From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs.
They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery.
Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
It was clear the author never actually performed servant leadership. If they did, they would be writing a different article about how much work they did to support their team instead of “how much lack of work can I get away with”. They sounded like an absent manager.
That entire paragraph is a string of poorly-articultated, cringeworthy sentences. In fact the whole article seems to be a series of strawmen set up on the basis of oddly specific and naive interpretations of management concepts like "servant leadership". There's basically nothing in here that I would agree with as a blanket statement without a lot of company and org-specific provisos.
All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, which is a common failure mode for newly converted IC to junior manager. Where he goes off the rails in the most tone-deaf way is describing that as "not doing useful work". As a manager your work is constantly observing what people are doing, staying the hell out of the way when things are working, and leaning in when things are not going well from a team and outcomes perspective. Doing that well is incredibly challenging and important work.
Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.'
I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.
>Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.
I often describe myself as a bulldozer for my team. My job is to lay out clear expectations, do my best to steady the course free of external chaos, and bulldoze a clear path for the team to get stuff done.
My first manager at Amazon was like that. Loved him to pieces.
He didn't micro-manage, he didn't even fully care about the scrum. Just said "I can see the ticket status myself. If you are blocked by something, need any info or resource, I'll hunt it down for you, otherwise you keep cooking".
Agree and follow this principle to certain degree, however there are caveats here - something being a blocker shouldn't prevent you from trying to resolve the blockers by yourself or work with your boss to resolve them ie - "hey boss, I'm blocked with task A with refactor of this code; are you happy for me to do XYZ?". Then I have options to say: "yes! excellent! go ahead!" or "no, we need to do ASD here" or "no, we cannot do XYZ right now". If every time people encountering blockers would come to me to resolve them, or wait until they're resolved I'd not get anything done. On the flipside, if every time a blocker is encountered people were to handle it themselves, then a) it might not align with my vision on what actually needs to be done here b) I'm blindsighted with what was actually done.
Clear boundaries and strategies eliminate these caveats = team members are aligned on what they can make decision for and general direction the team is heading towards.
Yeah like I said if we are straying in to over-reliance/not really doing our job, he clearly lays out what to do and says "there go take care of it" a few times. He does a good job of not fostering a culture of constantly playing CYA
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.
Man was I wrong.
The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.
There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
Author gives own take on what they thinks servant leadership means, then invents a supposedly different kind of leadership that is just servant leadership, taken into a different context than the original church one, then gives it a new name, one that doesn't really tie into their definition.
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too.
I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
There is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, but without that contrast in mind, you can easily lose track of what the terms mean. The article does a decent job of trying to find a healthier middle ground, IMO.
The problem is when things evolve we no longer know if someone refers to the evolved form or the original. Or more importantly if the evolved form retains the important parts of the original.
Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long you’re aware you you’re serving and who you’re working peer to peer with/against/whatever.
Another term for it somewhat is being a “players coach.”
End state is you will build loyal as heck teams with it, and if you want to take a very cynical business mindset, it produces with the least pain and suffering three very impotent outcomes - your team will produce output, they won’t hate you along the way, and your team will write you (well earned) manager perf reviews. A manager who has a loyal as heck team up and down the stack builds unique odds of corporate survival.
All these trendy management things either go back to straight-up bullshit (this is the more common case) or some non-bullshit thing that's been ripped out of its original context such that it becomes bullshit.
I did everything he mentions in "Transparent Leadership," but also the stuff he talks about in "Curling Parenting."
I did it for 25 years. Seemed to work. I kept my job.
In my company, Personal Integrity and Honesty were very important. Not sure how representative that is, in today's world. It was an old-fashioned Japanese corporation.
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development.
Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.
This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
"Servant leadership" is not a buzzword but it's been misused and abused by Big Corporations to the point that it basically lost its meaning [1].
For me - personally - the idea is about being less of a boss and more of a nightwatchman or janitor.
I believe in agency and ownership and - in sane environment - people can be left alone with clear objectives. It's more about removing obstacles.
I'll give you a simple example.
Once a week a maid comes to our apartment. Despite a clear power balance disproportion (it's easier to find a new maid than a senior engineer) and her being used to being transparent and prioritizing to not disturb tenants for me it's the other way around. I'm super happy to hastily finish a call or leave my room is she feels the need to disturb me, and if she needs an extra pair of hands I'm happy to help her with anything. After all, I'm more interested with the final result than feeling important.
We have a bucket list of tasks than has to be performed that slightly exceeds her capacity and she has a full right to prioritize things. It took my a while but I eventually convinced her that it's ok to skip things - like cleaning the windows - if she's feeling under the weather or it's cold outside rather than faking it.
