The Case for Practical Servant Leadership
“Leading a team of teams is a formidable task – much of what a leader must be, and do, has fundamentally changed. The heroic “hands-on” leader whose personal competence and force of will dominated battlefields and boardrooms for generations has been overwhelmed by accelerating speed, swelling complexity, and interdependence. Even the most successful of today’s heroic leaders appear uneasy in the saddle, all too aware that their ability to understand and control is a chimera. We have to begin leading differently.”
General Stanley McChrystal, from his book “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World”
“Years ago, business gurus used to apply the business school conundrum to me: ‘Who comes first? Your shareholders, your employees, or your customers?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s easy,’ but my response was heresy at that time. I said employees come first and if employees are treated right, they treat the outside world right, the outside world used the company’s product again, and that makes shareholders happy. That really is the way it works. It’s not a conundrum at all.”
Herb Kelleher, Co-Founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines
“When external change is happening faster than internal change, the death of the organization is inevitable.”
Gordon MacDonald, author
Employee Engagement is taking a serious hit globally. It is dwindling due to shareholder primacy, increasing unionization, contract abuses and mental health issues related to hybrid work models, and increasing attrition given generational workforce dynamics.
As a result, we are in desperate need to equip leaders to mitigate these challenges. Practical Servant Leadership is arguably among the most powerful ways to hit these challenges head on and create healthier, thriving companies comprised of energized, high performing teams.
Several research studies have found the following benefits when leaders make Servant Leadership practical in their organizations:
- Higher job satisfaction
- Greater trust
- Healthier communication
- Greater team empowerment and autonomy
- Better personal growth and development opportunities
- Reduced turnover
- Healthier team dynamics
- Higher customer satisfaction
A strong global trend is for companies to embrace Agile, since it has been proven to lead to superior quality products, higher customer satisfaction, greater transparency and control, improved predictability, higher team productivity, and lower cost.
In 2021, Gartner published an Infographic summarizing their findings after studying hundreds of large companies that achieved the most benefit from Agile practices. The most foundational of the three common practices found was:
They established a foundational culture of Servant Leadership by empowering delivery teams through autonomy and decentralized decision making.
Google embarked on a multi-year research project, entitled Project Aristotle, to discover and quantify how to consistently create very high performing teams. What was the number one attribute they found must be created, strengthened and protected?
Psychological Safety: When team members feel safe and encouraged to push back on their leaders and are encouraged to take experimental, innovative risks. This is one of the foundational elements of Practical Servant Leadership.
In 2020, Gallup published the results of their findings after studying the impact of employee engagement on business results in 200,000 Business Units representing three million employees. They quantified that companies that improved employee engagement by 20% yielded the following benefits:
18% less turnover
4% higher productivity
6% more sales
30% less absenteeism
20% higher employee wellbeing
8% more profit
Think about it: If your company’s current profit is $50MM, it would increase by $4MM just by strengthening employee engagement by 20%. This is just one of the measurable benefits of Practical Servant Leadership.
In 2012, Chris McChesney and his team published The Four Disciplines of Execution, which documents four key methods that every company should focus on if they want consistently excellent results. One of those four things is to focus on the Lead – not Lag – Measure.
Translating that for our purposes here, the LAG measure is stronger business outcomes, and the LEAD measure is the engagement level of the team, which is strengthened when leaders commit to being Practical Servant Leaders.
In other words, Practical Servant Leaders are not “taking their eye off the ball” by shifting their focus from business outcomes to serving their teams. Rather, they are strengthening the likelihood that those business outcomes will be remarkable.
Past Results
What happens when leaders adopt the practices of Servant Leadership?
Art Barter, CEO of Datron World Communications, had this to say after introducing and implementing Servant Leadership mindsets and practices into a faltering company:
“When we acquired the company, we were doing about $10MM in revenue and were losing money. That was in November of 2004. In our Fiscal Year 2010, we had record new customer orders that exceeded $200MM. These were record profits and cash.
