Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership
2 comments
·December 4, 2025dpflan
With "servant leadership" in its current form being attributed to Greenleaf, here is the "source of truth" on servant leadership: https://greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/
"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic bosd's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and decides rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.