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The Leadership Virtue That’s Burning You Out
I used to believe that being a leader meant being a servant: available 24 hours a day to solve problems, make decisions, and come up with new ideas.
At first, it felt wonderful. People came to me for everything. I felt needed. Helpful. Even heroic.
Can you relate to that?
Then, problems and decisions piled up. I spent my days firefighting instead of building the future. People waited for me to tell them what to do. I became the bottleneck.
I was once so convinced of my own indispensability that I stayed awake through an entire 96-hour military exercise.
What could possibly go wrong?
By the end of the exercise, I was babbling nonsense and confusing 150 people. I crashed and slept for 18 hours straight. People stood still, waiting for me to wake up.
At first, I was upset at the lack of initiative. Then, it dawned on me that I created this problem. I was indispensable in all the wrong ways.
The belief that I had to be a servant created internal expectations and behaviors that led to dependency and burnout. My personal life, relationships, and well-being all suffered.
From Servant to Service
Servant leadership was a great idea when it first came out. It was a necessary corrective to selfish, me-first leadership that placed privileges over people. The intentions were the best: serve the organization and its people.
For years, I had accepted without question that servant leadership was the only noble way to lead. I even highlighted it in my book, Leadership: The Warrior’s Art.
I began to question the wisdom of “servant” leadership after the hard knocks consistently led me and others I knew into dependency and burnout.
The verb, to serve, can take two directions. Servant is one direction, leading to a loss of agency and ending in subservience. Service is the other direction, using your gifts to advance the common good, while retaining your agency.
Plenty of people will admonish that I was practicing it wrong, and therein lies the rub. Words create thoughts that result in actions: perverse behaviors can arise when you subordinate yourself to your employees, bosses, and organization.
There’s a sensible way to embrace the spirit of service without succumbing to servitude.
I call it service-centric leadership. You serve your people and organization as a steward of growth, standards, and performance; you develop people and hold them accountable for doing their jobs; and you obey the oxygen mask principle so you have energy and endurance to go the distance.
I’m keen to get your thoughts on the difference between being a servant and being of service.
Comment below.
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