Most of the pointy hairs I worked in corporate environments would probably prepare a list of requirements and walked through the apartment with a checklist every time she would finish giving her a full, harsh performance review.
But that doesn't build trust and long term relationship.
And after some time she developed - what people around here call ownership - and sometimes I feel she cares about the household more than I do.
I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.
I was never taught that servant leadership should be some weird "manager as parent" relationship.
Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.
IMO: I think there is a helpful distinction to be made between leadership and management. Leadership provides purpose and inspiration. Management provides, coordination and motivation. I’m not saying one person can’t do both.
I do agree that most management books read like parenting books - but I’d add that whats more important than the method is consistency in whatever approach you believe in. I’m not sure that managers/leaders will ever do that well relying on a book or a special ‘way’ they have read. They really need to have worked this out for themselves.
"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.
Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic boss's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and deciders rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.
If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. Basically they are a customer, but also on the payroll.
That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings some value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.
When I say something like this it usually means “I don’t want to dictate your job to you. You’re here because you’re smart, ambitious, and capable. We’ve talked at length in team settings and 1:1 about our goals. What do you think are the problems that need attention, and what solutions do you propose?”
The anti-pattern I’ve seen from some folks is that they never want to propose solutions because then it’s someone else’s fault if those fail. These folks often demonstrate minimal ownership of any decisions, so they don’t feel bad complaining about all the problems they see. Not only is that unhelpful, it can actually be very toxic for the team. (As you mentioned.)
So when I’m saying “bring solutions” what I’m really asking for is some shared ownership of the choices and consequences—I’m asking folks to act like the main character in the story. And don’t worry, I own the consequences of the mistakes in my team to my leadership—this isn’t about throwing them under the bus. (Getting this to work well requires a lot of trust both ways.)
But see, Claude can do nothing even better than it can choose between options. So why should that boss keep his job again?
"Bring me solutions, not problems" can mean "You are a competent, knowledgeable employee, who has identified a problem. You know enough to look at the alternatives and decide which is best, or at least which ones are workable. Bring me that, not just the problem."
And if it does mean that, it's empowering. You with your hands on the situation, you get to tell the boss what you think the best answer is, and the boss backstops you from deciding something that won't work in the bigger picture.
This article is a great example of the Strawman Fallacy. I suppose it's a method to generate traffic but I would argue a key aspect of servant leadership is being transparent that you are in a role that should collectively support and lead to enable and expand the team.
I feel attributing any sort of parental concepts belittles the meaning here.
Coming from the Sales world sometimes I don't want to be taught to fish.
I'm coming to my VP for help because I already tried diff baits, went to diff ponds, and tried diff reels.
I'm coming for a fish finder not a lecture on maybe my casting was off
Can’t wait for AI Slack plugins to replace all low tier middle managers. You can achieve so much transparency since the data is already out there anyway.
There has to be a better way to organize how ICs communicate. More productivity to unlock.
I think this has somewhat strawmanned “servant leadership,” which is more about humility in posture than purely intercepting annoyances and blockers, but nevertheless the conclusions are solid.
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is. I identify as such, but I also do just about all of the "Transparent Leadership" things called out in the article. I may have to re-evaluate my orientation.
There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.
Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:
Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.
You see, this only works in orgs that don't suck. It breaks down the moment employees must be manipulated in some way to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the employees. Unfortunately a regular occurrence even in countries that have employee protection laws.
From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs.
They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery.
Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
It was clear the author never actually performed servant leadership. If they did, they would be writing a different article about how much work they did to support their team instead of “how much lack of work can I get away with”. They sounded like an absent manager.
If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control.
Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.
That entire paragraph is a string of poorly-articultated, cringeworthy sentences. In fact the whole article seems to be a series of strawmen set up on the basis of oddly specific and naive interpretations of management concepts like "servant leadership". There's basically nothing in here that I would agree with as a blanket statement without a lot of company and org-specific provisos.
All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, which is a common failure mode for newly converted IC to junior manager. Where he goes off the rails in the most tone-deaf way is describing that as "not doing useful work". As a manager your work is constantly observing what people are doing, staying the hell out of the way when things are working, and leaning in when things are not going well from a team and outcomes perspective. Doing that well is incredibly challenging and important work.
> All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager,
That's not being charitable, that's just having basic interpretation skills of the very next sentence of the article.
> it starts with a straw man argument ...
Perhaps they have, but there are also no shortage of middle managers that are adequately described by it. I worked for one for a few years.
Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.'
I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.
>Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.
I often describe myself as a bulldozer for my team. My job is to lay out clear expectations, do my best to steady the course free of external chaos, and bulldoze a clear path for the team to get stuff done.
My first manager at Amazon was like that. Loved him to pieces. He didn't micro-manage, he didn't even fully care about the scrum. Just said "I can see the ticket status myself. If you are blocked by something, need any info or resource, I'll hunt it down for you, otherwise you keep cooking".
Agree and follow this principle to certain degree, however there are caveats here - something being a blocker shouldn't prevent you from trying to resolve the blockers by yourself or work with your boss to resolve them ie - "hey boss, I'm blocked with task A with refactor of this code; are you happy for me to do XYZ?". Then I have options to say: "yes! excellent! go ahead!" or "no, we need to do ASD here" or "no, we cannot do XYZ right now". If every time people encountering blockers would come to me to resolve them, or wait until they're resolved I'd not get anything done. On the flipside, if every time a blocker is encountered people were to handle it themselves, then a) it might not align with my vision on what actually needs to be done here b) I'm blindsighted with what was actually done.
Clear boundaries and strategies eliminate these caveats = team members are aligned on what they can make decision for and general direction the team is heading towards.
Yeah like I said if we are straying in to over-reliance/not really doing our job, he clearly lays out what to do and says "there go take care of it" a few times. He does a good job of not fostering a culture of constantly playing CYA
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
You CAN tell the team it's raining and details of the weather without letting them get overly wet.
There's middle ground here.
Shit umbrella is not a great analogy. More like a shit filter. Let through what needs to be let through and block all the distracting crap.
Just wanted to provide a useful link on the topic of leadership. The US army publishes its doctrine for free and updates it somewhat regularly:
https://talent.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ARN20039_...
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.
Man was I wrong.
The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.
There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
Author gives own take on what they thinks servant leadership means, then invents a supposedly different kind of leadership that is just servant leadership, taken into a different context than the original church one, then gives it a new name, one that doesn't really tie into their definition.
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too.
I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
There is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, but without that contrast in mind, you can easily lose track of what the terms mean. The article does a decent job of trying to find a healthier middle ground, IMO.
The problem is when things evolve we no longer know if someone refers to the evolved form or the original. Or more importantly if the evolved form retains the important parts of the original.
Exactly. And like evolution, what of the millions of species it evolved to are referring to.
IMHO either stick with the original, or say “like X with following changes/details” or just go with a new thing.
Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long you’re aware you you’re serving and who you’re working peer to peer with/against/whatever.
Another term for it somewhat is being a “players coach.”
End state is you will build loyal as heck teams with it, and if you want to take a very cynical business mindset, it produces with the least pain and suffering three very impotent outcomes - your team will produce output, they won’t hate you along the way, and your team will write you (well earned) manager perf reviews. A manager who has a loyal as heck team up and down the stack builds unique odds of corporate survival.
All it takes is a little EQ.
All these trendy management things either go back to straight-up bullshit (this is the more common case) or some non-bullshit thing that's been ripped out of its original context such that it becomes bullshit.
That's interesting.
I did everything he mentions in "Transparent Leadership," but also the stuff he talks about in "Curling Parenting."
I did it for 25 years. Seemed to work. I kept my job.
In my company, Personal Integrity and Honesty were very important. Not sure how representative that is, in today's world. It was an old-fashioned Japanese corporation.
If the dishonesty worked, you never know it happened!
So you can never tell how much of it there really is…
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development.
Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.
This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
"Servant leadership" is not a buzzword but it's been misused and abused by Big Corporations to the point that it basically lost its meaning [1].
For me - personally - the idea is about being less of a boss and more of a nightwatchman or janitor.
I believe in agency and ownership and - in sane environment - people can be left alone with clear objectives. It's more about removing obstacles.
I'll give you a simple example.
Once a week a maid comes to our apartment. Despite a clear power balance disproportion (it's easier to find a new maid than a senior engineer) and her being used to being transparent and prioritizing to not disturb tenants for me it's the other way around. I'm super happy to hastily finish a call or leave my room is she feels the need to disturb me, and if she needs an extra pair of hands I'm happy to help her with anything. After all, I'm more interested with the final result than feeling important.
We have a bucket list of tasks than has to be performed that slightly exceeds her capacity and she has a full right to prioritize things. It took my a while but I eventually convinced her that it's ok to skip things - like cleaning the windows - if she's feeling under the weather or it's cold outside rather than faking it.
