How to Become a Servant Leader in a Digital Age

Perhaps no other thinker has done more to define the practice of servant leadership than Larry Spears. Spears, who runs a center for servant leadership and has written over a dozen books on the topic, has searched the canon of servant leadership texts, case studies, and examples to distill 10 characteristics of servant leadership.

After years of analysis of servant leadership scholarship and theory, Spears determined that servant leaders share the following characteristics:

• Listening: clarifying the will of a group

• Empathy: listening with positive intent

• Healing: creating wholeness

• Awareness: of the self, and of the situation

• Persuasion: convincing, rather than forcing compliance

• Conceptualization: seeing the bigger picture

• Foresight: identifying likely outcomes

• Stewardship: "holding something in trust for another"

• Commitment to the growth of people

• Building community

According to Spears, not every servant leader embodies all or most or even some of the characteristics on this list. But chances are, those who are committed to this practice will find some overlap with these characteristics.

Still, I question whether this list holds up today.

Spears published this list in an article printed in the 2010 edition of the Journal of Virtues & Leadership, and 2010 was a remarkably different cultural moment. Social media was gaining popularity but was still mostly the domain of the young and tech-oriented. Smartphones were widely available but were mostly owned by affluent, professional consumers. Today, digital distraction is the default experience: swiping and scrolling having replaced small talk and conversation - multi-tasking and messaging having become the normative ways of working.

Can you really listen deep enough to clarify a group's sense of will when pings and alerts divert both your own attention, and certainly the attention of other group members? Can you actually create a sense of group wholeness when digital distractions cut into our moment to moment experience?

I would argue that Spears' list is still a useful and authoritative compendium of the habits of the servant leader. I would also argue that such a list has pre-requisites for a distracted, digital culture. In other words, these traits of servant leadership require pre-work.

The pre-requisites are simple: First, slow down. And then, tell stories.

Slowing down: Each of Spears' attributes requires the servant leader to step aside from the fast flow of the digital age. One can't listen deeply if you're sprinting from one task to another, nor is it possible to take the time to persuade others without effort and intentionality. Conceptualization is constrained by our tendency to sprint from one meeting to the next. Thus the first-prerequisite of servant leadership is to "slow the proverbial roll" that engulfs our efforts. While slowing down seems simple in theory, it is nearly impossible to adopt in practice, with everything in our surrounding culture pushing us to accelerate. It's not so much that the servant leader creates intentional moments of slowness: leadership retreats, mindful pauses, cleansing breaths. Rather, it's that the servant leader consistently deploys micro-habits to subtly slow things down.

A few specific habits of slowing down come to mind from the servant leaders I have worked with:

• A commitment to small talk: Idle chatter is not irrelevant, and the servant leader recognizes this. Not only does the servant leader tolerate small talk at the start of a call, a meeting, or a presentation - he or she welcomes it. Moreover, the servant leader remembers the details that emerge from these conversations: who is seeing which movies, who supports which sports teams, who is doing what over the weekend. When prioritized, small talk makes a big difference in slowing the pace.

• An elimination of digital distraction: The servant leader recognizes that multi-tasking is a myth. Whether closing a laptop screen and turning off a phone in a face-to-face setting, or turning on one's webcam in a group Zoom, or taking a weekly digital Sabbath - the servant leader sees the tension between analog focus and effective service.

• A return to shared values: Many organizations have shared aspirations, many workers take assessments to understand their core values or personality types. The servant leader draws upon these commitments and sources of motivation at the start of a shared effort.

When we slow down, we create one of the pre-conditions for servant leadership, and make it possible to share stories.

Telling stories: A few years ago I toured the offices of Menlo Innovations, a small software development firm in Ann Arbor, MI. Menlo is led by Rich Sheridan, who describes himself as the company's Chief Storytelling Officer. Among the standard executive-level responsibilities, Rich sees himself as responsible for the telling of stories: those of the customer, the employee, and the end-user. It's this ability to create coherent, compelling narratives that makes Menlo Innovations a joyful place to work.

The digital age is saturated with content but short on stories. We know what people do but we rarely understand the why.

Telling stories is about creating coherent stories from the scattered, fragmentary data of our day-to-day existence. It's about pushing ourselves to understand purpose - of our own efforts and those with whom we collaborate. It's about starting with small talk and gradually moving towards the big picture conversations that create deep trust.

When we commit to slowing down and telling stories, we begin to practice servant leadership. When we slow down and tell stories, Larry Spears' list of 10 characteristics is all the more likely to describe how we lead people. And our communities are more likely to say they were better off because of our leadership.

