Excellence in Leadership: The Leader as Servant

How do you look at leadership and how do you think or how do you like to talk about leadership?

It’s a complex topic. As you said, there’s a lot written on it and it travels through the centuries. Frankly, there are leadership lesson in life right back to the early ages of writing. I try and cook it down to a one-liner, which I really like that came from a professor at the London Business School, Rob Goffee, who said, “At the end of the day, if you think about leadership, leadership is really your capacity to excite other people to higher levels of performance. Everything that you’re doing around that is to achieve that goal. It obviously ladders up through many actions, many belief systems, many cultural influences, but ultimately, that’s what you’re trying to achieve as a leader. If you’re successful, then you will get the best out of your people. They will achieve something that they probably didn’t even think they were capable of.

What role does service play in that or how do you look at the concept of service in that regard?

It’s an interesting one. I think the challenge for many leaders is when they step into these roles for the first time, they feel like they have to have all of the answers. There’s a presumption that because you’re now in the chair or you’re in the spotlight, that you’re suddenly magically transformed into someone who knows everything about it. In reality, the biggest opportunity you have, coming back to Rob Guffey’s definition of leadership is that you have the chance to let others shine. By virtue of you performing a role where you’re bringing others together with diverse views, diverse skillsets, diverse backgrounds, and often representing different constituents both inside the organization and maybe externally too, they can bring to bear their knowledge base to help you grow as a leader and help your organization achieve the objectives you’re setting out for. That’s not possible if you’re not willing to take a step back sometime and actually be a servant rather than a master of those people in the room. That is a facilitator and creating the ground on which they can stand and put forward their points of view, which may not always be consistent with yours. Ultimately, maybe additive to the total story of how you’re going to achieve your objectives. That’s difficult, particularly for new leaders because the natural sense is, now I’ve been given the role, I have to demonstrate it. Demonstration is through taking action, being in the forefront at all times, not stepping back but actually being in the spotlight at all times, which can be a huge flaw, a huge mistake. It’s almost human nature to want to do that.