CTO Coach (8+ years) ⊕ Author ⊕ Bullish on AI • 3x Founder • Author of “Amazing CTO” & upcoming “Practical CTO” • ex-eBay • ex-ImmoScout
🛑 Enough with the #ServantLeader talk! It's a term I genuinely dislike and, especially in tech, I see it leading managers like #CTOs, #VPs of Engineering, and Tech Leads down the wrong path. The problem isn't serving or leading—it's the combination. I've been in the trenches with the teams: all-nighters, 2 a.m. incident calls, hot fixes. Servers that would not restart. As a manager, you absolutely help your teams, put effort into their development, and remove obstacles. I used to draw upside-down org charts to emphasize the support structure for decades. I asked "what is the worst desk" in open offices and sat there. There is nothing bad about enabling your teams. But many of my clients who self-identify as "Servant Leaders" are actually just servants. They're not leading at all! ❌ They do their employees' jobs. ❌ They get overloaded with operational work. ❌ They are stuck up to their neck in doing, not leading. #Leadership is simple: A leader has a compelling, self-explanatory vision that people want to reach. She weaves a story around it. She leads people toward that vision. When you default to just being a "servant" to avoid the perceived "badness" of telling people where to go, your department will zigzag. People feel disoriented, initiatives stall, and the "leader" gets pulled even deeper into endless alignment meetings. Be a leader, not a servant. Help them along, remove obstacles—or teach them to remove their own!—but the primary thing is to #LEAD. Servant leader is like Scrum. You can use Scrum to be agile, but the risk is high that Scrum sets the wrong incentives. Servant Leadership can work, but there is a high risk that you get it wrong. What are your thoughts on "Servant Leadership" in a modern tech context? 🤔 #Leadership #TechLeadership #CTO #EngineeringManagement #ServantLeadership
PS: I see CTOs who solve the problems of their teams, because they struggle with the problems they should solve (e.g. pushback to the CEO).
It's a tool to use and like all tools there is an appropriate context for it and many inappropriate contexts. Longer version, leadership is situational: https://read.developingskills.fyi/p/leadership-is-situational
Stephan 🦄 Schmidt, the zigzag effect you mention is the cost of low leverage. Leaders should be focused on the 10x problems, not the 1x problems. Quick question: What's the one thing you stopped "serving" that made your team finally step up and own the outcome?
This shows up clearly in hiring too. If a hiring manager lacks a strong vision, they struggle to make tough calls on candidates. Even when their gut says "no," they defer to team consensus. Worse, without a clear destination, the wrong people could be hired. I've seen "servant leaders" hire for where the team is today instead of where it needs to be tomorrow. Vision isn't optional when we're building a team. It's what filters and attracts the right people.
Jan Ulbrich
6d
I did the same in early days and that was not only bad for me, but didn’t even help some in the team to develop themselves. It’s cozy on the couch. Nowadays I lead mostly by having a clear vision. I’m still bad in double-checking results. I sometimes assist and I always support. I don’t serve.
Tom Hill
6d
I always like to phrase what is meant by "Servant Leadership" in the following way; You are of service to you team, not in service to them. i.e. Your role is to help them, not to do things for them. Sometimes that means being the mirror that is hard to look in when you give them hard feedback they don't want, but need, to hear. Other times it means having their back and holding space for them to your own detriment in rooms they're never in, in ways they never see or know of. But rarely does it mean doing things for them to make their life easier. If you're doing that you need to circle back around to the point about providing hard feedback, because that's what you should be doing to be of service, not in service.
Nickolay C.
6d
IMO it reflects a higher level issue of our industry. I call it "identity through tools" that leads in the end to "identity as tools". That is, when instead of clearly articulating "achieve X with Y", one starts to say "I'm Y" if Y seemly achieves many different Xs. More examples would be "k8s engineers", "AI engineers", "React engineers" etc.
Jorge Duque
3d
I believe the main point of adding the servant to Leader was to remove the ego from it. The idea that you're a leader by acknowledgement from those you lead not because you demand or expect it due to job role or some other hierarchical title. Then again this is how I view it.
Great!
CTO Coach (8+ years) ⊕ Author ⊕ Bullish on AI • 3x Founder • Author of “Amazing CTO” & upcoming “Practical CTO” • ex-eBay • ex-ImmoScout
6dLonger article: https://www.amazingcto.com/no-servant-leader/