Servant Leadership in a Digital Age

Servant Leadership is a trending topic in all forms of organizational life, from churches to universities to non-profits, small businesses to multi-national corporations. Yet as the popularity of servant leadership has increased, its definition has become increasingly ambiguous. What exactly is servant leadership? How is it practiced? And what might it mean in a world of continuous social change and digital acceleration?

Google searches for servant leadership have doubled in the last 14 years.

Robert Greenleaf first coined the term Servant Leadership in a seminal 1970 essay, "The Servant as Leader."

In the essay, Greenleaf writes:

"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature."

Greenleaf's roots were in the corporate world. He worked at AT&T for nearly four decades. Yet despite his work in the telecommunications industry, one wonders how Greenleaf's ideas might have evolved were he working in our contemporary tech-shaped culture. He passed away in 1990 at age 86, leaving a legacy that continues to shape leaders of all vocational and spiritual backgrounds. In this post, we'll explore how the idea (really, the ideal) of servant leadership transfers to a digital age, and what it means to be a servant leader in a time of constant technological acceleration.

We need a new approach to leadership

Acceleration and a drive towards efficiency are the only unifying aspects of all organizational life life today. Digital technologies have expedited the flow of information providing us with an abundance of data while conditioning us to move quickly. As communications dart across our screens we cannot help but feeling a sense of busyness, even a sense of overwhelm and malaise. The same corporate world that gave rise to the concept of servant leadership expects constant availability and its responsiveness, far more than it expected from its laborers in Greenleaf's day. Lean staffing structures and ceaseless digital connectivity are a potent pairing, explaining why organizations see increasingly more of their people affected by exhaustion, burnout, and anxiety.

Indeed, this is a time that requires a new approach to leadership. So many of those who aspire to leadership today do so because they believe the can improve efficiency, increase speed, and crank up outputs. Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" has become a widely adopted template for doing less with more. If aspiring leaders are successful in this drive towards acceleration, the market will reward them accordingly. Yet in prioritizing these outcomes they exacerbate the anxiety and freneticism that characterize organizational life.

Servant leadership offers an alternative to the hamster wheel of digital age efficiency. While still driving towards a meaningful vision of a world that could-be, a servant leader consciously charts an unconventional path.

Motivation: The Heart of the Servant Leader

Motivation is the most distinctive attribute of the servant leader. Their motivation appears rather backwards when compared to their peers.

The conventional digital age leader thirsts for productivity gains and increased effectiveness. And let's be clear - there's nothing wrong with efficient, high performing organizations. But in servant leadership, any performance indicator is understood to be an output. When servant leaders achieve such ends, they do so by starting from a commitment to service above all else. The servant leader chooses to serve - to serve first. Being a servant leader in a digital age is about prioritizing a mindset of service to one's team members, stakeholders, members, or community. To paraphrase servant leadership guru Ken Blanchard, any profits reaped by the organization are the applause they receive in exchange for quality service.

The heart of servant leadership is this orientation towards making people and communities more complete, more whole.

To identify a servant leader, ask them about the purpose underlying their work. Ask them about their why. If their answer is presented in the metrics of the marketplace or in the terms of the efficiency expert, than they may be a conventional manager. But if they are driven to make a demonstrably positive impact on their surrounding communities, then they might just be on the path towards servant leadership.

Best test: The Outcome of Servant Leadership

As with the conventions of motivation, the conventional metrics of the marketplace are outputs to the servant leader.

While they are likely to be as or more effective than their conventional peers in generating revenue, profit, and growth, they measure their effectiveness over time with a different yardstick. The growth logic of the marketplace is less immediate than the growth of people. The servant leader repeatedly inquires as to the effect their work has on colleagues, customers, suppliers, and members. If their leadership is to be meaningful, their entire network must benefit.

Greenleaf established a test for would-be servant leaders when he wrote:

"The best test [of a servant-leader], and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?"

Servant leaders can be shrewd negotiators and crafty marketers, powerful executives and commanding authorities. They can be successful capitalists and wealthy investors. Each will employ a unique approach to their exercise of leadership. But what will unite them is a continuous process of reflection into the well-being of their community. The best test of servant leadership is in the betterment of others, for the benefits of servant leadership must be shared.

Finding Sacred Spaces in an AI-Shaped Culture

The sociologist Emile Durkheim argues that religion is defined by the concept of sacred spaces. A sacred space is one that is inherently distinct from the ordinary aspects of life. This differentiation clarifies why churches have sanctuaries, why worship involves liturgy, and why traditions are centered around canons of holy texts.