Most of the pointy hairs I worked in corporate environments would probably prepare a list of requirements and walked through the apartment with a checklist every time she would finish giving her a full, harsh performance review.
But that doesn't build trust and long term relationship.
And after some time she developed - what people around here call ownership - and sometimes I feel she cares about the household more than I do.
Hope that makes sense.
I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.
I was never taught that servant leadership should be some weird "manager as parent" relationship.
Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.
Yes indeed. Thank you.
IMO: I think there is a helpful distinction to be made between leadership and management. Leadership provides purpose and inspiration. Management provides, coordination and motivation. I’m not saying one person can’t do both.
I do agree that most management books read like parenting books - but I’d add that whats more important than the method is consistency in whatever approach you believe in. I’m not sure that managers/leaders will ever do that well relying on a book or a special ‘way’ they have read. They really need to have worked this out for themselves.
We should stop normalizing referring to managers or employers as leaders. These are different things.
With "servant leadership" in its current form being attributed to Greenleaf, here is the "source of truth" on servant leadership: https://greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/
"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.
Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic boss's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and deciders rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.
> “bring me solutions, not problems"
If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. Basically they are a customer, but also on the payroll.
That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings some value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.
When I say something like this it usually means “I don’t want to dictate your job to you. You’re here because you’re smart, ambitious, and capable. We’ve talked at length in team settings and 1:1 about our goals. What do you think are the problems that need attention, and what solutions do you propose?”
The anti-pattern I’ve seen from some folks is that they never want to propose solutions because then it’s someone else’s fault if those fail. These folks often demonstrate minimal ownership of any decisions, so they don’t feel bad complaining about all the problems they see. Not only is that unhelpful, it can actually be very toxic for the team. (As you mentioned.)
So when I’m saying “bring solutions” what I’m really asking for is some shared ownership of the choices and consequences—I’m asking folks to act like the main character in the story. And don’t worry, I own the consequences of the mistakes in my team to my leadership—this isn’t about throwing them under the bus. (Getting this to work well requires a lot of trust both ways.)
Sometimes bosses will repeat your idea to sound like he solutioned it for you, without taking e.g. workload or priority into account.
I haven't met a boss that wasn't incompetent. Not saying they don't exist, though.
But see, Claude can do nothing even better than it can choose between options. So why should that boss keep his job again?
"Bring me solutions, not problems" can mean "You are a competent, knowledgeable employee, who has identified a problem. You know enough to look at the alternatives and decide which is best, or at least which ones are workable. Bring me that, not just the problem."
And if it does mean that, it's empowering. You with your hands on the situation, you get to tell the boss what you think the best answer is, and the boss backstops you from deciding something that won't work in the bigger picture.
This article is a great example of the Strawman Fallacy. I suppose it's a method to generate traffic but I would argue a key aspect of servant leadership is being transparent that you are in a role that should collectively support and lead to enable and expand the team.
I feel attributing any sort of parental concepts belittles the meaning here.
Excellent analysis. It’s like: servant of whom (themselves)?
Coming from the Sales world sometimes I don't want to be taught to fish.
I'm coming to my VP for help because I already tried diff baits, went to diff ponds, and tried diff reels. I'm coming for a fish finder not a lecture on maybe my casting was off
> Teach a man to to fish
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish… and you feed yourself. He’s a grown man. And fishing’s not that hard.”
Can’t wait for AI Slack plugins to replace all low tier middle managers. You can achieve so much transparency since the data is already out there anyway.
There has to be a better way to organize how ICs communicate. More productivity to unlock.
That's not going to fix the social problems. What happens when your team needs something from another team?
I think this has somewhat strawmanned “servant leadership,” which is more about humility in posture than purely intercepting annoyances and blockers, but nevertheless the conclusions are solid.
Some good points to think about. But also note that sometimes you can shield and assist a team on things you can't be transparent about with the team.
So a hybrid of the two schools of thought might be better than either one (depending on the larger org).
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is. I identify as such, but I also do just about all of the "Transparent Leadership" things called out in the article. I may have to re-evaluate my orientation.
There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.
Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:
https://www.intellicoach.com/ep14/
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is.
You did not. Or, at least we share an understanding of what the term means which differs substantially from the author's.
Love this, thank you for sharing.
They just described servant leadership and called it something else. It's not about parenting or treating people like children.
Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.
this is so silly. porque no los dos?
You see, this only works in orgs that don't suck. It breaks down the moment employees must be manipulated in some way to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the employees. Unfortunately a regular occurrence even in countries that have employee protection laws.