“The neat part about it was that we were able to achieve that growth without taking on any debt. We did it with internal growth and cash generation. That’s where Servant Leadership really pays back in that you’re able to do more with less people because people become so productive within Servant Leadership that you really can’t put a limit on how much they can do. That’s what is so exciting about Servant Leadership…to see people perform and be happy at the same time about what they’re doing.”
Here are some of the measurable results from programs I have initiated and/or led that were built on the foundations of Practical Servant Leadership:
- Three teams won the CIO’s prestigious annual award earned by only a few of the 1,700 global IT delivery teams with the most stunning business results and highest team engagement.
- One large transformation with 220 team members across multiple international teams completed multiple production implementations over a four-month period, with the first being the largest “foundational” implementation of 70 large features. Here are key metrics from this implementation:
- Work was completed in 40% of the time allotted and 30% of the budget
- In the first few weeks after the initial and substantial implementation, the number of defects was in the single digits
- The CIO sponsoring the program told me that in 40 years in IT he had never seen a large implementation go so smoothly. In fact, he said he had to walk around and confirm with his leaders that an implementation even took place!
When the team found out that they had won the prestigious annual CIO award, they gathered in a conference room to whiteboard out what they thought they did well. It took three whiteboards!
I watched from the back of the room. After an hour of capturing everything they could collectively think of, I saw my fingerprint in most of the things they captured…knowing that I had stepped in to make those things happen.
However, the cool thing is that not once was my name ever mentioned in their session. I had basically been “invisible” because I wanted the focus to remain on the team. I walked away from that session feeling very pleased…and proud of the team for their incredible accomplishments.
In one strategic initiative in 2020 that was deemed second only to COVID in terms of importance and value to the company and its customers, the leadership team was trained in the methods of Practical Servant Leadership and their Executive Director had this to say to the team and its leaders after this training:
“As a leader, the team doesn’t work for me. I work for them. If this team is going to succeed, we first need to build a foundation of Servant Leadership. I am therefore asking my leadership team to support the team as follows:
o Remove their barriers,
o Help them understand and succeed in their specific roles,
o Empower them to own the work and get it done, and then
o Stand back and stay out of their way.”
Here are results after the team and its leaders were introduced to and trained in Practical Servant Leadership methods:
o Over 800 database tables were converted to the new application system
o 61 features were deployed across 29 production deployments
o 469 User Stories were done with an average cycle time of 2.7 days
o 974 tasks were completed by the team
o 401 test cases were passed
o The team finished one month ahead of schedule and $1.3 MM under budget
o 29 production deployments were completed over several months. The number of defects (quality issues discovered in the production system) was ZERO
o The solution delivered yielded an estimated savings of $1.7 MM the first year and $4.7MM YOY
o The Executive VP over this organization exclaimed, “Awesome work! Fun to see! Lots of fun facts but the most interesting is that there hasn’t been a single ticket!”
o The Senior VP of Enterprise Operations said, “Hard work. The team rolled up their sleeves. Awesome!”
Over the years, several executives at one global company asked me to facilitate workshops for their respective leadership teams to leverage the methods and principles of Practical Servant Leadership. In these highly interactive, productive, and conversational workshops, we covered the methods and behaviors of Practical Servant Leadership and mapped them to their organization’s business and professional development objectives for the next year. We also reviewed suboptimal operational practices as exposed through customer feedback and developed strategies to mitigate these with Practical Servant Leadership methods.
The average Net Promoter Score (NPS) from hundreds of participants spanning multiple sessions was 100.
Finally, what happens when leaders have the courage and humility to practice Servant Leadership with simple methods that transfer psychological ownership to the team and thus transform a team of followers into a team of leaders?
I will let David Marquet explain in this brief storyboard video entitled “Greatness.”
If you would like to learn more how Practical Servant Leadership can help you and your team, here is a link to Pre-Order my new book entitled “Practical Servant Leadership: No Nonsense Tactics to Ignite Your Team for Remarkable Business Results.”
This will be published in late November 2023. Keep in mind that the rest of the website is still under construction.
I am also available for coaching, training, mentoring, and workshop engagements. Please call me at 828-771-6477 so we can get acquainted and discuss your needs.
Grace and courage!
Joe
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