“ The best leaders are servant leaders – they serve those they lead." ~ Tony Hsieh
At GC3 we work with a lot of managers and leaders who have progressed in their careers with a strong desire to serve their employees and the organization they work for. They, very admirably, care a great deal about the people that work with and for them, and they are always looking for ways to share their wisdom and experience to ensure others succeed. The desire to serve others can sometimes be confused with a need to help however, and this is where some people can become victims of their own virtue.
Helping someone is perhaps the most direct and tangible act of service we can offer. Getting ‘hands on’ and contributing directly to the work or giving specific and detailed guidance can feel very positive and uplifting. After all, as managers we’ve often ‘been there and done that’ while rising through the ranks as individual contributors, so our ‘help’ can almost certainly save some time and energy in the short term, and ensure people avoid the mistakes and pitfalls we encountered through our own, sometimes bitter, experiences.
Truly serving someone, however, could look very different. It could mean allowing them to make mistakes, to fail even, and perhaps to take longer to produce work of a lower standard than might have been the case with ‘help’. On the surface this might look and feel like an act of cruelty rather than service, but in the longer term this might be exactly what the individual needs in order to grow into their potential. Take away that helping hand and they might stumble and even fall. But they will also learn, and the very act of picking themselves up from the fall will teach them as much, and perhaps a great deal more, than the manager ever could.
The need to help rather than serve can also have broader unintended consequences. For example, the team will:
- Develop a dependency on that help. They will stop making their own decisions, and will instead defer to their manager on everything, creating a bottleneck and single point of failure;
- Develop a fear of failure, seeing each intervention by the manager as a kind of judgement for the mistakes they would have made had they been given the chance;
- Become limited by the past experiences of the manager, rather than adapting to the ever-changing needs of the world we live and work in. Experience can only go so far, eventually becoming outdated and outmoded, leading to ever diminishing returns;
- Only ever be as smart as the manager, limiting their potential to have a far greater impact as individuals and as a group;
- Lose its ability to learn, to innovate new solutions, and to continuously improve;
- Lose its sense of ownership and engagement over their work, leading to falling standards that require ever-increasing levels of ‘help’ from the manager to sustain the current quality levels.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the cost for the manager is also very high. They will quickly become stretched to the breaking point as they try to effectively do everyone else’s work as well as their own. They will also become emotionally exhausted by the need to keep offering that help, draining the well of their most valuable asset dry before it can truly make an impact.
If the manager in our story here sounds like you, Leader, then you are probably feeling exhausted and close to burn-out right now. While we applaud your motives, hopefully you are beginning to realize that, in your actions, you are failing to actually serve. This is a hard truth to hear, and a hard cycle to break, but with sustained attention and focus you can turn that need to help into an ability to truly serve.
When you’re ready to start making that transition Leader, we at GC3 are here and ready to serve you.