Servant leadership is one of the most popular ideas in leadership development, and one of the easiest to misunderstand. The name suggests a leader who does whatever the team wants. The original idea is much more demanding than that.
What is servant leadership?
It is leadership that starts from serving the people you lead, and judges itself by what happens to them.
Robert Greenleaf, who introduced the idea in his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader, gave it a test: “Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”
That test is the heart of it. The measure of a servant leader isn’t how hard they work for the team. It’s whether the people they lead are growing.
What are the characteristics of servant leadership?
Dirk van Dierendonck’s widely cited review describes servant leadership as shown through six things:
- Empowering and developing people. Giving people responsibility and helping them grow.
- Humility. Putting others’ success first and learning from them.
- Authenticity. Being open and genuine about who you are and what you intend.
- Interpersonal acceptance. Understanding and accepting where people are coming from.
- Stewardship. Taking responsibility for the wider good, not only your own team’s results.
- Providing direction. Making clear what is expected.
A note of caution comes from the field itself. A 2019 review of 285 servant leadership articles found a lack of coherence and clarity around the idea, and 16 different ways of measuring it. Different programmes may mean slightly different things by the same name.
Why does trust matter to servant leadership?
Because it looks like one of the main routes by which it works.
Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. Van Dierendonck’s review proposes a strong one-to-one relationship, trust and fairness as the main ways servant leadership has its effect. That is a model to test rather than a finding, but one study did test something close to it. Across 191 financial services teams, Schaubroeck and colleagues found servant leadership influenced team performance through affect-based trust, the kind that rests on the personal bond, and through the team’s psychological safety. Transformational leadership, in the same study, worked through trust based on competence and reliability.
So servant leadership seems to depend on people believing the leader genuinely has their interests at heart.
What do people get wrong about servant leadership?
That it means doing everything for the team. A leader who rescues every deadline is serving the output and keeping people dependent. Greenleaf’s test asks whether people become more autonomous, not less.
That it means no direction. Providing direction is one of the characteristics. Serving people includes being clear with them.
That it’s proven to work. It is well liked and widely studied, but a 2023 review found that problems preventing cause-and-effect conclusions remain very common in servant leadership research, and the authors’ own experiment found no effect on performance. That isn’t a reason to drop it. It is a reason to check what happens in your own organisation rather than assume.
How does servant leadership connect to purpose?
Directly. Servant leadership is a purpose before it is a set of behaviours: a decision about who you are there for.
Trust Leader puts it this way: purpose is the anchor, the Trust Map is the application, and practice builds the evidence. In the Trust Leader Hub, three Purpose playlists take a leader through the questions behind their Manifesto, and one of them is “Who do I want to serve?”. The answers become their aim, their purpose and the values they want people to experience from them. The accidental manager: what do you stand for? explains how.
Which behaviours make servant leadership visible?
These behaviours that strengthen trust line up most closely with its characteristics, in their exact wording.
Empowering
- 17. Involve people in decisions that affect them.
-
- Set and confirm clear expectations before work begins.
Humility
- 10. Ask for support when needed.
-
- Give credit to others for their contribution.
Interpersonal acceptance
- 14. Acknowledge how others feel before responding to the task.
-
- Show openness to others’ ideas, even when you disagree.
Stewardship
- 20. Consider how your actions may affect others before acting.
Providing direction
- 18. Explain the reasoning behind decisions that impact others.
Most of these answer one Trust Question: Do they believe I act with their interests in mind? That fits what the research suggests about the personal trust servant leadership depends on.
One part the behaviours don’t cover is developing people over time. They make a leader someone people can rely on. Helping each person grow is coaching work that sits alongside them.
Here is how it looks. A team leader is asked by her director to cut a project’s scope. Before replying, she thinks through what it means for the two people who have spent a month on it, then tells them first and explains why the scope is changing. That is behaviours 20 and 18 in one conversation. Nobody enjoys the news. But they can see who she was thinking about.
How do you develop servant leadership in your managers? turns this into a practice plan, and How do the 20 trust behaviours fit the leadership model you already teach? sets servant leadership alongside five other models.