachlan

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