There are some genuinely interesting principles inside the concept of servant leadership. Not all of them survive contact with the real world — but several do, and the ones that do are worth building into how you lead, every day.
Robert Greenleaf published “The Servant as Leader” in 1970. The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership has developed the framework since, and subsequent scholars — notably Larry Spears — distilled it into ten key characteristics. That body of thinking is more substantive than most of its corporate-retreat packaging suggests.
I have been drawing on parts of it for years, long before I attached a name to it. These are the principles I actually believe in, and what they look like in practice.
Listening — actually
The version of listening I learned early on was two ears, one mouth: listen twice as much as you speak. The version I have come to believe in is closer to three-to-one — and more importantly, three distinct kinds, not just more of the same kind.
You can be in the room when someone speaks and not receive a word of it, especially if you are already forming your reply. The physical presence is there. The reception is not. What I am actually after tracks three things at once:
- The words themselves — what is actually being said
- The message underneath — what they are really trying to tell you, which is often not the literal sentence
- What they are not saying — which is sometimes the most important thing in the room, and lives in their word choices, their hesitations, and what they left out
This is what is sometimes called deep listening. Oscar Trimboli has built a substantial body of work around it — his book Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words is a good place to go further.
A team member comes to you and says the timeline is tight. Listen for what is underneath: are they telling you the timeline is tight, or are they telling you they are not going to make it and do not yet know how to say that? Are they asking for help? Are they signalling something about the project they expect you to push back on? The words are data. They are not the whole message. If you are only tracking the words, you are working with about a third of what is actually being communicated.
Word choices tell a story. What someone says, how they say it, and what they leave out of the sentence — all three of those are worth paying attention to.
Getting to know everyone
This is probably the most concrete expression of working in service of your team, and the one most likely to get deprioritised when things get busy.
I mean everyone. The person who cleans up at the end of the day. The person who answers the phone or greets people when they walk in. The people running your marketing who are picking up signals from the outside world that will not otherwise reach you. The people who deliver your service or build your product. The C-suite. Everyone.
Gifford Thomas writes about this directly: valuing the janitor as much as the CEO is not sentiment, it is how you build an organisation where people actually want to stay. And it is the only way to lead well. You cannot work in service of people you do not actually know. You will make decisions that look reasonable from the org chart and are, in practice, completely indifferent to the real work happening three levels below it. You will miss the person who is, quietly, doing extraordinary things that hold up half the organisation — while others walk past them because they have already decided what that person’s role means.
I have seen what happens when leaders miss that person. It is expensive, in ways that do not show up on any dashboard until well after the damage is done.
And I have been on the receiving end of a leader who did see me — who noticed what I was doing and named it when they did not have to. It changes how you show up. People hunger to be seen. If you have the chance to do that for someone, it costs you nothing and means more than most of the things on your to-do list.
Seeing the person
Greenleaf’s framework identifies both empathy and healing as core characteristics. I will be honest: I am not a therapist, and I am not particularly good at the kind of support that involves sitting with feelings without immediately moving toward solutions.
What I am genuinely good at is this: seeing someone’s potential before they have learned to see it themselves. Understanding what it is to walk around not believing you deserve the next opportunity — because somewhere along the way, the message landed that chances like that are for other people. Recognising that gap between how someone sees themselves and what they are actually capable of: that is empathy. Not a performance of warmth, but a genuine seeing of another person’s inner experience.
It shows up in small moments — the colleague who deflects every compliment, who says “it was nothing” when it was clearly not nothing, or who hesitates before putting their name forward for something they are plainly ready for. Those moments are information. They are telling you something about where someone is versus where they could be.
For the healing side: my version is structural. Not advice about your situation, but what can I actually clear for you? What can I take off your plate, shift on your plate, or add to your plate so that you can deal with what you need to deal with? You need time. You need flexibility. You need a weight moved. That is what I can give you — the practical clearing of the path.
Growing people
One of the things I believe most strongly is that you grow people by understanding what they are genuinely capable of and building from there.
This is not the same as ignoring weaknesses. It means you are not trying to manufacture the opposite of what someone is. Someone who is not built for numbers is not going to become an accountant because you assigned them a budget spreadsheet — it is going to make them anxious and behind. But with the right support and a genuinely low-stakes starting point, you might be surprised what comes forward when people have the right conditions.
