(available on LinkedIn)

I’ve been reflecting on servant leadership a lot recently. It started in August, when I saw Lauren Woods‘s inspiring talk at ETLS Las Vegas about her leadership at Southwest Airlines.

(Gene Kim and I swap notes on IT Revolution and Agile On The Beach speaker management, and we agree an event has to open with a great keynote. Lauren did just that)

Southwest is big on servant leadership. Its founder Herb Kelleher once said “I’d rather have a company bound by love than a company bound by fear”. And as president, Colleen Barratt shaped customer strategy and employee culture in terms of corporate values and service. It’s a big part of their enduring success.

That commitment to servant leadership resonates with me at Equal Experts, where our network and business are grounded in treating everyone equally regardless of their role. My role as Global SVP Technology at Scale is to enable our customers and engagement teams to succeed. I can’t succeed on my own.

It’s hard to explain servant leadership. I used to describe it just by saying I’m opposed to saviour leadership. That’s where a well-intentioned hero tries to solve team/organisation problems themselves. Over time, they’re over-involved and burn out, while the team/organization is over-reliant and growth opportunities are missed for others. It’s short-term gain and long-term pain.

On a recent flight to the USA, I re-read The Secrets of Consulting by Jerry Weinberg. It’s a great read, and I’d forgotten that Jerry outlined a servant leadership model of MOIJ – motivation, organization, information, and jiggling. I realised that’s a close approximation of how I approach servant leadership:

  • Motivation. Encouraging people, acknowledging them, giving them feedback, and having empathy for their situation
  • Organization. Creating or modifying structures and resources so it’s easier for people to do their work
  • Information. Sharing facts, ideas, theories, so people have more knowledge and different perspectives to act upon
  • Jiggling. Offering new ideas to people, to shake them out of a rut when they’re stuck

Although as the son of a trade unionist and a pharmacist, maybe servant leadership wasn’t really a choice for me 🙂