While I'm hardly an expert on Durkheim's work, it appears that this demarcation primarily pertains to rituals. However, in my personal experience, it seems that questions and conversations can also hold significant power in designating a space as sacred, even without the presence of rite or ritual. Three sacred spaces have shaped my faith, my theology, and my outlook on life.

One is the sanctuary at my home congregation, a community that gathers each week to ask what it means to Welcome, Forgive, and Serve. Another is the campfire ring at Rock Island State Park, where I gather with good friends each summer to ask the big questions of life over beer, steak, and s'mores. The other is the pastor's office at Lutheran Campus Ministry, where I had so many meaningful conversations about the Lutheran tradition and vocation with my late mentor.

In my experience, these spaces were sacred not just because of rituals --- but because of the depth of conversations that occurred there. Each space facilitated the asking of the biggest questions of this life - in a way that wouldn't have been possible amidst the frenetic pace of our culture.

The digital age has already erased two of the boundaries that religious communities once held between the sacred and the profane.

Online worship has erased the boundaries used to mark worship spaces by making worship available in our living rooms. And apps that support spiritual practices like prayer and meditation have made these traditional aspects of religion more widely available. But by integrating these practices into daily life, these technologies have also erased the distinctions that once made these traditions sacred.

Now, AI systems like Chat GPT provide us with the means to ask the questions that were once the domain of sacred spaces. ChatGPT can help you make sense of the death of a loved one. It can advise on you on how your vocation is meaningful. It can give you language to explain the mysteries of faith to a small child.

AI generates answers to these great questions in mere seconds. And while it doesn't cite sources, I found ChatGPT's suggestions on vocational meaning to be compelling. I found its commentary on death to be thought provoking, if not hopeful. I found its guidance for teaching faith to small children to be clear, useful, and within the bounds of my own faith tradition.

What happens to faith when a chat bot so easily answers the big questions we once asked in sacred spaces? What happens to the spaces we thought of as sacred when AI becomes a spiritual director? Can we still find sacred spaces in a post-ChatGPT culture? To answer these questions, the church might look at two commitments for ministry in a digital age:

The church must facilitate the practice of asking questions in community. ChatGPT can provide a quick answer to a big, spiritual question. The church cannot rival the speed with which AI answers these questions. Nor, in many cases, can the church come up with answers that sound as confident. Still, the way that AI responds these questions is somewhat isolating. To answer a big question with out the involvement of a trusted interlocutor is to present a viewpoint that is incomplete and fragmentary. Conversations on being are richer as dialogues, not monologues. So while big questions may begin as monologues in a world of AI, our sacred spaces must convert them into shared conversation. If we develop the trust and the psychological safety to convene these conversations, then the sacred spaces of the church will be all the more important in a digital age.

Then, faith leaders must teach their communities to critically reflect and scrutinize texts. AI-generated content seems authoritative. It is well organized and easy to read, even to the point where it could be considered "doctrinal." Yet the web is full of examples where AI fabricated answers or presented outright falsehoods. Inaccuracies are rampant. Its answers seem confident but they are hardly authoritative. This invites a return to the practice of textual scrutiny - or to use the technical term, hermeneutics.

We ought to equip our communities with the ability to wrestle with texts - not just the scriptures, but the confident-sounding outputs of computer technologies. More than all others, this might be the lifeskill that the church is best positioned to teach in a digital age. Regrettably, American Christianity seems less willing today to train its communities on hermeneutical scrutiny. Rather than teach interpretive skills, too many ministries and preachers seem content to offer the "Biblical view" or the "Christian answer." Too many of us see the church not as a place where texts are wrestled with, but as a vendor for inscrutable answers. If we develop the capacity to teach critical and reflective thought processes, if we are effective at teaching context, culture, and history to our communities, then the spaces that set apart our churches will be free to grapple with all sorts of texts - both those from the scriptures, and those from the chatbots.

If we fail to make these commitments and develop these habits, our sacred spaces may be eroded by ChatGPT. Who needs a pastor to give you vocational advice when OpenAI is available to you in all times and places?

But if we become skilled facilitators of life's biggest questions, we might just find that AI becomes something of a sidekick.

Rather than supplant the church as the location for these conversations, ChatGPT may spark curiosity and inspire confidence.

AI may initiate deeper conversations within Christian communities.

AI, then, becomes the doorway to the sacred spaces that define religion. It becomes a portal to conversations that are meaningful, life-giving, and set apart.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of two books on church in a digital age.

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