You walk alongside your people. Sometimes you carry them for a stretch when they need it — not forever, just through the stretch where carrying is what the situation requires.
I once worked with a colleague who was exceptional at what she did — demonstrably, repeatedly, across everything you could measure. She had also, somewhere along the way, absorbed the message that opportunities like professional development and formal certification were for other people. Not for her.
I disagreed. I pushed — not just with her, but with the leadership team. Made the case for the budget. Sat through the conversations you have to sit through when you are trying to get someone who has been overlooked into something they deserve. She got her Salesforce administration certification. I made a significant fuss about it when she did, because she had earned significant fuss — and because people who have learned not to expect recognition deserve to receive it anyway.
That is what growing someone looks like in practice: seeing the gap between where they are and what they are capable of, and then doing the actual work of closing it — including the uncomfortable conversations with the people who control the budget.
This requires actually knowing them — not what their job description says, but who they are. And it requires the conversations that feel like they might be beside the point: How are you doing, actually? You have a lot on right now — do you want me to take something off your plate, or would it help to keep it because it gives you a place to put your focus?
Those conversations are not a detour from the work. For me, they are the work.
Giving people the platform
Persuasion, in Greenleaf’s framework, is not manipulation. It is influencing through reason and relationship rather than positional authority. You make your case; you bring people along.
Part of how I practise this is by making sure the people closest to the work have a platform for their knowledge beyond their immediate role. When someone has insight that leadership should hear — about what is actually happening on the ground, about where the friction really lives, about what clients or customers are signalling — I want that knowledge to travel.
With their knowledge and their consent, I will amplify it. I will bring it into the rooms they are not in. I will make sure that when decisions get made, the people who actually know get heard.
Building community — another of Greenleaf’s ten — is part of this too. Cross-functional information flow is not just courtesy. It is how you get better decisions. And it turns out to matter a great deal when things get hard and you need people who understand the whole picture, not just the part that was assigned to them.
Learning from the past, reading the present
Foresight — learning from what has happened, reading what is happening now, anticipating what is coming — is probably the characteristic I exercise most naturally. Pattern recognition is just how I think.
One thing I have tried to build wherever I work is a genuine retrospective culture. When a project ends, we stop and ask: what worked, what did not, what were our wins, our challenges, our opportunities, and what would we do differently? And we write it down. A retrospective is not a formality. It is how you get better, and how you protect future teams from problems that have already been solved.
I do the same thing with people. If I notice a pattern in how someone operates — how they communicate under pressure, how they handle ambiguity, what makes them effective and what erodes it — I pay attention. I adjust how I work with them. And when it is safe and appropriate, I might name it. Not as a judgement. As useful information.
Holding someone else’s vision
Conceptualization — holding the long-term vision while staying grounded in operational reality — lands a little differently in a second-in-command role.
When I am operating as a COO, the vision I am holding is not mine. It is the CEO’s. My job is not to dream; it is to understand the dream well enough to build the road. To translate it into a roadmap. To anticipate what we are likely to run into, plan for what we can see coming, and adapt when we hit something we did not.
There is a discipline in that worth naming: holding someone else’s vision with the same care as if it were your own. Not because you are subordinating yourself, but because you have decided the destination is worth getting to — and you happen to be the one who knows how to get there.
In practice, it looks like being able to make decisions in the CEO’s absence and know — not guess — that you got it right.
The term I have made a kind of peace with
I still do not love “servant leadership.” The word “servant” carries more history than most writing about this framework chooses to acknowledge — a history that lands differently depending on who you are, what you have seen, and what the word has meant for people around you. As a woman, I have noticed how much of the language of leadership was built without people like me in mind. It is a word I pick up carefully.
But the underlying orientation is real, and Greenleaf was onto something. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School frames his central test this way: do those you serve grow as persons? Do they become, through the experience of working with you, more capable, more autonomous, more likely to do good work themselves?
That is a good test. It is one worth applying every day, whatever you call the thing you are doing.
I know what it produces when you actually do it. When my formal role has changed — when the title shifted and the org chart was redrawn — people still called. The systems were still running. The trust outlasted the title. That did not happen because of a job description. It happened because I had been showing up the way I actually believe in: not as a concept, but as a daily practice.
The name can stay complicated. The practice does not have to be.